The skin is what divides the internal and the external, the container for all that I recognize as myself, the border of my body. But skin lies, often I don’t recognize myself, the face I find in the mirror is a stranger that does not identify with the essence of my being. I feel I have been tricked into a body that does not faithfully portray my soul that the skin I inhabit fails at representing me completely: I tend to locate my essence somewhere inside myself, somewhere deeper. On other occasions, I am completely at ease with what I see as my image, it feels as if inside and outside merged authentically as if the mountain of discrepancy just melted away. My appearance does not belong to me, it’s a mask, a painted surface determined by nature and fate, God and DNA, it’s beyond my control. Since childhood my appearance decides who I am, people’s reaction to my external image slowly shapes my behaviour, gives me confidence or makes me feel insecure. It shows me my limits, encloses me in a typology, as a result, I start to act as a reflection of my image, but within myself, I experience a feeling of inadequacy, sometimes pure failure, of disunity, of imprisonment. The skin is an emotional as well as a physical border that eventually I grow and adjust into, but the gap remains, the space between ‘me’ inside and the outside representation separates us. I have really shitty days but covered in make-up I give myself an immaculate appearance, and so you, on the outside, would not see the discrepancy.

People have a strong perception of the space between the interior and the exterior; the feeling of surprise and loss when I arrive home after having my hair cut, it’s just a new hairstyle, but it is a new image of myself that I don’t recognize yet. It takes a few days to get re-adjusted to that image being me again, that space, that hesitation in recognizing our reflection is the demonstration that the essence and the appearance do not constitute a whole. I can only try to imagine how the intensity of this perception must be after anything more drastic and permanent like suddenly looking in the mirror with huge perky breast and inflated lips. Is there the constant feeling of disorientation related to the inside and the outside?

I remember as a teenager, identifying with parts of my body, the ones I liked, the rest of it was pushed and pulled until it became different, until it resembled what I thought would be my ideal.

That never happened, and eventually, I surrendered to myself and gradually grown into recognizing and love the way I was. It did not come naturally, it was a process of embodiment, of slowly learning to recognize this ‘me’ that I had been given.

We live in a state of continuous struggle between nature and culture, we construct our identity by expulsion; everything that cannot be embraced by us, belongs to the outside, which relates to Julia Kristeva’s model of identity, the Self is created by rejection, inner space does not exist ‘naturally’.

Body formation is achieved by expulsion, like the bulimic whose vomiting is used to re-establish their too fragile borders. For Kristeva, the pre-linguistic – that which precedes the symbolic order-is linked to her notion of the abject. The abject “is the place where meaning collapses,” the limit with what is totally human and what is not fully so and the most significant borderline which separates the inside from the outside of the body: Self from Other. The use of imagery of the perfect female body make an implication that femininity is “made up” or artificial- as these retouched images do not correspond with the way most woman look- therefore they imply that the real, “natural” state of women is far from perfect. The ideal image of female beauty portrayed in fashion magazines structurally implies its abject alternative. Morally or socially trying to “control” the image of how a female body in our culture should look like, symbolizes a desire to restrict the body’s margins.

The English anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that the human body stands as a symbol for social structures and how the categories of clean and unclean are projected onto the female body. Clean representing the side of order and social control and unclean the opposite, the side of disorder and danger to social control. Both men and women share a variety of openings that upset the inside/outside distinction of the body, but women seem to express a more radical experience of their bodies, they lack those clear borders, and even their genital organ is made of infolded skin, an outside that becomes and inside.

“The women’s sex organ represents the horror of having nothing to see.”

This situation can create an ambiguous feeling for their body, a sense of ‘being all over the place’ that clashes with the idea of linear unity of our patriarchal society. Women are made to believe that their ideal-self is not within them-selves but comes to them as an outside imposition. From putting make-up on to plastic surgery, women’s behaviour in making themselves beautiful in order to be accepted and therefore in the eyes of the other be One, reveals a profound sense of disgust for the natural body. Two, ideal is clean and compact, expel and reshape are the way to incarnate it.

This is about borders, about the need to establish the Self through rejection. What I expelled is part of me that becomes the object, external and I live me with a re-defined image. Vomiting, waxing, liposuction, scrubbing… The feeling of expulsion dissolves the borders of the body, and before the Self is established, I gravitate in a space between being and non-being. I am a fluid being that mutates following the menstrual cycle, every month a part of me dies and is expelled, and then I am ready to be born again