On Feeling Ugly
I have been feeling rather ugly for sometime now. I just don't talk about this, because it is simply
impossible to say that I feel ugly without having my friends jump right
in trying to convince me it is not true. Well, as friends, we are pretty
much scripted to do exactly that. If any of my friends broke this code
and said, well, nothing, I'd probably be even more heart-broken.
Then there are the others, who would exhort me to seek comfort in
some notion of inner beauty. At the moment, I could not care less. I am
sure they are well-meaning, but I don't think I need it right now.
Under intoxication, however, an acquaintance of mine managed to
break free of the limits of civility and tell me she wouldn't dance with
me, only with "one of the handsome gay boys." Had I not been swooning
under the influence of a kiss that a much younger man had planted on my
lips barely ten minutes before that, I would have fallen apart.
I'd been dancing happily with him when he leaned over close and said,
very sweetly, "Can I kiss you?" I had said yes before he had the time to change his
mind.
Of course, when I have guys wanting to kiss me, my feeling of
ugliness must be entirely unfounded, right? Yes. So? If you can give me
such evidences to disprove my ugliness as a fact, I can come up with
twice as many to prove it. It is to circumvent this exercise that I have
chosen to speak in terms of my feelings. They seem to exist per se.
I have seen that even the most stunningly goodlooking people have
some body-image issue going on. So then it all must be crazily
subjective, tweaked only by varying degrees of self-obsession? I am not
so sure. Not everyone who hates the way they look are invisible, are
passed over in silence in everyday parades of eye candies.
I thought I could write interestingly about feeling ugly. But it
only comes out as pathetic whining. Note that I still do not say I AM
ugly. I have to keep saying I FEEL ugly, resorting to the slightly
assuaging perspective that it might only be my feeling, not reality.
I am sure there is some radical perspective that claims a rightful
place for ugliness in this world. Until I find that, I should perhaps
disable comments for this post and put my friends out of misery! But
what I cannot avoid is the utter discomfort of having them look at me
closely next time, their eyes tracing the contours of my face, trying to
find in it the ugliness I feel, or looking for what would help them prove me wrong.
On Being Miserable
This only partly follows from feelings of ugliness. At this stage of
overall miserableness, everything gets enmeshed in a chicken-and-egg
conundrum.
I might cope better if I relinquish my exacting notions of living, which
demand that I live with gusto all the time, that I live life to the fullest, throw
myself in it one hundred percent. Whenever I go through phases where I
simply cope with life rather than live it, I feel like an utter failure.
The other day I went to meet an older friend of mine. When I entered her home,
she was sitting with a few other friends of hers, and I was shocked by
how disheveled she looked. Not one to ever present herself in human
company with even a string of hair out of place, she shocked me with her
sweat-stained face; faded, old saree; and dark circles ambushing her
lovely eyes. In addition to all these departures from her usual image of
being on top of things, she broke down in the middle of the
conversation, held her head in her hands, and shook in sobs that came
with the force of things held back for too long. Through her crying, she
said she was finding it hard to cope.
Even as I put my arm around her, let me confess, I found some tight knot
getting undone in my heart. I was relieved to see that it was alright
to just cope; that even she, whom I had thought would always be in
control of things, was merely coping. I felt less alone.
P.S. I am still trying to figure out how to disable comments!
P.S. I am still trying to figure out how to disable comments!
