To be unlovable
I can’t tell you what percentage of my life I’ve spent pretending I was lovable.
I can’t count the number of Sunday mornings I spent as a child slumbering next to the car speaker, falling deep into some crappy 2000’s pop song, imagining myself as a kid who could talk in class more than once a year. Or the hours in high school I spent after school or church, staring at the sky, writing love stories for myself. They would read something like this: I, the pimply invisible girl who perpetually wore a Gap hoodie that was never washed, would be found by a guy who really saw me for who I was. You know, like in those teen movies that are premised on the idea that we are all secretly very entitled to love. Or they would feature me in some dress that was trendy that year, twenty pounds lighter, hair and makeup so perfected as to completely reveal the beauty in my face that was there all along. The kids at school who could never remember my name would feel regret for the time they wasted not knowing me. I would be admired- seen.
Meanwhile, all the signs said that in actuality, I was pretty damn disgusting, inside and out. My big, chunky, Asian face was covered in self-inflicted acne scars. I wore the same black emo jeans everyday for weeks in a row. I grew up relatively privileged and trauma-less, yet I still behaved as if the world was out to get me. My friends told me they were scared of me, that I was too angry and argumentative. One repeatedly told me that I reminded her of her abusive father because of “the way I was.” Every Sunday, I sat in the corner at church alone, staring at the floor. I had the energy of a 300-pound shadow.
Who was I kidding? Who would want to be around a large mass of walking darkness that could not hold up one conversation without wanting to cry or yell? I knew this, yet I still found myself searching for evidence in the most obscure places that I wasn’t as terrible as the signs were pointing to. A conversation that’d last longer than five lines with someone at church could convince me that my lifelong social anxiety was starting to dissipate completely. A tiny compliment on my syntax in any of my shitty poems or speeches could convince me that all my exile from others was to gather fuel and angst for writing the next The Catcher in the Rye. A glance from a stranger on the train home would send me into an excited musical frenzy for the next few days. Would this be the end of my years as an unlovable? Perhaps the world just made a mistake ignoring me this long.
I’ve spent — wasted — a good portion of my life hoping that like magic I would be wanted and well, why would I have thought any differently? I grew up surrounded by narratives that everything got better after high school. I watched as my teen years passed by, always waiting for the next moon, the next year. In my senior year of high school, I screenshotted the ending paragraph of writer Jenny Zhang’s Rookie essay “Outsider/Insider” that promised me that “one day… there in your corner of the world will be people like you who have been waiting for you this whole time as much as you have been waiting for them,” and read it in between classes when I felt lonely.
But by the time college rolled around this year, I watched as everything stayed the same. Between having extreme nausea before Zoom sections and being unable to speak in class, between shutting off my wifi in the middle of calls and wanting to exit during breakout rooms, I felt more stuck than ever. The people were different — nerdier, more off-beat, less judgemental. No one could see what I was wearing. No one knew each other — no one knew me. Yet I still watched as the few social interactions I had curled up and foiled onto the virtual ground and observed as I was excluded and forgotten. I had to face what I had knew all along — that there was something deeply wrong with me that made me undesirable. Not the time, place, or people I had been placed with, but with me. I watched as other kids who were no more attractive or normal than I was find company in each other, even virtually. Here were the physics nerds and poets, the Jenny Zhang’s and indie movie protagonists, who really were lovable all along. I just wasn’t one of them.
There comes a time where in order to avoid becoming a jaded conspiracy theorist, a grumpy old man, or a vengeful incel, one has to take real accountability for their actions, for themselves. There comes a time when one has to walk up to a mirror and look only at themselves for a good five minutes without falling into fits of self-pity, self-hatred, or anger. There comes a time when one should ask whether or not it’s really the world’s problem for not loving you. Here I am: chronically fraught in my self-consciousness, uninteresting unless I am angry at someone or something, self-esteem lower than the floor, a fucking self-absorbed drag who doesn’t contribute any good to anyone. I’m not waiting anymore for my illness or my unlovability to disappear. I’m not waiting for the world to give me the love I’m not entitled to. To get straight to the point: I’m getting a therapist.
I get that the world is unfair to a lot of people who really didn’t deserve it. Perhaps even I am one of them. However, it isn’t about what others have given me, but what I eventually choose to give to myself. Will it be more false hope, entitlement, delusion, and self-hatred? Or, will it be accountability, action, and maybe even… love? I don’t know yet, but I’m trying.
Originally published at http://uglythoughtsuglybrain.wordpress.com on October 15, 2020.
