I was a child in the 70s and a teenager in the 80s. These were incredible times in many aspects but the information was not yet so massive and accessible. Not the ones that could really make a difference to me at the time. Young people today believe that they often don’t realize how transformative a simple Google search or sharing wishes on a social network can be.
Since my adolescence, I felt uncomfortable with my body. I was always very thin. And being tall didn’t help much either because it made me look even clumsier. My sports clumsiness made me even more of an awkward teenager. And that made me very introverted.
And in an age without internet, cable TV or even cell phones, life could be quite lonely. And I basically got used to it and ended up creating a unique world of mine, where I basically took refuge and was the director, the screenwriter and the actor.
But over time I ended up trying to express this, and one of those ways was through drawing. The drawing managed to bring out a lot of this world that I lived inside of me, the world I would like it to be.
With this introspection I hardly paid much attention to my body, even because I found it “weird” or unattractive.
Yet I only started making peace with my body very recently. Practically after 40 years. I started to realize that it was silly to be very critical of yourself and looking at old photos I see how beautiful my body was and how much it can change in 10 or 20 years.
With this notion, I realized that the body I have today, with its defects and qualities, will not be the same 10 years from now. So what I can do is enjoy. Posing for photographers or artists to draw it, I end up realizing that anybody is sacred. Single. And he deserves respect, especially his own.
