The Goddess and Me
seeing yourself for what you are
I was fourteen, and she was descended from Olympus. The heart of this story and its tragedy is that goddesses aren’t real, but mortals are.
A good storyteller recounts the truth of people’s lives while respecting and retaining their humanity and privacy. Some writers will change a few names and claim the whole thing is fictional, but that’s a cheat. The Goddess was kind to me, and that bound me to her. Now, I’ll try to tell her story in a way that befits what she was, even though she’ll never read it.
At fourteen, boys are just beginning to consider the breadth and depth of feminine beauty and power. She was small but strong, fragile like a glass swan. Her skin was the color of toasted gold. Her eyes were large, dark, and round, like pools so deep you could see your soul in them. She was my teacher at a time when many considered me unteachable.
“Bladerunner” is a film based on a novella by Phillip K Dick. It considers the question of what we are. Deckard is a robot who doesn’t know he’s a robot. He’s hired by the man who created him to hunt down and destroy other robots. Deckard has a test that divides the robots from the humans. His creator asks him to test the beautiful Rachel. Test after test comes back inconclusive. Deckard asks his creator how that’s possible, demanding, “She doesn’t know, does she?”
“She’s beginning to suspect,” Deckard’s God replies.
“How can it not know what it is?” He asks.
If I could talk to my creator, I would ask him of the Goddess, “How could she not know what she was?” Being what he is, the creator might answer, “Did you know what you were?”
When you’re fourteen, teachers are a different sort of creature from you. That they may have a spouse, a favorite book, a favorite song, a toothache, a retirement savings account, a mother, father, aunt, or uncle; none of these things occur to you. They are a level of creature above and separate from you, charged with driving you, correcting you, or nurturing you, depending on how you respond to them.
Learning disabilities tend to cluster in children. Just one might be easily overcome, but three, four, five, compounding and complicating each other makes it very easy for the learning-disabled child to just give up and accept that they’re as dumb as they seem. Giving up and accepting life as a bad kid is easier than trying and trying and not succeeding.
She taught us social studies, which is a combination of anthropology, sociology, history, civics, library skills, logic and more. Social studies starts you on the road to critical thinking where human beings are involved. It and literature are among the most important classes you can teach a fourteen-year-old trying to unravel the mysteries of the human mind and the complexities of life as a citizen.
My struggles with reading and, even more, my struggles with confidence made it almost impossible to make passing grades normally. I always needed either extra credit assignments or summer school to advance to the next grade.
Noticing that a sketchbook was my most faithful companion, the Goddess asked if I could draw the presidents. Likenesses are more difficult, but images of most of our presidents are iconic. Even at fourteen, I realized that I could draw caricatures of these famous faces and pass them off as likenesses to other fourteen-year-olds.
I would need about two months to complete thirty-nine drawings. I’d been experimenting with color. A friend of my father taught an oil painting class twice a week, but oils take weeks to dry. Pastels are easily available and easy to use, and a little spray with a fixative made them permanent. One by one, the Goddess tacked my presidential drawings on the corkboard strip above the blackboards on three of the walls in her classroom. I would pass social studies that year.
How we see ourselves is such an important element of what we become. I saw myself as ugly, brutish, not stupid, but slow, slow of tongue, slow of thought, alone, alien, impossible to know. I began taking drugs to make myself bigger and stronger than I already was. I tuned out the world because it would have none of me.
The Goddess was universally loved, not just by us, but by the other teachers, the parents, even pets, and the birds in the trees. She made other people feel better about themselves. Her smile and her kindness were constant. There were moments when I could see that she pulled her glasses down to focus, and she was no longer in the world with us, but I could never imagine her not seeing in herself what we and everyone else around us saw in her. How could she not know what she was?
Most of America had never heard of eating disorders or body dysmorphic disorder, and then Karen Carpenter died. Carpenter reminded me of the Goddess. She had the same hair, the same eyes, and the same smile that concealed more than it revealed. I couldn’t tell what her secrets were, but I knew she had them, and I knew she hurt.
Besides conventional beauty, Carpenter was one of the world’s most successful musicians. Loved by her peers, fellow musicians talked about her talent and her warmth. Working with her brother, who was also troubled, Carpenter sang songs that inspired people. For all the ways she was exceptional, she could never see it in herself. No matter what she achieved, she was never good enough, never talented enough, and, in particular, she was never thin enough.
Carpenter’s death started a national discussion about what beauty expectations were doing to women. People began to notice when their teenage daughters turned down servings of potatoes at dinner and looked at size zero jeans in catalogs. Although mostly associated with young women, body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders manifest in men as well, although they might manifest in different ways.
When it became clear that I would actually graduate from college, I decided to treat myself to a three-hour course on pencil sketching with Lucy Millsaps in my last semester. I already had my art credit because I took a theater course with Lance Goss. I’d been drawing since I was an infant. Besides raising my GPA by a tiny hair, having Lucy work with me on my skills was just to please myself.
We did contour drawings, gesture drawings, value drawings, figure studies with over-active theater kids in leotards, botanical drawings, and anatomical studies using a real human skeleton. Lucy assigned us to do a self-portrait at home and turn it in for critiques either before the class or in her office. I chose in her office.
“Boyd, you don’t look like that.” She said. “You’re much better looking than that.” And then she said something that told me what she was trying to know, “Are you ok?” How we see ourselves and what we actually are can be very different things. Body dysmorphic disorder is the opposite of narcissism. My art teacher was worried about how I saw myself.
To some degree, Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant believed that morality manifests as physical beauty. More often than not, though, physical beauty is a cultural manifestation. Ring-stretched necks, facial scarring, bound feet, and pointed heads are all body modifications seeking to align our physical beauty to some proscribed sense of morality. We created the term “Rubenesque” to describe the beauty of fat-bottomed girls, based on the theory that in Peter Paul Rubens’ day, a woman’s value was described by the heft of her thighs.
I knew a man, a doctor of philosophy, who devoted his life to considering the relationship between morality and beauty and plumbing the depths of aesthetics and what they mean, at least in terms of philosophical theory. He was a recognized world expert in these things. That he lived, worked, and wrote in Jackson, Mississippi, surprised many.
At whatever point it began, by fourteen, my sense of self was under serious duress. My grades were not what they should be, as everyone told me. “But, you’re SO SMART, Boyd.” I was slow to respond, had slow foot movement, and was clumsy, making me useless as an athlete. Whatever success with the opposite sex meant was immaterial to me because talking to them terrified me. I received many mixed messages about my art. On the one hand, everyone said I had some talent; on the other hand, many of the same people said that wasn’t anything a sane person would base their life on. I was good at something that they said didn’t matter.
The one thing I had was that because I was held back a grade and because I was physically maturing faster than anyone else my age, my genetic propensity for size and strength began to manifest itself in ways that couldn’t be ignored. Whatever else I couldn’t be, I could easily become big and strong. Since there seemed to be some communal value in that, that’s what I pursued.
In the 1970s, size and strength were considered a matter of exercise and protein ingestion. Aerobic exercises made me look awkward and ungainly, but Anaerobic exercises (strength exercises) made me look competent and confident. My life became about putting another plate on the bar and moving more weight than anybody in the gym.
My grandmother poked my trapezius, deltoid, and pectoral muscles and made a face. “Boyd, what are you doing to yourself?” she asked. “Don’t do that," she pleaded. “You don’t want to look like that, " she said, but I did.
Building muscle mass meant ingesting protein. I didn’t want to be super lean like Frank Zane and some of the legends of bodybuilding, but I didn’t want to be fat either, so I read up on lean sources of protein. Protein powders based on dehydrated milk were readily available in the seventies. These days, protein shakes don’t taste so bad. Some even taste good. They tasted like the ground-up chalk they used to line the football field in the seventies. I ordered two-pound cans of it from Joe Weider. It said “chocolate” on the outside, but that just meant it was colored brown.
Classmates used to gather around to watch me drink six raw eggs. Besides protein powder, raw eggs were the leanest source of protein I could think of. A few salmonella scares and concerns about cholesterol eventually put me off of them, but I could easily drink six eggs in front of you today. Once you get beyond the revulsion, it’s easy.
Lloyd’s Barbeque offered half-smoked chickens for just a couple of bucks. “That’s pretty lean!” I figured. Chicken was more protein per pound than beef or pork, and that was a price a high school kid with a summer job could easily afford, plus they tasted really good. I kept one or two in my mother’s garage refrigerator, where roving fingers (mainly my dad's) wouldn’t eat my chickens.
Theories about the recuperative power of vitamin C were making headlines in the 1970s, so besides supplemental capsules, I kept myself supplied with frozen orange and apple juice concentrate. I was consuming nearly double the number of calories recommended for a kid my height, but I was making rapid and noticeable gains. Not satisfied with being the strongest kid in school, I began entering contests to see if I could be the strongest kid in Mississippi. “If I keep working,” I reasoned, “By the time they add bench press and deadlift to the Olympics, I’ll be ready to compete.”
One day, at a gym in South Jackson, a fellow ironhead who worked for the Jackson Police Department asked if I’d heard of anabolic steroids. He was a cop. Cops are symbols of authority. Dynabol is illegal for sport’s use now. Then it wasn’t. As much as I hate needles, even now, I was willing to inject myself or let this policeman inject me if it meant I would become bigger and stronger.
I was letting my physical manifestation determine my moral value. I recognized that there was a penalty. My body made my grandmother cry. My joints were becoming weak and easily damaged as my muscles outpaced my tendons and ligaments. I was aware that there might be some liver and kidney damage, but I was sixteen by then and invincible. When I go to the doctor now, they check me to see if my liver has yet given up the ghost.
My Body Dysmorphic Disorder and my eating disorder meant that I was consuming twice as many calories per day than I needed and three times as much protein. As I got older and spent fewer calories, my BMI grew and grew. I had money and no mortgage, so treating myself to a sixteen-ounce steak made sense because of the protein but no sense at all because of the calories.
I outgrew the classes the Goddess taught, but I kept her in my sights. Her health was somewhat frail, I knew. On a class trip to Washington, our bus stopped at a horrible little steakhouse that gave half of us food poisoning, but they used little plastic flags stuck in the meat to indicate “rare,” “medium,” or “well done.” Even though she only ate a few bites, the Goddess got a tiny sliver of the “medium” flag stuck in her throat, which infected her inner ear. She had to cut the trip short because the inner ear determines balance, and she could hardly walk.
I never met him, but I knew she had a husband who loved her. Even though she was almost twice my age, I began to see her as much as a human, as a teacher and goddess. I recognized that, besides the smiles and the concern for everyone else, there was sometimes a forlorn look about her, an inconsolable incompleteness that baffled me. How could it not know what it is?
One day, they told me the Goddess had fallen remarkably ill. She wouldn’t ever teach again. She wouldn’t ever do anything again. As beautiful and as strong as she was, her body could no longer support her. Several years later, I heard she died.
It took me many years to understand that the Goddess and I suffered from the same thing. It manifested differently in me than it did in her, but we were suffering the same. Now, when I look at photos of myself at fourteen, I see a creature alien to me. Perfectly normal looking, with somewhat soulful eyes, I wasn’t at all the monster I imagined myself when I was fourteen. How could it not know what it was?
I was stuffing myself to try and shape myself into a distorted image of what I saw in me. In the years to come, it manifested as severe weight issues. The Goddess was starving herself to try and shape herself into a distorted version of beauty she already attained just by smiling. Her body rebelled, and my body rebelled, and it cost us health and happiness.
One of my other teachers, also a social studies teacher, contacted me to ensure that if I were to tell the story of the Goddess, I would do so in a way that befits her and respects the privacy she valued. I hope I accomplished that. In three years, I’ve made four attempts to tell this story. I’ve gone way over my one-thousand-word limit for an essay.
I came to realize that I wasn’t telling her story so much as I was telling my own, and reflecting on my perception of her. I was a child and she was a woman with a life and a purpose and a family. We shared a weakness that neither of us deserved, and it cost us.
“How can it not know what it is?”
I don’t have an answer for that. I’m still discovering that my life-long perception of myself is different from what was actually both inside and outside of me. Many of us don’t feel lovable or feel adequate. We discover a million ways to hide it, but it’s always inside us.
Many of you will know the Goddess’s name. Please don’t use it. Please don’t reveal what you know about her life. In my story, she’s a concept. An ideal in the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy. Her real life, whatever it was, whatever it could have been, is not a story for me to tell.
My initial thought was that I might use a story to try and heal the hurt that was inside her or maybe justify it somehow. I realize that's not possible. As much as I would have sacrificed myself to protect her, that was just never an option. Her pain will forever be a part of the universe, but it's over now. She's at peace. You can't pray to a Goddess that's not a goddess, but you can remember her.
