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delusion

i posted this on tumblr but i felt uncomfortable about it because i think it's too personal or something


i never know how to feel about my appearance. earlier i wanted to take a picture of myself because one of the tumblrs i follow does a themed selfie thing, but when i tried to, all my pictures came out really bad, even though i thought i looked nice today. so i wonder if i’m ugly but i just don’t know it. i normally have a really high opinion of my own appearance but sometimes i think i’m deluding myself. or maybe it’s just that i understand that even though i can love the way i look and even like other people just because they resemble me (which i do. see also: my desire to marry my own clone), that doesn’t mean i think other people are likely to agree with my opinion. i’m a fat black afab person, so it’s not like i have to look that hard, or at all really, to find people who think my body is disgusting. that’s just like, any time i watch tv or scroll through my dash. so most of the time i just think i consider myself extremely pretty but everyone else thinks i’m ugly, and i occasionally manage to be okay with that.

on the other hand, i also often get stopped on the street and in stores and stuff because people want to tell me they like the way i look. i think this is mostly because my hair is always an unusual color and i wear really colorful clothes, so i stand out, and then i have a chubby smiley face, so people feel comfortable coming up to me. but i’ve had people stop me when i’ve been walking to class, it happens all the time when i’m in line buying something at a store, when i participate in protests and stuff people are forever taking my picture and my friends are always showing me the photos of me that ended up on instagram or whatever. it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every time i leave the house a stranger does something to indicate they like the way i look.

so i have no way to appropriately calibrate my opinion of my own appearance. i think what it is is i’m just striking and odd looking but in a nonthreatening way. i don’t know if that’s different from being pretty - to me, being interesting or unusual-looking is a big part of how attractive i find someone because i’m very bad at remembering faces, so i tend to have crushes toward people i can reliably pick out in a crowd. (i mean, i love kristen stewart, but if someone shows me a picture of her and doesn’t tell me who it is, i won’t recognize her at all.) i guess it doesn’t matter that much, but it stresses me out to not know what the truth of things is. i want to work on my mental health issues but it’s hard when i really can’t tell if i’m overreacting or exaggerating or making things up or not noticing aspects of a situation. two years ago, for about a month, i was fully convinced that everyone in the entire world was participating in a conspiracy against me, which involved being nice to me to my face and later meeting up to discuss how worthless and disgusting i was and decide whether it would be best to keep pretending to be nice to me out of pity or to try to get me to kill myself. this wasn’t a belief to me - i knew it the same way i know that 1 + 1 = 2. and it’s scary, to know that i can’t believe the things i think, and that i can’t even believe other people, because i know my brain can convince me that they’re lying even if they’re not.


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