Fat Suit

I don't have much left in the tank right now, but I promised myself I'd write something here every day so I'm going to give a quick shot before I wade into Friday evening traffic.

I have a weird kind of social anxiety that is based largely (pardon the pun) on my weight issues and it always tend to manifest itself in surprising ways. I'm a social person, at my core, I enjoy meeting new people, I thrive off the energy of others. But I've carved out a very specific identity for myself in social settings that is, in many ways, insincere, and I'd like to get past that. I think it's the same for everyone, to some extent: I am always, quite self-consciously, the Other, to borrow the parlance of my old literary theory classes. I have to do a tangled kind of dance with myself to get past that feeling in every new situation, and what I usually do is try to use my own anxiety and insecurity to invent a persona in each new conversation. It's starting to exhaust me, my own self-pity and self-consciousness, the way I nurture my own discomfort and turn it into a fat clown suit. If I met myself at a dinner party I think I'd pretty quickly find a way to migrate to the other side of the room. That may not be entirely true, actually, but I do find it very hard to get out of my own head and interact honestly and sincerely with new people. My friend Peter, who I haven't spoken to in years, unfortunately, was one of the most intense and most sincere people I've ever known. He used to get very upset when I'd turn on my self-deprecating fat loser schtick and he always used to call me on it. He would tell me it hurt him to hear me make those jokes, he would tell me I needed to give myself permission to love myself the way he and others did, he would tell me that the way I see myself is not the way the world sees me and I should stop assuming it was and stop trying to punish everyone for my own insecurity. And fuck...he was right. I was too cool for school back then, and I liked to pretend that he meant well but just didn't get it, didn't really get me, didn't understand the sophistication of my oh-so-meta verbal somersaults. But in truth he nailed me, and it was not much for to process at the time. So thank you, Peter, wherever you are. I love you too. And I'm working on it.