An Exultation

I have been an ugly man.

I was not an ugly woman before because that would assign me an undertone of sociability that I found myself without. An ugly man is fitting in that I was the solitary male archetype-- desperate for emotional connection but unable to find it-- and I felt thoroughly unattractive.

 I found myself a living replication of Kafka and Dostoevsky’s literary portraitures of self-loathing. I identified with their embittered, powerless male figures on a visceral level. We were made of some of the same stuff, me and Kafka’s human-turned-parasite and Dostoevsky’s underground dweller. My soul overlapped theirs. 

I felt perhaps the most closely pressed by the man from underground, for he expressed, “It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.” Aha, someone even lower, even more pitiful, than the one who underwent metamorphosis and found himself a parasite! The man from underground could not even become a different creature, if he tried. 

Such was the powerlessness I felt in the grips of social anxiety and body dysmorphia, both. While my outer self was a petite runner, brown haired-brown-eyed-freckled, feminine, by many accounts cute and others pretty and still others hot, my inner self festered, withered. 

And that was the place my actions emerged from, not from some distant reality but rather from my dying innards, my tattered and burnt essence. How UNHAPPY I was! And aware of it: but unaware of how to change. 

And so to men of other centuries, who spoke of self-loathing and bitterness and misery, I turned to satisfy my solitary, ugly self for some form of companionship.

But now, at long last, I have found myself on the threshold of some longer-lasting spring. The world is molting, and I am positively beaming.

 I walk through the world and I am not diminutive, scuttling, dictated by fears, by physiological knee-jerks. For a long while even after awareness of the toxicity of my state, even after I knew what had to change, I did not know how to change. And I have found myself both changing still and already changed. How!

Exposure. Over and over, exposure to people in low-risk situations, situations in which I had a basic script but independence and autonomy still: behind a register. 

Increased exposure to love and care and affection- spending time with people much more frequently. 

Courage to look a little longer and to be shocked at the lack of negative consequences- they looked away or they didn’t? Slightly awkward: nothing more or less. 

Facing the reality of the situation rather than living in my own head: what are they doing? Wonder why: letting myself observe instead of turning inward and shutting down. 

Turning outward by picturing a third party observer watching me and my conversational partner: putting it in perspective. 

Speaking more slooowly, taking breaths in between. 

Dancing and singing- feeling alive- and holding these things less close to my chest: letting my essence spill down a table leg like water from a displaced cup.

Exultation!