I gaze into the mirror, looking at the Adonis smiling back at me. I flex my abs at the visage, but David Beckham isn’t impressed. He remains stuck to my mirror, in another world captivated with celebrity, soccer skills, and Posh Spice. Oh well. I’ll never be as cool as David Beckham, but I guess I can always buy more of his stickers.
When I watch MTV’s I Want a Famous Face, I cringe. I see people who are so deeply scarred with insecurities about their personal appearances that they feel radical surgery is the only way out. I yell at the TV as a 19 year old boy becomes more like Ricky Martin in hopes that a long time friend will find a new attraction to him.
At a friend’s house, I wait while my friend changes to go out. I think she looks great as she is, and I tell her so, but she whips sarcastically, “Michael! Yeah, right!” and looks for the perfect way to present herself. Thirty minutes later, she still looks great, but this time she believes it.
I read articles about teenagers choosing to get plastic surgery. I read about women obsessed with the whiteness of their skins, spurring a new fashion trend. Skin-whitening surgery and sales of related products boom. Why do people go so far to obtain this corrupted sense of beauty? Surgery can’t give them true happiness, can it? The logic boggles me.
But I have my own issues.
When I go to a bathroom, I’ll wet my hair and push the front slightly up and to the right. Sometimes, I overdo it and come out drenched, like I just came out of the shower. I’m not even trying to impress anyone.
I have an image in my mind of what I look like. It’s a good portrayal. When I look in the mirror, if I don’t match what I think I should look like, I get upset. So I wet my hair, adjust my hair by an eighth of an inch. I get happy.
I know it doesn’t matter. After all, I can look at other people, and I know they have their own little routines, but it’s not like one moment they’re Cinderellas and the next they’re Oscar the Grouches. When it’s me in the mirror, sometimes it feels that way though.
I know I could never pick out the good-looking iteration of me out of a lineup of versions of myself. They’re all the same. It’s me! And always me. But I want to feel that whenever I step out the door, I am the me that I believe myself to be.
It’s not logical. It’s just a feeling. And I all want is that feeling, the feeling that I’m projecting the best version of myself.
Add that to a refusal to wear glasses in public (I’m a nerd!), constant weight-watching (my flabby abs!), a refusal to smile in pictures (I hate my under-bite), and fears of looking old (AHHHH! Where did all this hair come from?), and I have what appears to be a full-blown neurosis, at least on paper.
I’ll think I look great when I pose for a picture, and when it comes out, I’ll think I look awful. I hate that.
And yet, something tells me I’m not that abnormal from everyone else.
When I turn on the TV, I’ll see more examples of people I once thought merely superficial. But I don’t think that’s it. I think I’m just as superficial as they are. I feel better about myself with a little makeup (chapstick), the right clothes, or hairspray. For certain people, though, it takes a lot more. As silly as I am, I know how hard it is to escape how I feel at times, no matter how hard I try- happiness is rarely connected to logic.
I imagine, then, how they must feel.
(Viet Weekly, Fall/Winter 2005)
Tags:
david beckham,
identity,
viet weekly
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