Alenka Oakland September 2022
Roughly 2 years have passed since my last shoot with Anastasia.
And so much has changed in my relationship with my body.
Last time, when Anastasia started shooting me, I broke out crying. I felt very vulnerable, exposed and I was hurt by the attention my body was getting.
I was at war with my body, it was a relationship of hate. I wanted to erase it.
Since then, a lot has changed. I am more at peace with it. I am starting to experience what it means to love my body.
As Anastasia starts shooting me, I am comfortable and feel more playful. I enjoy looking at my body in the mirror and I go as far as trying to find poses that would make appealing pictures. I feel clumsy but in a good way. Uncharted territory.
I look at this body that I have obsessively tried to hide, over and over again, to escape the attention it was bringing into my life. I have wanted my body to become transparent for the longest time, so that other people would see past it. See the invisible inhabitant, that yearns to be seen, heard and understood.
So I could escape the pain of my body being perceived as something to possess, conquer or feel threatened by.
Other people's sexual attraction for me has made my life more difficult.
There are things I am still uncertain about.
Am I allowed to want to be seen for what is inside of me if people are easily sexually attracted to me ?
Am I allowed to enjoy feeling attractive ? What does that feel like ?
Can I have it all ? Be seen as a sexual being as well as an emotional and intellectual one ?
Am I allowed to benefit from my looks ? That's a big one.
Who do I ask for permission ?
I wanted my body to be invisible, and I still do to a certain degree.
However, I am not mad at it anymore. I manage to feel gratitude for it and I dare think that it is beautiful.
I am now on a journey to embrace the fact that my body is a conversation starter.
This is what a body that loves you looks like.
Alenka Sacramento Delta October 2020
Even though, the human experience of Life, and more particularly, MY experience of Life has always been at the forefront of all my questionings, and has driven how I live my Life, it is only a couple years ago that I started “cracking the code”. I finally figured out that it was possible to take agency over my internal world, how I experience Life and how to do so in a very focused and systematic approach.
Ever since, joy and happiness have been constant companions in my life, and I am feeling more and more at peace and fulfilled, no matter what the external circumstances are. The realizations and epiphanies that have punctuated my personal growth, have led me to what feels like one of the last frontiers towards liberation : my body. This vessel that I have always rejected and tried to control.
As Anastasia starts shooting me, instantly, I feel a big knot in my throat and it is getting harder for me to hold back tears I was not expecting. The attention that I am constantly trying to divert from my body, or rather to avoid, is all on me now, there is no escaping it and it hits me hard. It's a very painful confrontation, but I am finally unpacking decades of shame and body dysphoria.
I realize how foreign my body is to me, or rather, how foreign I want it to be.
I hate my body.
I hate my body for the attention it brings into my life.
I hate my body for the situations it generates and forces upon me.
I hate my body for how it attracts, who it attracts and why it attracts.
I hate my body for the way I am being held responsible for it. For this body I did not choose, that I had no say over.
I hate my body because it has robbed me of the life that I desire.
I hate my curves, I hate my breasts, I hate my butt, I hate my hourglass shape, I hate my “baby baring hips”.
I hate all of it, because in the eyes of others, my body unflinchingly gets labeled as female. It is perceived as female. It gets interacted with as female.
Female. Not human. Female.
I am not a person, I am a body. I am not a human being, I am a gender.
And gender is a story. A story that the collective ego tells itself.
An ego that needs to put everything in categories to understand the world it exists in, because it is scared of what it does not understand.
An ego that fails to see beyond boundaries and labels.
An ego that fails to accept and include the unknown and the uncharted.
An ego that feeds off the fragmentation of reality and lacks the courage and power to strive for the realization of unity.
An ego that needs something to fit in a box in order for it to be real, because it identifies with a limited language, that fails to grasp how infinitely rich and profound Life is.
An ego that knows only limits.
An ego that lacks creativity, imagination, courage and compassion.
An ego, that I have nothing in common with.
During the shoot, Anastasia asks me what my ideal body would be, my answer is ready : the body of a man.
With everything that I associate with it. Mostly a flat chest and square hips, but most of all, that which has no price to my eyes : anonymity and normality.
Anastasia asks if I am trans. No, I am not.
I realize now, that through out my life, in protest and in reaction to the story I was told about the feminine, and having had that story projected unto me, I have systematically steered in the opposite direction. I have tried to emulate the story I told myself about the masculine.
Aggressively standing my ground, making sure that it is understood that I am not someone to fuck (with).
Emulating the strength and wisdom that seems to radiate from someone who is patronizing.
Flirting assertively with the confidence of someone who is owed the world.
I experience the gender and body dysphoria, but like everything else in my life, the practice of acceptance and transcendence of everything that I am, permeates my way of life. Internal processes of acceptance and inclusion have always been my jam. External change to accommodate internal conflict has never been my cup of tea, because it has always been temporary and I find nothing liberating about it.
Freedom comes from within.
In everything that I do in life, rather than try and change my environment, and let that dictate how I feel, I take it upon myself to take agency over my internal experience of Life. With results beyond my wildest dreams.
And this is how I want to approach my body.
Rather than change my body to make it fit a certain ideal, a certain illusory story, I want to change how I feel about my body, and I want to change the story in my head.
The underlying current of my life, my drive, my aspirations, my thirst for never ending expansion are all true and they exist beyond my body and beyond the gender binary. They are what make my life what it is: unique, exceptional and precious.
If I am not seen beyond societal expectations, beyond sexual impulses and beyond questionings around procreation, then the burden of a limited and fragile mind will not be mine to carry. The burden of not seeing how profoundly rich and beautiful I am...
I am reclaiming my body. It is mine, and no one else's. Whatever grasp some might think they have over it, is an illusion and it is a story they tell themselves to protect their cowardly mind.
I am reclaiming myself, because my body might be tangible, but I am untouchable.
I am excited to embark on this journey towards acceptance of my body.
Even more so because Anastasia showed me a whole dimension beyond acceptance: I can LOVE and I can ENJOY my body!
She called my body fertile. I initially had a jerk reaction because that is a word I associate with procreation and what is expected from my “Baby baring hips”. But I have made peace with that term.
My body is opulent, abundant, generous, full of resources. It IS a fertile body. It is the body that has made it possible for me to live this extraordinary life.
Everything I have accomplished in my life, a life I am extremely grateful for and proud of, is something I have accomplished through my body.
My body is the vessel through which I manifest my desires, my drive, my dreams, my creativity, the richness of my internal world.
As I finish this statement, it is 2021 already and I am 33 years old.
I realize now that it took me so long to write it, because I wanted to give it back to Anastasia when the process of healing was done. I can see now that it is going to take more time to make peace and to free myself of the baggage I have accumulated around my body. I have experienced what it feels and what it means to enjoy my body for the first time, and I am excited for that to become second nature.
There are no words to express how grateful I am to Anastasia for creating this space and how precious I think her work is.
It is a work of Love and Light.
Of Love, because Anastasia loves our bodies and finds them beautiful, and helps us learn how to love them ourselves and see ourselves through her eyes.
And of Light, because she sheds a light on the dark emotions that have wrapped themselves around our bodies, disconnecting us : shame, hate, denial...
She brings them to the surface and helps us dissolve them, with Light, with compassion.
Thank you Anastasia.