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I was at the pub with some friends, including this guy I used to have a thing with, if you could even call it that. He has a new girlfriend and he kept doing that thing everyone does when they really like someone, which is crowbar them into conversations. Someone was talking about how much they love sports documentaries, and he was saying that her uncle used to be a swimmer. He left early to go and meet her because they were going to a flower market together the next morning.
The whole thing made me a bit sad. “I’m feeling a bit, Why not me? this morning,” I told the group chat.
“Is that because you still like him or is it something else?” replied Moya.
“I do like him a bit still—” I went to write the next bit but stopped when I realized I couldn’t explain what I meant. I guess I was sad because I couldn’t imagine him, or anyone, being like that with me, because there is a very small part of me that thinks there’s something really, really wrong with me, and it’s only a matter of time before someone finds out that I’m unloveable, and that’s why people get to know me and then disappear.
It’s something I’ve felt most of my life but never really realized, or I did realize but didn’t bother to say out loud because I didn’t know how to phrase it.
The closest thing I can compare it to is this: You know that feeling you get when someone asks if they can go into your room or your bag to find something—say, tweezers or a bandage—and you’re scared they’re going to see something bad and you don’t even know what that could be, only that you feel it’s there.
I surprised myself with this thought, because I’ve always considered myself someone who really loves themself. I really like the way I look. I love that I have small, sleepy, hooded eyes, even though celebrities are paying to get them pulled up their foreheads. I like that my thighs are big enough that they rub and burn when I walk around in hot weather, and that when I smile I get a dimple on my right cheek. My default is to assume someone fancies me—like, if a guy looks at me, I think Ah, another one. Once I was on the tube after the pub, and there was this man roughly my age opposite. I thought we were giving each other eyes, so I shyly looked down at my phone and then back up again and chewed my lip, slightly anxious about the whole thing. It was only when he stood up so casually at Canada Water and wandered off the carriage that I realized the entire thing was a narrative I had invented in my head. But even this didn’t embarrass me. I enjoyed my self-indulgent logic, thought Classic me, and told people about the incident because I knew I could tell it in a way that would make them laugh.
There are things that bother me: that my top lip disappears when I smile, or that I’m so bloated all the time my tummy looks out of proportion with the rest of my body. That sometimes when people are talking about clever things, I wonder if I have any opinions on anything at all. But I work hard to address these issues: I journal every morning, follow people on Instagram with similar body types who say things like, “Your body is an instrument, not an ornament!” talk to myself in the kind way that I would a friend, come in from nights out and dance around my room until my chest feels itchy and asthmatic, spend lots of time alone—like the other day, I went to the James Joyce-inspired exhibition at the White Cube where there was this room filled with rubble which made me feel overwhelmed and oddly calm. And yet despite all this, that feeling persists, deep down, below all the affirmations and the solo dates, that there’s something rotten in me.
The weekend after I realize all this, I’m at the pub with friends again and Nik and Jackson come back to mine because Nik’s never listened to Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and we decide he must do so immediately. We get back to my bedroom and I’m trying to find a lighter in the draws of my desk, and while I’m looking Nik and Jackson see the mess that’s in there—dirty make-up sponges, paracetamol, hair spray, euros, gift cards with a couple of quid still on them, old passports, toe separators, dried up pens, acne antibiotics. I tell them that if they think that’s bad, they should see inside my wardrobe. I open it up and there’s a colorful puddle of clothes at the bottom knotted up around itself because I can’t bring myself to hang anything up.
They laugh and Jackson says his isn’t far off that. And then we lean back on my bed and I make Jackson hold my feet because I’ve loved it when people do that ever since I was a baby. And then somehow we end up sitting in a triangle, all holding each other’s feet, and it doesn’t feel as weird as it sounds. It’s nice, actually, like a strange version of one of those trust exercises you do on school trips, where you fall back into a classmates’ arms with the understanding that they will catch you. I tell them about the persistent feeling that I’m really weird and it’s only a matter of time before people find out.
“Weird how?” they ask, and I try to think of examples where the fear feels as though it’s come to life, like this really bad Airbnb review I got, or one time in bed when this guy came on my stomach and I wiped it away with the pillow and he was like, “Do you not have a towel or a tissue?” and I just thought it was fine because I could change the pillow cover or turn it over until I did the next morning, but in that moment I felt as though I’d done something really odd and disgusting. And I tell them all this stuff and they don’t flinch. Nik says about the guy, “I feel sad for him that he could go from being so intimate to so defensive so quickly,” and I realize I’m not that weird, or I am but it doesn’t matter. And I realize then that sometimes self-love is not the love you show yourself, but the act of surrounding yourself with people who love you.