#60: writing a new os: an evolution of control

living by your own rules, so long as they're in accordance with your present values

Jul 16, 2024

Isabelle Albuquerque, *Orgy for Ten People in One Body,* 2020

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Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here! And thank you, Philipp Kaspar, for the intro music.

The wooden doors pushed open, providing an immediate sense of relief as we emerged from the suffocatingly hot sauna. We waddled over to the slab of stone where we’d placed our towels and sprawled out like a herd of small sea lions. It had been far too long since I caught up with two of my best girlfriends so I shared a collaborative Apple Note earlier in the day, which we each added to in the form of encrypted hints of what we wanted to chat about that night.

Reciprocity is one of my favorite traits in friendship. On this evening, I witnessed it in full form as we all lent our undivided attention to whoever had the floor. There was no fear of hogging conversational airtime as we all were set on making it through each person’s list of life updates. And while our conversational surface area was expansive overall, we went deep on the topic of the female experience of body image blues.

Your body is never going to be my favorite or the most interesting thing about you.

When you walk into a room, I never go ‘Oh, thank god she is here because she has such a great body.’ I think ‘Thank god she is here because she makes me feel at home in my own skin, because she listens intently, because her bubbliness and excitement for life is infectious.’

The very things I love about you are the ones that go by the wayside when you are transfixed in a daze of insecurity.

The three of us passed these comments around, embracing our ability to feel into them even more deeply when directed at another person. When I reflect on what I love most about the people in my life in general, but especially the women, it literally has nothing to do with how they look. I know this. But it can be so easy to forget to lend that to yourself.

From an early age, we learn how to subvert our own desires in order to fit into certain boxes. Instead of being rewarded in school for following our own curiosities, we are rewarded for mastering the subject matter given to us, regardless of its personal resonance. I learned at a really young age how to subtly silence my intrinsic desires and curiosities in order to get good grades, make it onto sports teams, get into a good college, appear popular, etc.

At the same time, I learned from the media and the women around me that I could apply that same discipline to my body. If I figured out how to silence my internal hunger cues, then I could manipulate my body to meet the extrinsic reward of looking a certain way. I figured out how to rework my system of accomplishment such that the emotional rewards I would feel for denying my body’s hunger cues were stronger than the physical rewards of satiation. Being able to say no to my body and yes to this new system that I created in my head, which was rooted in those same values of discipline, hard work, iterative processes, and so on, felt like an act of rebellion because it put me in the pilot seat of control. And I was damn good at it. But within the new system I had created, I was still listening to and appeasing an external authority rather than my own intuition.

This system would deem certain behaviors as good, others as bad, and tally up points like a scoring system on the hour. I did this because it made me feel like I could control one small segment of my adolescence. I put all of my eggs in this basket and it was really fragile. Unknowingly, this new system of accomplishment and reward that I had created became like a religion - it gave me a sense of purpose and made me feel capable of combatting the insecurity that I felt in other areas. Well, actually, it gave the facade of mitigating those insecurities but in reality, it actually made them worse.

As I got older and started to heal my relationship with my body, food, and exercise, I learned what it felt like to listen to myself, first and foremost. I felt my intuition come online and WOW was that more powerful than the little circus I created in my mind around number crunching and external validation. Liking me for me was better than any nighttime reward I felt when I was younger for skipping the cupcake at soccer practice. It is amazingly comforting and horrifyingly sad to know how many of my girlfriends relate to the experience that I’ve described above. I also have many male friends that relate, either under these same exact terms or under the guise of having created their own secret system for feeling in control of life when they were young and afraid.

I look at pictures of this younger version of myself and remember exactly what it was like to be in her head and feel so grateful now to have an entirely different sense of accomplishment and reward. I have spent the past 12 years thinking rigorously about what matters to me. And it has fundamentally changed my relationship to myself and to other people.

So as we sat in this bathhouse on a Friday evening, discussing our younger relationships to our bodies and how they’ve evolved overtime, it was also comforting to be reminded that these feelings of insecurity come and go in seasons. We related on how often bad body image days have nothing to do with how we look physically. Instead, they stem from feeling out of control in one area of life and accidentally slipping back into the old operating system that used to run the disordered script, which works by conveniently narrowing our control panel to two levers: 1) food and 2) exercise. Even though we no longer derive our worth from our physical appearances in the way that we used to, we can still have moments of these outdated scripts running amok. But they feel annoying and perverted when they come online now because we have tasted what it feels like to be adored and adore ourselves for so much more than that. And once you’ve allowed yourself to feel that, it’s hard to find the same satisfaction from a disordered relationship to bodily control. It just is not that interesting to you anymore.

This conversation was a reminder to take a deeper look at root causes rather than their symptoms. Throughout our lives, we develop different strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Some of them good, others not so much. I have outgrown this particular strategy of seeking control, but the symptom of body image insecurity can still come up from time to time when I am feeling spun out or navigating change. It was important to remember that as it helps me look further under the hood at what I really need. And ultimately, it helps me write a new OS based upon the values that are actually representative of what I care about today.

The cool thing about recognizing that your previous coping mechanisms for change no longer satiate your present value system is that it gives you an opportunity to write new “rules”. The ability to create an internal world of your own is not actually a bad thing. That early inkling of desire to go against the grain is actually a trait that I am so proud of today; I now just apply it to other things. What matters is the type of rules you write. So while a younger version of myself assigned points to cupcake consumption, it is liberating to know that I now can assign intuitive “points” to things like: 1) did you call your mom or someone you love today? 2) are you spending time working on things you care about? and so on.

There is a sincere sense of liberation in realizing that you’ve outgrown maladaptive control strategies. Sometimes they arise momentarily just to remind you of how far you’ve come.

Thank you for getting Caught Up in Char’s Web this week!

See you here, again, soon.

-Charlotte

Xandra’s Curation Corner

Xandra Beverlin is an incredible art curator at Pace Gallery, co-founder of PULSE, and dear friend, who so generously pulls pieces for this newsletter each week. I text her a few short bullets about the main themes of Char’s Web and she replies with the most thoughtful articulations of the artists that come to mind. This is my favorite part of writing my newsletter. Do yourself the favor of reading her curator’s notes!

Ana Mendieta, *Imágen de Yágul*, 1973/2018

“I resonate so deeply with your theme this week - I can say that I’ve certainly experienced many of the emotions, and built a form of that “narrative” that you tell yourself upon exiting what could be considered to be a challenging relationship with your body. I can sense that you’re tapping into this deep corporeal sensibility, around how we perceive ourselves rather than how we may objectively physically appear, so here I’ve incorporated 3 artists whose work effectively interrogates the role of the body altogether.

Ana Mendieta is known for her earth-body artworks, which typically demarcate her own silhouette into a physical form within organic materials - usually employing negative space. She captures an intuitive sense of being in touch with the elements of nature, and our body’s relationship to them.

Isabelle Albuquerque’s work presents more of a provocative angle, most specifically her Orgy for Ten People in One Body series that you can see above. She uses her physical form as a literal mold via 3D scanning and robotic carving with mediums from bronze to wax: tapping into our connection to desire, sexuality and embodiment.

Last but most certainly the most well-known of all three, Louise Bourgeois (an icon!) interrogates the relationship of the body most distinctly through its role in reproduction, subsequent motherhood, and transmutation of form through age. All at once disturbing and empowering, her work took me a while to really digest and understand — but isn’t that exactly the same painstaking process of how we learn to lovingly perceive ourselves?”

- Xandra Beverlin, July 2024