Every Lie I've Ever Told

by Rosie Waterland

  That’s why I posted the status and photo.

  I highlighted my flaws to show how frustrated I am that we even obsess about flaws to begin with! A little counterintuitive, yes, but I just wanted to say, ‘Look. I’m not a thin woman. In fact, I have a body that a lot of women would consider their worst nightmare. I know there are things about me that are not conventionally attractive, but I’m happy with myself because my appearance isn’t what I value most about myself. So take a look at me. Take a look at this photo. Take a look at my “flawed”, chubby body, and know that if I can get on with life not constantly obsessing over my looks, then you can too.’

  That’s why I refused all media requests today.

  Because I really do believe that we should not be obsessing over appearance, so I didn’t want to feed that obsession by talking more about it. I just wanted to put the post up, vent my frustration and sadness at physical appearance being such an issue for so many women, and then go back to not letting physical appearance be an issue for me. I didn’t want to go on a bunch of chat shows to talk about it, because the whole point of my post is that I think people need to stop talking so much about it. There is so much more to each of us than our looks. I have reached a place in my life where understanding that has made me a lot happier as a person, and I would love to see other women reach that place too. I thought and hoped maybe a photo of me could help some women get there. I’m willing to let my appearance be a talking point for a couple of days, as long as the talking point is, ‘Actually, yeah – why are we so freaking obsessed with appearance anyway?’

  I’ll leave the photo up as long as Facebook allows it, because I stand by the message and the way I chose to deliver it. But I don’t have anything else to say about my body, because my body is THE LEAST INTERESTING THING ABOUT ME! Soon, the status will be so far down my Newsfeed that it will be forgotten, and my naked body will no longer be a talking point.

  Now, I’m going to go and watch some TV and hang out with my cat. xoxoxo

  Not long after that status went up, Facebook deleted the photo and blocked my account for forty-eight hours. Instagram deleted the photo and threatened to deactivate my account if I ever did it again. Twitter deleted the photo, plus they put new restrictions on my account, so whenever I post a photo on Twitter now, it’s blurred with a warning telling people it may contain ‘offensive content’. So I’m pretty sure Twitter thinks I’m a sex criminal.

  I stepped away from the whole thing and retreated into myself. I honestly had not expected to cause such a fuss with what I considered a pretty specific feminist message about body image that would only be relevant or interesting to a few people.

  The Fast-Food Opinion machine had come after me, and it really made me doubt myself. I felt like shit, basically.

  I stayed true to my promise not to talk to any media about it. I don’t know what I would have said if I had, because I really had no idea what I thought about anything anymore. I needed time to gather my thoughts, to spend more than an hour figuring out my opinion for a change.

  I ended up taking a couple of months. I had been asked to give a talk at the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House, and I decided to use that time onstage to describe exactly what had happened to me in the days and weeks after putting up a naked photo. I’d had the time to think about how the whole situation had shaped me as a woman and forced me to look at my identity, even if I didn’t always like what I saw. Here’s what I said that day:

  I have been panicking, for months, that this talk is going to reveal to everyone that I’m a complete fraud. I mean, when they came to me and asked if I wanted to give a talk at the Opera House for All About Women, I was like, ‘Are you kidding? Absolutely. Let me just call anyone in my life who’s ever wronged me and shove it in their faces.’ And just as I was in the middle of that revenge fantasy, they told me that the topic they’d assigned me was ‘How to be yourself’ and I instantly felt sick. Because I realised ‘Oh, they think I know!’ And when I get up to give a bunch of paying audience members a definitive guide on ‘how to be themselves’, everyone is going to realise that I have no fucking idea.

  Now, this is a problem for me, since just a few months ago I published a memoir called The Anti-Cool Girl, which basically outlines my journey to self-acceptance and yes – figuring out how to be myself. I wrote about being born to addicted and mentally ill parents who forced my sisters and me into a childhood filled with neglect and abuse and trauma. I wrote about how that affected my sense of self and belonging and how I became convinced that if I just managed to sneak my way into the cool crowd, I’d finally feel love and acceptance. And the final chapter of my book explored my mid-twenties awakening, in which I realised that I was enough, and I just needed to care less and do what felt right for me, fist pump nailing it, etc etc etc! Follow my example and be an anti-cool girl! Be yourself! Huzzah!

  And now, I’m terrified to have to stand here and admit to you that sometimes I read that chapter and think it’s full of crap.

  The thing is, I do know that to be yourself, you have to know who you are. But I change my mind about who I am on a daily basis. I mean, some days, I read the chapter of self-discovery in my book, and I think: ‘God, Rosie, you are so fricking wise, man, well done on having your shit together and never compromising who you are.’ Other days, I read that chapter, and I think: ‘God, Rosie, you suck, you don’t even follow your own advice. You say it’s liberating to stop caring what people think? You care what everybody thinks. You cried when you were reading your Twitter notifications yesterday. You’re such a fraud.’

  And now, standing here talking to you, I’m terrified you’re all going to realise I’m a fraud now too, because, if you came here, based on my book, or even the topic of this talk, expecting a magic formula on how to be yourself, I have to tell you right now that I’m not going to be able to give that to you.

  But, if I am going to admit that I have no idea what I’m doing and possibly ruin my career in the process, I might as well do it at the Opera House, in a flower crown and a tutu, I mean, what a way to go, am I right?

  Here’s what I do know: Having a clear sense of self and sticking to it is easy, in theory. But maintaining that sense of self in the face of, well, life, and reality, can often feel almost impossible. I mean, it’s one thing to try and follow the philosophies of ‘leaning in’ or ‘not giving a fuck’ or ‘being an anti-cool girl’, but what about the days where you just can’t? The days where ‘leaning in’ feels exhausting, and the days where you actually do kind of give a fuck and the days where rather than being an unaffected anti-cool girl, you sort of want the cool kids to like you.

  I have days like that all the time, days where I just can’t live up to the person I’m supposed to be, to the person that I wish I was, and it often makes me feel like a failure.

  Let me give you an example of a time recently where I got completely confused about who I was, and basically had an existential identity crisis/brain fart.

  So, a couple of months ago, I put a naked photo of myself on the internet. I actually haven’t spoken about it since, so saying that just now makes me think ‘you crazy bitch’.

  Which is actually what a lot of other people thought about it too. My mum asked me if I was drunk, since the Facebook post went up quite late, and that offended me, because I hadn’t just put up the photo, I had written what I considered a really articulate and well-thought-out piece explaining why I was doing it. And I said that to my mum, I said: ‘Mum, I wasn’t drunk! How could I be drunk and write like that, didn’t you read what I wrote?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, no, I just saw the photo and thought you must’ve been pissed.’ Thanks, Mum.

  She wasn’t the only one. A LOT of people wanted me to know what they thought about that photo. And when I say people, I mean women. There were a few men who told me to put my saggy tits away, but mostly it was women who felt like they needed to tell me why what I had done was brilliant, or why what I had done was an eye-roll-in
ducing embarrassment.

  I was shocked at the level of reaction, which a lot of people considered a disingenuous response from me. I do have a large online following, sure, but I honestly thought when I put up the post that it was kind of a boring rant about feminism and body image, and maybe a few hundred people on my page would like it, and Facebook would probably take the photo down anyway because apparently women’s nipples are more offensive than hate groups, so I just put it up and went to bed.

  Cut to the next day, and my naked body was a nationally trending topic of conversation. And the honest truth is: I was fucking mortified. I was approached by a lot of media asking me to explain myself, and I sort of crafted this dignified response where I said I wasn’t going to fuel the story, because my body isn’t the most interesting thing about me – and that was partly true, but what was also true was that I was just really freaking mortified that my naked body ended up everywhere, and no, I didn’t want to go on your TV show and be interviewed while my boobs are displayed on a ten-foot screen behind me. Are you kidding? This is so embarrassing!

  But I am the first to admit that I had actively, yet naïvely and inadvertently, put myself in that position. And the vulnerability I was feeling that day was of my own making.

  But, the vulnerability wasn’t just about my body, it was also about my thought process – it was about the fact that I had made a pretty definitive statement about who I was and something that I stood for, and then I started to question it. Despite having put what I insisted to my mum was an incredibly moving and articulate critique on our culture’s obsession with female appearance, a strange thing started happening where it didn’t matter what I had written, because women kept explaining to other women why I had done it. And I started reading all these women arguing about whether I was brave, or an insufferable idiot, and it was like: ‘Rosie meant to say this.’ ‘NO she didn’t, she’s a fool, she means this.’ And then I was just like: ‘Arrrghhhh I don’t even know what I meant anymore, I’m confused!’

  Now initially, I posted the photo for the following reason: I’m a big girl. And my body has been through a lot. I was always quite thin, and then for a bunch of reasons I gained a lot of weight in my early to mid-twenties, and then I lost a lot of that weight, so my body has ended up in this kind of ‘looks like I’ve had a baby but I haven’t’ mode. Like, I’ve got really stretchy skin, and I’m covered in stretch marks and I have a belly that will always be there and I can basically pinch some skin on my boobs and pull it up to my chin. I say basically like I haven’t tried it but I’ve tried it, I know I can do it. I’d show you now but we’re in the Opera House, so let’s keep it classy.

  So, you know, my body is, by conventional standards for a woman, considered seriously flawed. I am told by society a million different ways every day that I’m disgusting. And I’ve got to be honest with you, that paralysed me for a while. I, like a lot of women, had spent my life hinging my self-worth on my appearance without even realising it. But the incredibly dangerous thing about hinging your self-esteem on your appearance is you might as well be hinging your self-esteem on a house of cards. Because no matter what you inject into your face, no matter how obsessively you work out or how restrictive you are with what you put in your mouth, your appearance will change. You will age. Your face is ageing right now. Your body is ageing right now. Gravity is taking its toll right now. And if you have invested all of your self-worth on the house of cards that is your aesthetic appeal, that house of cards is eventually going to topple and you are going to feel worthless.

  Now, gaining weight in my early twenties is when my house of cards came crashing down. When I gained weight, I felt like a worthless piece of shit. But that led to something incredible happening. I no longer had my appearance to fall back on to feel value, so I had to look for other things that I valued about myself. And building a new scaffolding of self-esteem not based around looks was incredibly liberating for me. I started to place more value on my intelligence. On my talent as a writer. On my ability to be a fierce and loyal friend. On my sense of humour. On the love I have for my sisters. On the fact that I survived a pretty horrific childhood filled with trauma, abuse and neglect.

  And when I started valuing those things, I suddenly remembered that I had a right to be in the universe. In spite of my body, I had a right to not only exist, but to be successful and to kick arse. And I would never have realised that if I was still convinced my body and appearance were the most important things about me. Does that mean I don’t care about looks at all? Of course not. I get eyelash extensions every three weeks, for Christ’s sake. I love dressing up, I love make-up, I truly believe in the transformative power of fashion. But all those aesthetic-based values have just been pushed lower down my values list, because I spent a long time living with them at the top of my list, and I just ended up feeling worthless.

  And so, having lived all of that, I started to get really sad that women, far thinner than me, far more conventionally attractive than me, seemed so hung up on their bodies. Eighteen-year-olds are getting lip fillers and Botox and breast implants, wellness warriors are posting photos on Instagram where they pinch a tiny roll of skin on their stomachs and hashtag it ‘working on my imperfections’. (Get back to me when your stomach’s so big you can’t see your vagina, then talk to me about what society considers imperfect.) My thirteen-year-old-niece looks up to Kendall Jenner, a girl who openly admits all she ever dreamed for herself was to be a Victoria’s Secret model. Cindy Crawford, one of the most physically genetically blessed people on the planet, announced that she was retiring from being professionally photographed at fifty, and was ‘passing the torch’ to her fourteen-year-old daughter.

  So, I posted a naked photo of myself. Just to say: you know what, I have a body that society tells me is disgusting – here’s a photo, just to prove it. Society tells me that as a woman, this body should make me feel worthless. But I don’t – not because I unequivocally love my body, because I don’t – I have struggles with my body image like everyone else – but because I value other things about myself, and I really encourage you to try it, because it’s been so liberating for me.

  That’s what I meant to say.

  That, however, was not what a lot of people took from the post. And that’s when I started to have a 24-hour-long brain fart.

  So, first of all, a lot of women were complimenting me for being ‘so brave’. I understand the intention behind that, but nobody says Miranda Kerr is brave for posting a naked photo. Calling me brave was basically saying, ‘Your body is not attractive, so it is really brave that you’re putting it all out there.’ And I was just like, ‘Ah, thanks. I would have really preferred if you had told me to put it away for being too sexy, but okay.’

  Then a lot of women were congratulating me on being a bigger woman who was proud of her body, and who was not afraid to flaunt it. And that also wasn’t right, because I have incredibly ambivalent feelings about my body, and I wasn’t comfortable being labelled as a body-image crusader. Some days I feel sexy, other days I cry about the size of my fupa. But, the point is, that on the days where I cry, I don’t feel worthless because I’ve learned to value other things, right? Is that what I meant?

  Then other women were angry that I’d shown my body at all. ‘A post about how our bodies shouldn’t be important is ruined by including a photo of your body,’ a lot of them said. And then I sort of thought: ‘Oh, it made sense at the time. I dunno, does it? Maybe you’re right.’

  Some women were angry that I’d said looks don’t matter yet I was wearing make-up in the photo and we can tell there’s a filter on it, you idiot. Well, first of all, I wasn’t wearing make-up, it was just the eyelash extensions, so that critique just made me feel pretty. And as for the filter thing – of course I put a freaking filter on! I was posting a naked photo, give me a break, sheesh. And I didn’t say looks don’t matter, I just said they’re not the most important thing. Didn’t I? I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE.

&nbs
p; Then there were just a lot of women online eye-rolling at me. The worst was a tweet from a female comedian I really like, who, and I’m paraphrasing here, tweeted something like, ‘I’m finally feeling brave enough to reveal this private part of myself,’ and below it was an X-ray picture of a uterus. And I was like, ‘Arrrghhh that really hurts my feelings but damn it, that’s a funny joke. What a solid burn.’

  So, at the end of that very bizarre twenty-four hours in which my naked body had gone viral because of a photo I’d posted myself, I was so confused about why I had done it. The Daily Mail even wrote an article about me having posted the photo because I was inspired by some blogger I’ve never heard of, and then I started to think, ‘Oh god, maybe I have heard of her, I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON, WAAAHHH.’ And then I tried to write a follow-up explaining what I had meant to explain the first time but by that point my brain was just checking out. I mean, the women who loved it, loved it for a million different reasons, and the women who hated it, hated it for a million different reasons.

  And as I was taking all of those opinions on board it was overwhelming what had been such a clear message in my mind initially. What didn’t help was that, apparently, even though people were reporting the naked photo to Facebook, it wasn’t taken down for more than a day. Facebook said it was because of a glitch in the system but I like to think there was some feminist staffer that day who was just like, ‘Oh, I’m trying to delete it. I don’t know why it’s not working.’

  But the photo was up long enough that the comment thread kind of reached this critical mass.

  And I was feeling incredibly vulnerable, not just because a naked photo of me had reached over six million people, but because I was so overwhelmed by the response to it that I wasn’t even confident about why I had put the photo up in the first place. And that’s when I started to feel like a fraud. You know, I’m meant to be ‘The Anti-Cool’, I’m meant to know who I am and to never question it because I don’t care what people think, and after putting up that photo, I was questioning everything.