A Confrontation, Los Angeles, 2019

This is a complex tale.  I’ll tell it over a couple entries. Here’s part 1. 

In 2018, I suffered a breakdown.  At the time, I don’t think I knew that it was a breakdown, but a couple years on down the road and I think I can call it what it was.  

A breakdown.  A crisis of meaning and of self. I doubted everything that I was doing.  Everything I was creating.  I doubted my ability to be a good father, a good husband, a good employee and ultimately a good human.  I was a 43 year old man in full-on DEFCON 4 meltdown.  A stereotypical, middle-aged Chernobyl.

When I looked in the mirror, I just hated my reflection, but that was nothing new.

I have always been big and I just thought it was my lot in life to be fluffy around the edge.  When I was a kid, I learned quick that I wasn’t regular–we would always go to the “husky” section to buy me jeans.  My mom said it was because I was bigger than the other kids and mom’s are good like that.  I think the moment that spiraled my self-image spinning out of control, was when I was 13 or maybe 14  (puberty was in full effect) and I went for a check-up.  It was a new doctor–a rather attractive younger lady doctor at that–and after some listening to heart-beats and looking inside ears, she asked me to take off my shirt.  I grasped the wide bottom of my t-shirt and considered my next move.  When you’re 13 and in the hormonal tsunami that is puberty, getting partially naked in front a woman in a low cut blouse can be marginally problematic to down right fucking embarrassing so I peeled that thing off as slow as possible while staring intensely at the faux white marble floor.

Once the shirt was off, she touched me here and there, which while a little stirring presented no significant difficulties.  Next she listened here and there, which was easier to contend with than the the light grazing I had just aced and then grabbed my right breast.  Yes breast and yes grabbed.  During puberty, the gods a blessed me with man boobs.  They weren’t huge breasts or anything but they stuck out a bit and made me feel a bit awkward when I tried on tighter clothes.  I hadn’t mentioned my boobs to anyone else and no one had thought to mention them to me, so I just thought that it wasn’t really a thing, even if they made me a bit uncomfortable and look a bit odd in a tank top.  Fucking tank tops.

Anyway, she grabs my right breast, squeezes it, cups it–almost like she’s fucking weighing it–and says something like, 

“Don’t worry, this will most likely go away one day.”

…and that was it.  My boobs were from that moment on all consuming.  What’s worse?  They never fucking went away.  Until I was well into my 30’s I would never and I mean NEVER, take off my shirt in front of someone unless I absolutely had to and even when I started to try taking it off at the beach I felt overwhelming waves of shame wash over me that eventually–sometimes only after a few minutes I would find an excuse to put it back on, or wrap a towel around my shoulders.  As a teen, when groups of my friends would go to water parks I would leave my shirt on or just not go.  Friends going swimming?  Nope.  I’m sick or busy.  Shirts and skins playing soccer.  Walk off the field and serve detention.  Once I was having sex, the shirt was on or the lights were off at least in the beginning.  I just knew that if the person I was with saw me they would see how flawed I was.  How ugly I was.  I felt like a freak and that sensation was so intense and so scarring that it’s lasted into middle age.  In fact, it was so intense that I just wanted to destroy my body because it had betrayed me. 

So I used it as an excuse to eat whatever.  To drink and smoke and sit on my fat ass and let it get fatter and fatter, because what did it matter.  I would always be me.  I’d always have the tits and always be a freak.  I decided I wasn’t going to love myself, and I didn’t for 30 years. 

Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon.