Card 5 · Femessence Series · 2020
Harmony
Age 25 · Caucasian background · Vaginal birth: No
She was twenty-five when she sat with this process. Old enough to have accumulated the damage, young enough to still feel its edges sharply. She knew exactly where the standards had come from — the playground, the magazines, the whispers — and she had spent years trying to fit herself into a shape that was never real. This portrait asked her to face the most vulnerable part of herself. To look at something she had been judging for years and discover it was pure magic.
“After so many years of believing that something was wrong with me, I now see that we are all incredibly unique — and in fact, NO ONE fits into that one-size-fits-all outfit that was so forcefully thrust upon us as young, impressionable girls.”
For a girl, growing up and into yourself is never easy. In fact, the playground is where you learn most about the most intimate and sacred parts of yourself. From the countless whispers of boys to the magazines thrown around by girls, we grow up expecting to be like what we hear we SHOULD be like. And, when we realise that we don’t fit into this one-size-fits-all outfit, we criticise, pick at, and alter ourselves until we come to understand that those standards were never real in the first place.
Just like my youth, going on this journey was challenging. It asked me to face the most vulnerable part of myself, and see all the ways in which I’d been judging something that, I now see, is pure magic.
After so many years of believing that something was wrong with me, and that I was an anomaly, I now see that we are all incredibly unique. And, in fact, NO ONE fits into that one-size-fits-all outfit that was so forcefully thrust upon us as young, impressionable girls.
Harmony is not the absence of difficulty. It is what arrives when a woman stops fighting herself and begins, at last, to come into agreement with her own body.
This portrait is part of the Femessence Women’s Celebration Series — a body of work by artist and arts therapist Caris Pepper honouring the sacred feminine through vulva portrait art. Each portrait in this series is becoming a card in the Femessence Vulva Portrait Oracle deck, coming 2027.
