Who are you when no one is looking?
To most people, this question is normally interpreted in reference to how they treat others. But what about how you treat yourself when no one is there to correct your negative self-view?
As much as I would like to say that even when I’m alone, I’m the same confident and unbothered person I am around others, that would be a lie. There is no part of those two people that overlap.
The ego that I live with in my daily life truly is left at the door.
Long nights are filled with overanalyzing every single part of my being. Was I too mean to people? What if I don’t look how I thought I did in my jeans today? Did anyone notice how I was walking today?
I find myself staring at any reflective surface I come across. Paying attention to my acne, or to the way that my shoulders were postured.
Beauty standards have always been changing. But never being able to feel like I match any, one specific standard has been challenging.
Body image in general has been a struggle. When you grow up with everyone telling you what you should change about yourself, whether you mean for it to happen or not, there’s a subconscious part of you that takes it to heart.
I know I did.
I saw changes in my eating habits, the clothes I wore, and how I did my hair. I was changing myself to become the person that everyone wanted me to be.
And that person was not the person I wanted myself to be.
This new person dropped an insane amount of weight that they didn’t have simply because someone commented on how I ate.
This new person wore baggy clothes to hide the body that people were constantly telling me they wanted, but also found so much wrong with it.
It truly felt like I was looking at myself in a funhouse mirror. I know that what I’m looking at isn’t real, but it’s still the reflection staring back at me, and I can’t change it.
Once I felt as though I had finally found my actual self, lumped somewhere inside of who I became, the subconscious effect that these comments had on me still stuck around.
So, while in public, I will continue to allow others to perceive myself as confident, but in private, I’m still worried that I have lost the version of myself that I had once loved.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a ten-step program for taking such a big personality switch every day and continuing like nothing is wrong. If I did, it might benefit me to read it.
Maybe this is completely normal though. Maybe the lack of discussion on the topic could drive me to feel that way. Just because it’s unspoken, doesn’t mean it’s not a regular feeling experienced by everyone.
Fighting to become a person I love again is tricky. But I’m not going to stop trying no matter how much that little voice in the back of my mind tells me that it’s not worth it.