This is not the post I started out writing. A couple of days ago I pulled out this picture of me, taken 30 years ago (hence the huge plastic glass frames) when I was 22 years old. I was going to write about self-image, about how I look at this picture and see someone different than I saw myself then. Back when this picture was taken, I thought I was fat. I did not consider myself attractive at all. I was still living at home when this picture was taken, sometime in the Spring. At the time I was finishing up college, working part time, about to buy my first car, an old VW bus, involved with two men (neither who loved me), one of which would eventually lead me to the man I would marry. It would prove to be an important year. But when I look at this picture, all I feel is sadness.
Sadness because even though 30 years has passed, I feel just as foolish as I did then. That girl there, she still rules a large chunk of my life. And sometimes I feel like she hasn't learned anything at all in the decades that followed.
I've never really understood what anybody sees in me. What makes me worth the trouble of being my friend. Yeah, this is self-pity. I hate it. And I must be crazy because I'm doing this publicly. And I don't know why.
I'll probably keep adding to this post, or not, or who knows what. It's all a work in progress.
Addenda: I've still got this horrid upper respiratory crud and it's drained a lot out of me. Hence no new blog post here, but I did do one at WWAATD. "
A possibly too-revealing reading pile".
6 comments:
ach robin...:-)
i will not tell you that you look adorable..or that that shirt rocks...or how i appreciate you and your beeing my neighbour in blogland...i will not tell you because you have to realise it yourself..that you look adorable..that your shirt rocks..and that you are a welcomed blogland neighbour...:-)
Had it been me, I would have focused on the cat or dogs in the photo. I've never liked the way I look in photos; but I don't dwell on it.
Danielle...you are right...I hope I can realize it someday.
The woman in the photo must have been a treasure of a human being—but I know you're even treasurier.
What Danielle said. Even though I know it resonates more stongly coming from ... Danielle...
But oh hon. We have to remember, in another 20 years, we'll look at ourselves now and wish to god we still looked like that, and wonder what we hated so much about ourselves and kick ourselves for wasting it... so - you know what to do!
I can back that up. A month ago I was looking through old photos, and I was genuinely shocked by what I saw. Like you I spent my youth thinking I was fat and ugly. It turns out, now I look from my aged perspective, that I was just plain WRONG. (Although I did spend a lot of it with a bad mullet, I admit.) It's horrible to think how much of my life I spent despising myself when it was completely unjustified.
Maxim: what we see in ourselves is not what other people see. So don't judge yourself too harshly Robin. You are better than you think.
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