IN WHICH I BEGIN MY EPIC MAKEOVER BY TACKLING MY ISSUES AT THEIR ROOTS — AND CLAIROL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
I had been a longstanding student of yoga, though my practice of it had taken a back seat as my own backseat expanded: the Plow — with my legs behind my head — was no longer an option, my huge rack and belly effectively suffocating me in that position. Nevertheless, from yoga I knew the Hindu chakra energy system of the body — seven centers determining the healthy function of every area of our lives. I recognized my main issues blocking self-actualization and jumping-for-joy wholeness and hotness lay in the second chakra in the pelvis, the center which rules sexuality, reproduction and any kind of creativity — the fun zone! Intuitively, I felt that a lifetime of creative frustration as well as yo-yo weight gain/loss stemmed from an imbalance there.
Growing up in a WASP family so shamed by sex I was convinced my siblings and I had been immaculately conceived, the freakishly repressed response to anything natural, such as nudity, was so sick as to be a source of abuse to a growing, curious child. Showing each other our stuff, a normal childhood event, was severely punished: a spanking on my bare butt reinforced the emotional sex abuse with a dose of physical scarring. Meanwhile, a mantra of “good girls don’t” was chanted my way up through adolescence.
This set about a quandary for me: how was I, then, a good person, to reconcile my burgeoning sexuality with the Olympian edicts of the Almighty Parents, sent down from their lofty, superior pedestals? They were always right about EVERYTHING, yet, I really, really liked boys — in the biblical sense, it turns out — though I had no idea of that at the time. In fact, no sexual information was EVER imparted in the convent we called home: any juicy carnal knowledge had to be gleaned from guilty, shamed whispers in the playground at recess.
My mother was so sexually clueless, when a lump began to develop in my right chest at the age of thirteen, she took me to the doctor, who conveyed the no-brainer hot news flash that I was simply “developing.” It’s worth noting that I myself didn’t even guess that, so cut off was I from my identity as a girl — my sexual chakra had been closed for business. Years later, two different psychics would tell me my mind was separated from my body, and I was living life completely from my head. I had simply shut my unacceptable sexuality down.
Indeed, had my rising sign not been Scorpio, I may well have ended in a nunnery; in the face of the closure Scorpio, the most sexual sign of the zodiac, at least provided me with a quasi-normal, middling sex drive. Had my second chakra been actually open and healthy, I don’t think I could have made it through adolescence without getting pregnant. Because closed as it was, I was nonetheless obsessed with boys, though I innocently only wanted to kiss them and never entertained the prospect of anything more. After all, hadn’t Mama Torquemada (Torquemama, that is) decreed good girls DON’T?
Ah, but as we will find out, dear reader, good girls — mos def — DO. In fact, I, Mrs. Hot, go so far as to assert it makes good girls even BETTER.
Yours truly,
