The Little Things

I never liked my own drawings; to be honest, I never was a good artist. When I was little, the people I drew were all the same looking; round blob looking things or sharp, angular, unnatural looking beings. There was no in between. I wonder now, why that is, what it had to say about me, what it had to say about how I see myself. I can draw animals, but not people; I can draw landscapes, settings, buildings. But I could never draw people.

I’ve never liked my round face. I hated it. My ex-girlfriend used to crack jokes about my round head being on top of my round shoulders, with basically no neck in between; and I fixated on that. I fixated on the roundness of my body, and the roundness that I saw. It made me look away from the mirror; not her, I had issues long before she came into my life, but the self-loathing of the shape, the eternal, seemingly constant roundness that I always saw in myself when I looked in the mirror. I wonder now if my drawings of people then, being round blobs, was a reflection of how I saw me. The impossibly angular people another side of the coin; flat, round, sharp, soft, curvy, not. I gave up on trying to draw because of how much I hated everything I saw myself make. My hands reflected the reality I saw, and the reality I saw was unnatural, warped, and irregular.

I never liked the idea of telling myself I had “body dysmorphia” but the fact of the matter is, every day from middle school through my mid-20s, I saw the same thing in the mirror. I saw something I hated, something I couldn’t look straight on at. Something, I realized later, that nobody else saw, until they did. I saw someone grossly overweight, someone incapable of changing, a slave to the machine of meat and bone that my mind merely inhabited. And I treated my body that way until it became how I saw it; and despite concerns, pleas, and assurances that that’s now how I was, I couldn’t shake that feeling, couldn’t shake that sight. I made myself into the creature that I believed I was.

I never liked running. I hated it since I was little, since my cousin tricked me into staying on the treadmill until I was exhausted, just so that he could show me how to get past a part I was stuck on in Tomb Raider. I hated the way my knees would ache, that I was slower than the other kids. I hated pushing myself so hard that I threw up in gym class, and one of the kids decided to call me “Puke boy”, probably the least creative insult he could come up with. I hated waking up at 5 am to run with my dad, who took the time out of every morning to try and instill a good habit in me. I was focused on the burning in my calves, the bile in my throat, the tightness in my chest as I tried to push through so my dad wouldn’t be disappointed in me.

This morning, running of my own volition at 6 am, I looked down at my right hand and noticed the curvature of my knuckles. I noticed that they look the way brass knuckles do in movies; each bone angled, a combination of angles and curves, peaking out from my skin. I had never noticed them before; and I don’t know when they became visible. It made me take stock of the little things; the way my skin clings to the muscle that clings to the bone, the contours so much more visible. The divots in my elbows, the outline of tendon clinging to my shoulder, the way my collarbone becomes visible when I reach far forward for something; little things that changed when I wasn’t looking. I look in the mirror now and I don’t see the creature I saw before. Even my face, my round face I’ve had since birth, doesn’t seem so bad; the angles of my neck more visible, the contour of my jaw, my chin, my cheekbones.

I never liked myself. But I’m learning every day to not hate myself.