In a new post on his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave has consoled a young fan struggling with her body image.
“I feel very bad about myself, I cannot see anything positive in my body,” the young fan, Barbara, wrote to Cave. “I hate to look at myself in the mirror and it makes me suffer a lot. I feel like everyone is better than me, even though I did very important things for being just 16 years old. How should I behave? What should I do for myself? Thank you for the possible answer.”
To which Nick Cave responded in the most wonderfully compassionate Nick Cave-y way imaginable. “Thank you so much for entrusting me with such a courageous and heartfelt question,” he wrote.
“I took the liberty of discussing it with a number of my female friends and there was not one among them that was not greatly affected by your honesty and that did not understand exactly what you were talking about. It seems that you are not alone in finding the mirror your enemy, but you are unique in being so open and truthful about your relation to it.
Cave continued to open up about his own troubled relationship with his body. “The question took me back to my adolescence and the troubled relationship I had with my own reflected image, and those nightmarish teenage years lived inside the pitiless mirror.
“I’m afraid to say this constant self-evaluation does not significantly decrease as you grow older, however it does become more manageable.
“I live mostly in hotels these days, and as I cautiously enter a different bathroom each night, with its angled mirrors and merciless lighting, I stand before the mirror at my most defenceless and exposed, and watch it do its worst. I often wonder how much accumulated misery a hotel mirror contains as it reflects back at us what appears to be our essential self. But, of course, what the mirror projects is not our true self at all but only our reflected outer-shell. What is virtually impossible to see within a mirror is that the very essence of our humanness, our vulnerability and fragility, is the most beautiful thing we possess.”
Cave highlighted the importance of going through life with vulnerability and openness.
“But those who have no awareness of their own fragility, who present themselves as overconfident, armoured-up and invulnerable, sacrifice the essence of what makes them both human and beautiful.
“Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other, to recognise in others the same discomfort they have with themselves and with their place in the world. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion, and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.”
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released their seventeenth album, Ghosteen, last week.
Listen: Ghosteen – Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
