This is a picture of me. I'm going to tell you a little story about it. (And if you start to think I am a complete narcissist, which you might, just wait. There's a contrapuntal story coming right up, I promise.)

Now eight times out of ten, I will look at myself in the mirror and think, Yep, there I am, there's Mo. I don't make any value judgements on the me part of me, I'll just see if my hair needs fixing or if I need lipstick or something.

And one time out of ten, usually every 28 days or so, I'll look at myself and think I am the most bloated, hideous, appalling creature known to man. I will positively loathe my appearance and hate the sight of myself and go eat a pint of long-since-expired chocolate cupcake frosting with my bare hands.

And one time out of ten-- okay, maybe one and a half-- or two, maybe two times out of ten-- I'll look at myself and think hey, look at me. I am beautiful.

When I took this photo, I had just woken up, and I headed into the bathroom to take a nice long afternoon shower. No makeup, hair all mussed, what have you. But it was, weirdly, one of those moments where I looked in the mirror and felt beautiful.

So I tried to take a picture of myself-- no goofy grin, no flippy hair, no makeup or anything. I wanted to capture exactly the way I looked to myself at that moment. Natural, basic, fully myself.

Now you may be looking at this picture and thinking, "Man, that girl has been smoking the funny cigarettes again." Certainly there are many photos of me out there which are more flattering than this one, and if you've read this journal for any length of time, you've probably seen seven thousand of them. But this isn't meant to be an objectively good picture of me. It's meant to remind me of how I felt that day, when I looked in the mirror and liked myself so completely.

I've been meaning to tell this second story for a long time, but I didn't want to put it in one of my usual goofy entries. This seems like a great time for it, though, to offset the whole "I am gorgeous! I am gorgeous!" theme of part one.

The story takes place just before last semester started; in fact, the week before my class started up. I met one of my students by chance, and she mentioned she was taking my class. I was intimidated in a way that I wasn't by any of my other students. But it wasn't until after the fact that I identified my feeling as "intimidation," and it was even longer-- halfway into the semester in fact-- before I realized why.

You see, this student is remarkably beautiful and very thin. She looks like a model, in fact-- she's absolutely lovely. And it took me half a semester to admit to myself that when I met her, I felt, "Wow, she is so thin and beautiful. She's never going to respect me as a teacher."

I know. You are appalled, right? I was appalled when I realized that's how I had been feeling, but there it is. At least I was honest enough to admit it to myself.

What does it say about our society that a girl like me could feel this way? My god, I've got plenty of self esteem, I sincerely do. See above. And I have complete faith in my intellectual abilities. In that area at least, calling myself a raging egomaniac might be an understatement. But I was intimidated-- intellectually intimidated, no less-- by her physical appearance.

All my other female students, beautiful, normal-sized girls, didn't intimidate me at all. But the exceptionally skinny one did. She was better than me. She was better than me by virtue of thinness, and subconsciously, I accepted that. For months and months, deep down somewhere, I believed it was true. Unquestioningly.

As I got to know her, the intimidation went away. She's a wonderful girl and we had a great relationship. She respected me and came to me for help outside of class all the time. And I sort of forgot about my initial feelings upon meeting her. Until one day, when she turned in a poem for class that she admitted was highly personal. The poem was about her struggle with bulimia.

It is a wonderful poem, but I'm not going to say any more about it here. It's not my place to reveal the personal issues of my students. But I went home and thought about it, and it all hit me. How I felt when I first met her, how fucked up my thinking had been, everything. And I realized that we were both victims of the exact same mentality: the thinner the better, no matter what.

This mentality led her to an eating disorder, and it led me to thinking she was automatically better than me. And that's just sad. That's incorrect. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.

It makes me angry, too, but I don't know who the hell to be angry with. Myself? Society? The media? Women in general, for buying into it?

I wish I could say that I will never buy into this thinking again. But I've gone this deep into brutal honesty, so why stop now? It's too ingrained-- my god, I didn't even see anything wrong with my feelings until months later.

I feel like I have to do something about this, both personally and socially, but I don't even know where to start except with this entry. Maybe some of you out there will have some kind of response to what I've written. Maybe you will understand why it's so important for the systemic prejudice against overweight people to stop. Maybe you are a not-thin person yourself, and maybe you'll be inspired to look yourself in the mirror and think you couldn't possibly be more beautiful

For now, I've taken that picture of myself, and I've framed it, and I've placed it on my desk. To remind me that in order to be respected, to be beautiful, to be loved, I don't have to be some model-thin ideal. All I have to be... is me.

My god, I don't ever want to forget that again.

"And speaking of turn ons, did I mention that Mickey's in that class, too? I thought that he was only taking the one class, but he is taking two electives this semester, and then two more next semester, and then he starts work on his thesis. And here's the most amazing part. I was talking to him, looking into those clear green eyes of his, and I actually retained all that information.

I must be growing as a person."