Damn.

My problem? I don’t think I am ever gonna be ready……

Which makes me pretty damn blue because once-upon-a-time-not-so-long-ago I was always ready.

And my body reacts accordingly. Listens to my nerves every whining complaint and explodes. Regard,if you will,a strange continent-like cluster of psoriasis erupting on my butt and legs that I think it is in the shape of the red-bull logo.They should sponsor me. Woe. It looks like shit and makes me feel much of the same.Cheers for that nervous system! ( “Oh! but you shouldn’t have!” ) Behold! A small rotunda around my midsection of “Way-to-early-what-the-hell-!?-who-invited-you-?” premenstrual bloat mayhem,a few Krakatoa sized zits and a-way we go….

An insecurity luau with no blue drinks that you light on fire with umbrellas in them.Great.

My heart was doing its “You ain’t good” enough soft shoe shtick on the train all the way into the city.The endless internal hammering of my ever present Dysmorphia causing me to leave my seat rather hastily to throw up between the rattling carriages.I sat down,feeling faint, wiping my mouth while hunting for gum in my black hole of a bag and I try to remember when I was “Well” for want of a better word ,well better than this anyway and it feels like a lifetime ago….When I lived in Long Beach and was the master of my machine.When me and Leizel would spend a whole day building up a set to shoot in and my confidence before a camera was happily obscene.

To this day,to this fucking second,though all the progress I have made I still have to wonder….How can you love someone and chip away at them? Undermine their sense of self. What kind of dire and absolute monster does such a thing?

The one that I chose to pledge my forsaken forever to,that’s who.

The damage is stunning in its sheer scale alone.The El Capitain of damage if you will.

Granted,I have always had a terrible time with body image.I don’t deny it.Fucking shocking really,I have good phases but it’s a war….From being almost six foot tall at eleven,wearing bi-focal glasses and having braces and cystic acne to starving myself and then getting fat again,obsessive training.Then you have the destructive relationship that lasted a few blood-soaked years with my treasured collection of sharp things and the scars that left behind now covered in countless tattoo’s. I have battled my body constantly and for so very long.Then round 2008, free of my former band and the soak who ruined it,secure in LA and in a great band at long last, I finally got it right and found some peace within myself for the first time.

Ultra fit,very lean and healthy.

And then finally falling in what I thought was true and forever love round the same time? I mean,could it get any better?  I wanted to do it with the lights on. I thought I had it made baby….I thought that I had found the one who could love me just the way that I was….

I was a Californian girl with a ring on my finger,in love at last,a perfect puppy dog and life was sweet. Until I didn’t wear the right shoes one night,until I ordered something different to eat,till I did or didn’t wear make up ,until I trained or didn’t…..

(” You look like a bum!”-“You only change your order if you are with someone new”-“Who are you whoring up to try to impress cunt?”/ “You look like a fucking dyke,make an effort you dumb bitch”-“You look all scrawny like a hard-tail,its ugly,do you wanna be a dude?”-“You have let yourself go I don’t want to be seen with a fat fuckin pig!”)

You see,I was a babe in the woods.Hard to believe after the red-lit street savvy life I have lead I know but I had no idea the depth of what I was dealing with.The effects of the long term so to speak.The man I was marrying was embroiled in a relationship that had spanned a lifetime that no one could tear asunder.Not with all the love in the world.The pain lingers still.Looking back,I can see how hard he tried to keep the worst of it from ruining us but the force was just too great…

And in time I lost my mind.

I got smaller and smaller because no matter what I did it was wrong. I gave my beloved a series of photos that I had done when we first started dating.Sexy moody black and whites taken by my best friend.I was super proud of them and at that point he thought I was pretty hot shit and I think he appreciated the gesture and liked them too.We had one up on the wall in our tiny moss green bathroom in Hollywood and it made me smile every time I needed to use the crapper.

Many months later he asked me who I was fucking while I took the shots as I had done all my make up super sexy and messy.Accused me of being drunk and high in them.Of fucking the photographer.Accused me of doing porn (??!!@!#$?) Absolute and complete insanity.Fans would approach me all happy and I would be cringing inside knowing that I would get chewed out endlessly for it  later ( “When did you fuck him/her you fucking cunt?!” ) all the way home.If I went to the bathroom at a show it was because I was fucking someone, naturally.I was constantly dehydrated because I didn’t want to have to use the rest room.It just wasn’t worth it. I wish that I was kidding here.I was  drastically underweight  because I stopped eating.You don’t eat? You don’t shit… I used to dread people,anyone at all, being nice to me because I knew that I would get bawled out for it . I used to pray for a car crash to take me out.

I would fantasize about our jeep getting hit on the passage side and me dying on impact.Lovingly, in slow motion.It helped….

Smaller and smaller…..

And through it all I believed with everything I had that it would get better.That all would come right and that I,that we would get our happily ever after.I know somewhere deep inside he wanted the same thing.I have to believe that for my own fragile mental state.

It didn’t get better.I lost everything and left…..

Miss Ash came to me by the way of Miss Emma,she of the vermillion lips and effortless grace. Miss Ash is a gifted photographer.An absolute valentine of a girl.Would I like to make some pictures? And in my dark mind I hear his voice….

(youfuckinguglydykebitchslutcuntwhorehardtailhookerfuckedoutlesbiandumbbitch)

When you are broken you tend to,well I tend to dare myself into new situations.I have modeled almost my whole like in one way or another and while it wasn’t out and out modeling work,per say, being in a band and on tour usually found me in front of a camera one way or another and I enjoyed it.It was kind of cool knowing that I photographed well even if I was no great shakes in the flesh,a sweet karmic pay back for years of torture for looking so weird,for being put through hell.Proof is out there that I am good at it too….so I told her,all cocky and such, that I would shoot with her,went to the toilet and was promptly violently ill and then,you are going to love this, proceeded to put her off for the last seven months.

Seven months.

(im too fat,i have to get my teeth finished,im not ready,im too busy,i have to get my hair done…)

Understanding is an understatement of Grand Canyon proportions. But round Xmas she  got sick of my epic procrastinating , rightfully so and locked me in and Friday was the day.Off I trundled to the train station with my matching set of hot pink Hello Kitty luggage that Raquel and Cookie gave me for my long ago birthday in the summer of stars when we would all call each other “Wife”and were as thick as thieves, stuffed with tight black things,abundant war paint and ridiculous shoes.Alighting at Newtown I jumped into a cap driven by a hatchet faced Somalian Muslim fundamentalist with a broken GPS and an utterly disgraceful attitude.After a brisk brush with death when he decided to go the wrong way down a one way street I jumped out thankful for my life and called Miss Ash from outside The Red Rattler bar where fat posers rolled out into the remaining daylight.

Miss Ash popped out of a lane way on studded boots that would have given Gene Simmons a boner and lead me to my fate.

Reese and Miss Kate were at the studio along with a selection of some of the 80’s finest metal although why Pretty Boy Floyd felt the need to cover Motley Crue’s evergreen “Girls,Girls,Girls” will always baffle me.Onward.Let’s get started. My stomach churning.A quick puke and into the pool of unforgiving white light I went.

And the sad thing? None of the shit that I got over the span of my loud life ever really got me that bad.Sure,at times it laid me low but I pulled up you know? Fools are always going to talk a raft of shit so you live with it although at times I have wanted to reenact the last scene of “Jay and Silent Bob strike back” I got by you know? Idiots on the net and so on,I mean,give a fuck? Faceless haters? Really? Exactly…..But when the one who asks your mother for your hand in marriage,puts a ring on it and vows to take care of you till death do you part and you,you great pillock,chose to believe it only to have him,you heart,your other half completely destroy your sense of self worth? Devastating on every conceivable level.

So we shot.And then we shot some more and Miss Kate and Miss Ash were making the right noises while I tried valiantly not to be broken.While I tried to block out the loops of his voice spewing hate in my mind and on the night went….

I found myself tired and melancholic close to midnight on the train heading home.I wasn’t quite sure what it was that had achieved but I knew that it was something.And that like my adored Sgt Elias’s sterling theory on feeling good was more than good enough.

Fast forward a week and I am in bed clad in a sweaty James Dean tee shirt with a heinous  fever and ferocious flu kicking five shades of unholy shit out of my pain wracked frame .While miserably wondering whether I will be able to work on Saturday night without expiring on the red ropes my phone pings.A message from Miss Ash.

“Check your email! xxxx”

And a photograph.

I just cried and cried.Sobbed so hard it shook me.Then Miss Emma called me after she saw it and I just kept on crying.

It was me,a picture of me.And it was amazing.I don’t know how I can feel so sad and broken on the inside and look like that.A testament to Miss Ash and Miss Kate’s formidable talents no doubt.

I have been staring at it on and off all night.I can’t help it.Its not vanity,its a visual validation that I needed more badly that I knew gauging by my reaction.It shows that I am not all the insults that were thrown at  me day after day.It is proof.

Hourly,daily,I feel like roadkill in light of the physiological torture that I went through.If I am not hiding out from the world,I am punishing my body because that thin reedy speed stretched voice inside sneers “If you were beautiful it would have worked out,you failed you failedyoufailedyoufail…” But this picture? It was me.

And you know what? It is beautiful. And do you know what else? He lost. LOST.He lost me and all the good shit that comes in the package deal that I am. I know that I am gonna fight the bad shit and doubt for-fucking-ever but tonight? As snot soaked and ill as I am ?

I have won.

And the prize was me.

As a comment beneath it once the girls had posted it onto their Face-book page read.

“Damn!”

Indeed.