How old were you the first time you realised that you were ugly? Not debilitatingly so, obviously, or else the answer would be pretty much immediately, but at what age did you accept that you weren’t on the right side of what you thought?
I can’t remember exactly when, but in a teenage minute one day it just fell into place. My awareness of myself shifted like a shadow walking towards a streetlight, drifting long behind me until I passed under the bulb’s honest light, and my outline sways sharply forward to confront me. Growing into a looming extension forewarning of my shape. I had, for a long time, looked at my reflection with such familiarity that it just felt right. Nice enough. The face that had informed my standard of what normal faces look like. The blueprint and the mould of my understanding. The bar by which I couldn’t help but judge. The nose and cheeks, caught in a darkened window, were always the old ones I knew. The eyes and lips glimpsed in a smudgy mirror were in exactly the right places, the places they’d been since I was old enough to understand that the person in the reflection was me. When I ask a shiny surface for a face, this one is its default. I guess it’s easy to go a good number of years, even while seeing plenty of separate faces in all different settings and manipulations, without stopping to consider that this core assumption left over from chubbier times, one that your world experience has long since outgrown the reasoning of, might not be as reliable as you left it alone to be. A lifelong theme; the way our own singular perspective can trip up our judgement. The subtle judgements that our flawed human minds make without us even realising. Unseen foundations of our thinking conjured from a unique gallery of experiences, through the emotionally rusted plumbing of our logic.
It’s a long journey to this realisation. The survival selfishness of early childhood gets rounded off and gradually shrinks as the first dozen laps of life are stumbled. We figure out that shockingly, others can see us back with their eyes, just like we see them with ours. We realise that, woah, the wants in our fingers are not the only ones in existence, just the only ones we can feel. You grow to understand that all the other humans around you also feel hungry at lunch, have a favourite colour, wake up shaken from scary dreams, wonder curiously about the unknown, and enjoy feeling happy in simple ways. It becomes easier to learn how to share, and later even drastically to put others’ needs ahead of our own. This all happened across my starter years, like everyone else. But where is the part where I find a second to realise that I only liked my face because it was mine? A terrifying discovery, the unearthing of a granite-hard truth alongside a distant, mortifying ignorance. A hard slam.
And we’ll never stop taking those slams. We only find them new as our fabric unfurls, untangling the threads and laughing off naiveties. I just hadn’t learnt to laugh at them yet. In many ways I still am. I continue to re-realise how dumb even the things that truly matter the most often turn out to be. It’s deceptively difficult to be feeling out in the dark for so much about the way life is, so dizzy you don’t even understand that’s what you’re doing. And it’s even harder to appreciate how truly funny the situation is while it’s happening. That remains a truth to continue wrestling with even in the adult times of the front. When you’re peering down the biting edge of a today, wrenching and flailing, it stares back an answerless and immovable silence that wails into your cavities. And yet, it’s almost impossible not to crack a smirk at the dissipating chunks of those today’s already overcome, with their bitter teeth filed down in the disarming lenience of memory.
So I look into the glass pane of the door as it drags itself shut, slowly sealing off a depth of hallway from the hanging sail of shade that skims this edge of the courtyard between lessons. I watch myself pivot into its frame and the usual circuitry doesn’t seem to fire up. As automatic as the pangs of self-consciousness, the instant evaluation runs without asking and comes back warped. The slight twist in the gut that follows is not unknown. Without yet understanding that unrecognised self-standard, informed by an unfelt bedrock-level bias that I’m unknowingly on the verge of blowing to pieces, I still know that some days I look strange, I look bad, I look upsetting. And then all at once, I look so much like myself that I cease to recognize the reflection at all. We change by the minute.
Quit Vision 