Or is it already the season of forgoing resolutions? On my way to the swimming pool this morning I heard on the radio that people are already forsaking their best laid plans. The reason: their goals are too ambitious. One should make small attainable goals. Instead of planning to become a triathlete, one should plan to go to the gym four days a week. Allow a few mornings to sleep in.
A lot of people must have slept in today. For the first time all month, the pool was blissfully empty.
Or rather, almost empty. There was also a college swimmer I often see at the Y, a leggy blond who made a resolution to lose weight. Already as thin as Popeye’s beloved Olive Oyl, she told me she needed to take off ten pounds. “Of course you don’t!” I said. “You’re already too skinny!” She smiled and stood on the scales. “I am a little less each day,” she bragged. Then she pinched her waist to show me what she called her love handles. “And look!” she added, pointing at her thighs. “I think I’m already getting cellulite.”
I’d like to say this girl is unusual, but when the high school swimmers are in the locker room, I hear a litany of complaints about their sylph-like bodies. The girls are forever sharing advice and cosmetics and clothes and romantic tips. “I think one of my boobs is getting bigger than the other. Can you tell?” “Do you have any coverup—I have new zit in my cleavage.” “Do you shave your toes?” And then, there’s always the question, “Do I look fat in this?” as they giggle and twirl in front of one another.
I wonder if the boy swimmers are primping in the Men’s locker room. If there’s a skinny kid among them who stands on the scale every day and worries about his weight. Who pinches his skin and wishes he were leaner, smaller, or somehow other? Do men get cellulite or fear it?
I am reminded of the premise in Buddhist psychology that we don’t see who and what we really are. We lack clarity. It’s as if we are looking through dirty glasses that we can’t clean.
I think of this now as I try to edit on my latest book, Son of a Bird, a memoir, due out in 2025. I keep changing the sentence-order, questioning my word choices, my logic, my everything. I feel an overwhelming sense of self-doubt. If only I had a little more clarity. I am beginning to wonder if I am just too much of a perfectionist. Am I, like the anorexic teenager, unable to see what is in front of me?
I have been emailing my editorial questions back and forth with two accomplished women-poets. They, too, are agonizing over their final manuscripts. They, too, lack confidence in their own vision. I also correspond regularly with several male poets, but I never hear them questioning their validity in the same way. I’ve never had a male poet send me an accepted manuscript and ask, “Is this as bad as I fear it is?”
Am I imagining these gender differences? I don’t know. But today, I am making my first New Year’s resolution. I will stop worrying about my book for two days. I know—it’s a very small resolution. But I doubt I can keep it.
While not editing today, I found this poem on the internet by Louise Glück, a poem that addresses what I am thinking/writing/wondering about here.
LOUISE GLÜCK- 4. THE DEVIATION
It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman’s body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in a bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words–
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.
This post was previously published on the Best American Poetry blog.