who are you with your eyes closed?

i shut mine and didn’t like what i saw

May 15, 2025

Do you know that I chose which college to go to based on how the campus looked? When people asked, and they asked frequently—“what made you choose going to school down in Tennessee?”, as if it were a dirty, forsaken place that they themselves would never deign to visit—I’d been known to say, “well, I wanted a small school”, or “they gave me really good financial aid”, or “I wanted to get as far away from my sociopathic high school boyfriend as possible”. All true, to a degree. But the real reason is that I visited the little southern campus and fell head over heels for the gothic stone cloisters, damp with humidity. The library that looked like it’d been the set for Harry Potter. I became enamored by the dogwood trees in bloom. In fact, the reason I discovered the 2,000 person school at all was from googling “prettiest campuses in the US” my senior year, disoriented amongst talk of majors and possible careers—a distant, immaterial future.

Beauty was my god, and I prayed at her altar. Clothes, furniture, nails, buildings, book covers, landscapes. Everything meticulously curated, nothing spared from my devotion. Not even myself, and I picked apart my appearance like a puzzle that needed solving. Tweezers, dye, weights—my instruments changed, but all served the same purpose. To make more lovely.

I’d not given much thought to this proclivity until I came across the following quote. A quote which produced in me, upon first reading, a stunning reaction—heresy! Blasphemy! I wanted to shout. The effect that first encountering any uncomfortable truth has on me, I’m afraid.

Art seeks expression. If it does not find an outlet through the work, it will seek expression in life. - Anaïs Nin

My mind went to work immediately firing off myriad arguments against the statement. A load of mumbo jumbo. Speaking of art in that way, as if it were a force of nature. Silly spiritualism, something for the desperate to cling to. But the words seeped into my skin nonetheless, and two truths floated their way to the surface of my consciousness:

When I do not write for long periods, I find myself inventing petty dramas amongst friends and acquaintances. Is my coworker plotting my demise? My teacher is in love with me. Mary doesn’t like me anymore, and is slowly trying to exit our friendship without hurting my feelings.
When I do write, my invented social dramas lose shape, reveal themselves for the two-dimensional inventions that they are.

My overactive imagination, finding no outlet on the page, manifesting instead onto my social life? I felt the weight of the realization. How awful, how impossibly cruel. How incredible.

What, then, of my obsession for the visual? Was I, deep down, a blocked painter, an architect? If I replaced the tweezer with a paintbrush, the weight room with a chisel, would I lose all desire to mold the curves of beauty onto my own physical vessel?

It was around this time that I hurt myself in the gym. A pain I’d never before experienced, radiating from my lower back. I could hardly get up from bed. I tried everything to get rid of it so that I could return to my normal training schedule. Massage, stretches, a new weightlifting routine. Nothing worked.

I decided to try physical therapy, carried to the arms of a middle-aged blonde woman and her Upper East Side home office by a stream of glowing recommendations. It was surprisingly more like regular therapy than I’d prepared myself for, and I divulged to her all of my shameful secrets: yes, I only train my legs. Yes, been doing it since high school, really. Yes, chasing a certain physique. Was lifting double, sometimes triple my body weight. No, I don’t stretch often. No, no upper body.

She diagnosed me before ever touching me: your body is misaligned. Your lower body much stronger than your upper and it’s pulling on your joints and ligaments. You need to start training your arms and chest, you need to start stretching. The only surprise? That I’d not injured myself earlier.

I was shocked. My body, an interconnected system? You could not exclusively train one area without affecting another? Every weight needed a counterweight? Oh, the injustice. Blasphemy, heresy, silly spiritualism. But I internalized her words nonetheless, desperate for a way out of the pain.

And so it was that I found my way to yoga. I booked my first Vinyasa class timidly, showing up early to inform the instructor: “this is my first time, so I won’t be very good. Just letting you know.” She was a small woman, with a steady presence and unsmiling eyes. She looked at me squarely. “Yoga isn’t about how the poses look. It’s about the internal, it’s about how they feel. The visual is just incidental. Ignore it.”

Heresy! Blasphemy! I thought. The external was the only world that counted, the rest was silly spiritualism! Something for the desperate to cling to. But for the benefit of my lower back, I continued to attend class. And ever slowly, her words began to permeate through to my core. I ignored the mirror, I focused on the sensations in my body. Mostly, they weren’t very pleasant.

But I continued to attend, and the pain in my lower back began to recede. Over time, the sensations in the rest of my body got a little less unpleasant, too. And so I began to find a new source of devotion; her class. Her unflinching manner, her imperviousness to my need for approval drew me in with magnetic force. I wanted to be like her; so still, so sure. In addition to class, I forced myself to meditate each morning, eyes closed on my living room rug.

And the thing about closing your eyes is that there is nothing you can hide from. No distractions. And what lies in the darkness? You, of course. Do you like what you see? I didn’t, not at first.

I’d spent so much time curating my outside that I had forgotten that the inside existed at all. My exterior was beautiful, as beautiful as the picturesque campus I’d chosen ten years ago. But my interior had the look of an unfinished basement, planks and dust and spiderwebs, mold spreading on the rough walls. A girl existing only to please, desperate to curate beauty for the eyes of others.

Facing her was painful, excruciating. I realized that I had to change just to lessen the pain of her presence.

For every weight, a counterweight.

I had to relearn what made me feel good, not just look good. I deleted Instagram. I began to write, every day. I let go of friendships that made me feel invisible. I did pick up the paint brush, I turned on the music, I danced.

I began to move through the world from the inside looking out.

I am not perfect today, by any means. I still look to the outside world to guide me, at times. I still often question myself in the context of those around me. I just bought a microcurrent device to “work out” my face, for christ’s sake. I re-downloaded Instagram (no scrolling, only posting. That’s a rule!).

But little by little, my two worlds are leveling out, converging. I feel it every time I write, create, draw: my inner world meets the outer. A little part of the shell replaced by my core.

I think that must be what true happiness is. Inner and outer, one. Complete and whole.