Musing: Tightropes

I had a guy tell me recently I was lucky that my flaws were physical and not inward. A million and one synapses sparked in my head, but the ones that kept circling were on differing ends of the spectrum of "Gee thanks!" and "Gee...thanks...."

I feel a lot of times that I am a philosophical person, a person of thoughts and ideas, dreams and other intangible beauties that elude a lot of people. In being that, I get real deep into myself. To people trying to look into me I'm a loner; I won't deny it and say that I don't spend a lot of time alone. Part of it is I do genuinely like to be alone with my thoughts, because only then do I feel really free to be myself and think in a way uninhibited by the needs of the outside, the people who I've let in my life. The other part is my fear, which I've spoken a bit about, that keeps me bound. I'm inert, because the object in front of me is me; it knows what moves I'll make and has counter moves already ready. It's kind of like playing a video game versus the CPU for the first time. At first, you don't know what's going on and it's beating you, but after awhile you learn. But newer games adapt, I adapt; for every positive move I make forward not only do I log it away, but my oponent, the other me does as well making sure I can't win the same way I did before.

I'm glad that a person thinks I'm unmarred inwardly. Because I'm totally not. I'm insecure and fearful. I'm really hard on myself and don't know how to let up. I worry and feel anxiety about almost everything (sans moving across the country and starting school again...weird, right?) I get jealous, and tend to be either really long-sighted or really short-sighted. A lot of times I feel like I carry too many emotions and thoughts in my person and feel heavy and plodding. But this dude? Thinks I'm respectable, sweet, funny and smart. This dude thinks I'm well put together and know where I'm going in life. On the inside, he thinks, I'm the perfect woman.

And then there's the other-hand: my flaws are physical. Given all I've revealed already, you can already tell how that would wreck within me. Given my admitted awkwardness with accepting myself fully, and my insecurities with the very minor things I may or may not be doing wrong at any given moment, him saying my flaws were physical was the only thing my vicious mind could focus on. In the minutes after he said it, I began picking myself methodically apart: acne scars, bad vision, stretch marks, not enough ass, not flat enough tummy...and it just cycled and cycled until I couldn't think of anything else but fixing myself or crawling into bed and crying. In typical me fashion though, I finished the conversation as if nothing were wrong and spent the better part of the last three days trying to convince myself to see the good in what he said.

It hurts because it feels like he just confirmed every bad thing I've ever thought about myself and other people. It feels like he's saying "You're not fooling anybody, you're not beautiful," while simultaneously saying "Tes, you're beautifully put together, how do you manage to be so put together?" making me question, do they see me as I see me, or do they not see me at all?

It's a very taut tight rope I walk within myself. The littlest things can send me over on either side, can send me spilling into despair, or floating into acceptance. I know I can't possibly be perfect but the fact I keep trying is either insane or really noble depending on how you look at it. I don't want to be perfect and I don't want to be "normal," I'd rather be whatever I'm supposed to be. It's just finding what that is that's the trouble.

So instead of making this one person's opinion of me make my heart heavy, I decided to just accept a compliment as a compliment. A person thinks I'm well put together, despite me knowing differently. They think I am wonderful and heading in the right direction. But mostly, they can kiss my ass.

I am beautiful and it takes me so much strength to even look at myself and say it. I know the way I write I can make myself sound hideous but the truth is, I'm actually really cute. It's all in the eyes they tell me. In any case, my inner beauty is what makes my cuteness morph and mold into beauty. And if that's not enough for someone, then clearly they aren't enough for me.