SpeakerWe're about to seam rip some difficult labels. The topics covered in this episode include psychological control, body image, and the deliberate refusal of food. These are raw materials, sometimes rough, that might stretch or reopen old wounds. I invite you to listen with care. If the mirror becomes too hard to look at, please press pause. That is what this book is, Knowing When to Say Stop. For those who need support, I've listed associations and concrete resources on our website. The link is in the description. Ready? Welcome to the Taille Unique Showroom, where we listen to you just as you are. Here, we seam rip labels to readjust the world to our measurements. Today, we're opening a rather special door in the showroom, the mirror. Originally, the mirror is meant to be your space. It's the participatory format where I play your voice notes, your raw testimonies without filters. It's the place where we listen to your own reflection. But for this episode, the mirror is a mosaic. There's not just one voice, but the echo of several women I've crossed paths with. Women you might know, women who could be you. Tonight I lend my voice to their silences. It is often said that the body is a house, but I've known women for whom it was a prison where they tried to sew through the bars from the inside. Tonight. i'm not looking at my reflection i'm opening an album i've kept close for a long time an album of blurry photos of bodies apologizing for their existence i think of alba alba had received the greatest gift of the renaissance milky skin full curves a belly as soft as a venus by titian she was beauty as art history has dreamt it but she she only saw a mistake i can see her again in the high school locker room before and after gym class she sucked her stomach in not just for the class photo no she held it in all the time she created an artificial void where life had placed softness by constantly contracting herself it felt like she ended up altering her own bone structure she seemed to walk hunched over slightly folded in two around this hollow she imposed on her flesh as if she were physically apologizing for taking up space i think of berenice berenice was the architect of her plate I often watched her at the canteen, fascinated. Berenice didn't eat, she sculpted the void. From time to time, during the meal, she would bring three crumbs to her mouth and spend the rest of the time packing, compacting, and spreading the food to create the illusion of a meal eaten. At her home, the kitchen was not a hearth, it was a cold battlefield. meals were of the fish sticks and fries variety expedients so as not to have to confront the material what surprised me most wasn't the state of her plate but the look in her child's eye sitting opposite her learning in silence that nourishing oneself was a chore sagacies sometimes passed down like that without a word just by a folk gesture pushing life away. I think of Gloria. Gloria wore her thinness like a crown. She would leave the table, disappear into the bathroom. and returned with the gleaming eye of a secret victory the ritual was immutable fill up for social appearance and reject for private requirement but gloria wasn't just vomiting calories she was trying to purge her own reality she couldn't stand being matter she couldn't stand her body having needs fluids weight sickness for her Eating was a stain and digesting was a defeat. Every time she leaned over the void, she tried to expel the woman of flesh to keep only the image with a capital I. She wanted to be smooth, untouchable, almost virtual. When she spoke about it, there was no shame. You could even almost hear pride. it was her way of taming the beast of controlling the world i decide what stays i decide what goes she thought she was sculpting a perfect statue when she was just the tyrant of a body she despised for being alive And then there's Maya. Maya was what we call conventionally beautiful. Fit, young, validated by the social gaze. But Maya didn't live in her body. She lived in a quest. She didn't want to be herself. She wanted to be a trend. Her tragedy is that of the Frankensteinization of beauty. She started with her chest, her first operation. Then a second, for more volume. That's when the machine jammed. Her heart stopped on the operating table. She almost lost her life to change her cup size. You might think brushing with death would calm the envy. Not with Maya. Once recovered, she shifted her obsession to her face. She wanted lips, but not just any lips. The trend at the time was the duck face. I want my girlfriend's lips, she told the surgeon, and then proceeded to describe from memory, or rather imagination, what she wanted. The surgeon, knowing his craft, asked just one question. Your friend, is she of African descent? Yes, she was. He warned her, trying to explain faithful architecture. It's a question of tissue, madame. Your lip structure doesn't have that elasticity, and your base doesn't have that architecture. We cannot force the material indefinitely. If we inject this volume, it won't look like a mouth anymore, but rather a beak. But Maya doesn't listen to warnings. She listens to the illusion. She changed doctors to find an executor. Today she has the volume. She obtained the object, but not the subject. The result is not the hybrid beauty she hoped for, it's a juxtaposition. its emotionless assemblage she borrowed the black body's feature full lips the high and round buttocks but she emptied them of their history their genetics and their soul maya teaches us a brutal lesson you can buy the walls but you can't buy the foundations By dint of wanting to inhabit the skin of others, Maya ended up becoming homeless in her home. And finally, there's Muriel. muriel is the one who turned her heartbreak into a fortress fifteen years of silence fifteen years of filling an emotional void with food one day she wanted to lose weight she went to see a dietitian to repair the faade instead of breaking down the walls and rebuilding them But when the specialist scratched the varnish, when he asked why this void, and suggested healing the soul as much as the stomach, the dam broke, and Muriel slammed the door. Pride forbade her from opening the black box. She preferred to keep the symptom rather than face the cause. So, since she could no longer eat her emotion, she decided to consume other people's oxygen. she used the world's intellectual laziness to create a vacuum around certain people and projected all the toxicity she refused to heal in herself she thought deeming others would make her shine news of her reached me over time without me even asking i was told she'd fallen ill i wasn't surprised I have this intimate conviction that the body always ends up knowing who we really are. The body doesn't know how to lie. It stores, it absorbs, and one day, it presents the bill. Illness is not always random. Sometimes it is the biological manifestation of a truth we've spent a lifetime stifling. I think her body simply attempted to expel the poison she refused to treat. I speak of Alba, Berenice, Gloria, Maya and Muriel, but I know that by describing their gestures, it might be yours I'm sketching. I've seen them. I've rubbed shoulders with them. And I've often felt that terrible helplessness. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a therapist. I have neither the white coat that heals, nor the words that save. Facing Muriel, I reached out a hand, and I got burned. Facing Berenice, I asked questions, and I saw the wall go up. We want to fix, we want to shake, we want to say, but look at yourself, you're alive. But we remain at the threshold, incompetent and clumsy, silent witnesses to the civil war you're waging against yourselves. So to you listening to me, and to them if they can hear me, I'm not here to judge you. My own reflection has its cracks, but I just want to tell you this. Your body is not a permanent construction site. It's not a house that must be constantly demolished and rebuilt to be habitable. You're not a JPEG image that needs retouching until the texture of life is erased. You're a mosaic. Sometimes it's broken. Sometimes it's glued back together crookedly. It pulls. It itches. But it is whole. I cannot cure you. I cannot force you to lay down your arms. I can just turn on the light in the showroom so that you can perhaps only see yourself with gentleness. Just see yourself. Ultimately, if this microphone is on today, it's because they showed me the way, by defining the negative space. Without knowing it, Albert, Berenice and the others were the shadow architects of Taïunique. They showed me the dead end so that I could have the audacity to build the exit. So thank you. Thank you for proving to me, through paint, that there was an emergency. The absolute urgency to create a space where we finally stop bleeding for a label. This was a special edition of the mirror. If you too have glued the pieces back together, or if you're still looking for how to inhabit your mosaic, The studio door is open for your voice testimonials at the mirror section of the podcast's website. And one last thing, I won't always be able to come knocking at your door to warn you of a new arrival. So, to have the showroom come to you, Make sure you hit subscribe or follow. The doors are open. The showroom is closing its doors for today. Remember, if no size fits you, wear your own. See you in two weeks.
