On Midnight —

I was about to respond to this anonymous comment in “Let It Out,” but it’s a subject that I’m painfully familiar with, plus I’m sure she’s not the two of us aren’t the only people who have been through something similar.

In short, the commenter (let’s call her Jane) experienced a humiliating, dehumanizing situation while on a camping trip with friends. Jane’s female friends left early and her male friends were drunk and talking obnoxiously about her female friends and how much they want to do it.

Now, I know there’s a feminist answer that says that she shouldn’t base her self-worth on the attention of men and that these guys were assholes anyway, both of which is absolutely true. However, I don’t think this is strictly a feminist problem or an issue having to do with misogyny specifically.

While true that the guys she’s talking about are misogynistic assholes, the underlying problem for Jane is that she wants to find a mate and she feels that her looks (in particular her weight) are going to prevent that from happening.

I am only going to address the romantic part because I’m sure that others will have a better answer to the misogyny than me.

Now, onto the issue as I see it.

I have been in Jane’s shoes more times than I can possibly remember in detail, but the heartbreak I can recall all too well.

In fact, on my personal blog I’m working on the Mother of All Teal Deer (over 5,000 words so far) as we speak detailing all the reasons why people don’t like me, going back through my childhood. Much of my young life was spent in the manic pursuit of love and affection in general, and a girlfriend specifically.

Often, people would give me useless advice like, “It will happen when it happens” or “When you stop looking you’ll find love” or “You can’t hurry love, no, you just have to wait. Love don’t come easy, it’s a game of give and take.”

And my response was always, “I don’t want to fucking wait. I want someone to love me now.”

I had two older brothers, Shamus and Shantung (not their real names, but in the real spirit of what my parents did to us) who had a new girlfriend every week, it seemed. I’m not sure why it was so appealing to me… maybe my brothers made it seem having a girlfriend was something that a guy should do or that I didn’t have a lot of friends and a girlfriend would solve that problem. Whatever the case, I wanted a girlfriend real bad.

And I’m not talking about from puberty onward. I can remember going to mass in third grade and when we would kneel, I would wonder if the girls behind me were looking at my butt.

I wanted girls to find me attractive, but whatever genetic advantage my brothers had in that department had skipped over me entirely. I heard more than a few times that I was ugly or had people talk about how fat I was (which I was not in the least in hindsight, but that’s entirely different story) or disparage my looks in general.

When I finally realized that no woman was ever going to look across the room, spot me, and decide that she was overwhelmed by desire for me, I had to switch to Plan B: romance.

Television had taught me that if there was one thing that women found irresistible, it was romance. So, in sixth grade when I wanted Jill to be my girlfriend, I stole a tennis bracelet that my brother had recently found in our yard and bought a single red rose to bring on Valentine’s Day. For the life of me, I could not figure out why an 11-year-old girl wouldn’t be overwhelmed by emotion and fling herself into my arms.

And — OH! — the letters I wrote to girls, pouring out my feelings and hoping they would respond in kind, but there was nothing kind in their response at all. I endured the mockery of my unrequited love, her friends and my classmates long enough to find a new love interest and write a new letter.

I never learned.

Somewhere in the basement I’ve got my childhood journal (at the store it was the only journal with a lock was pink and said “Best Friends”) and I know that at one point I told my journal about the eight girls I had crushes on at that moment. My strategy for finding a girlfriend at that point was to cast the net far and wide.

I’ve written about this (and my various rejections) before, but it bears repeating here. In Junior High, we would go to DARE dances and I would wish for nothing more than for a girl to want to dance with me. Although we went pretty much every weekend for over a year, the only time a girl ever danced with me was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.

Her friends asked me if I would dance with her, which I slobberingly agreed to and when the song was over she walked away and said to her friends loud enough for me to hear, “You asked the wrong guy.”

Couple this desperate search for love with the issues I had with making and keeping friends, and I was often alone, often seeking companionship and often doing everything in my power to fit in.

Throughout my life, I’ve had an easier time making friends with girls than boys. So I would often be in a circle of girls, similar to the one Jane described, listening to them describe the boys that they had crushes on or who was hot or who they wanted to date. Of course, they lacked the crude objectification that Jane witnessed, but the experience was the same: I was left wondering, “Why not me? Why don’t girls ever talk about me like that? How can I change so I can be talked about?”

All I wanted in the world was to be found attractive, for someone to want me the way I wanted someone else; to desire me and pursue me and act like I was the hottest thing since “Charles in Charge.”

But it never happened like that.

When I did find someone to date, there were never any outward signs of overpowering desire driving them into my arms. More often than not, it was a pleasurable conversation that we chose to continue which would get that ball rolling. So, I felt as though it was my personality, not my looks, that would help me find love, and I learned to basically discount my looks completely.

Even today, when people say something positive about my looks (as happened in this post), it makes me feel self-conscious and self-doubting. However, I force myself to simply acknowledge the compliment and thank people and move on because it would be rude to call their kindness into question. So, even the moments when someone is being kind, I’m completely skeptical and self-flagellating.

And then there are moments like this, where I submitted my photo to a Tumblr called Fuck Yeah Chubby Guys because I’m fat and I figured the kind of people who follow this Tumblr would welcome me in a way that random strangers don’t. Instead, they never ran my photo and when I emailed the guy admin a week later asking if he received it or if there was an issue, he didn’t respond.

Now, I’m about 50 times more self-loathing because a group that is supposed to be celebrating fat guys won’t even post my picture, but they will post pictures like this one of some fat guy picking his nose.

So, Jane, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting people to find you attractive or with the pain and sadness that the lack of attraction brings. People will give you all kinds of advice for how to cope with feeling unattractive, and some of it may help you shore up your self-confidence, but I have found that no matter how confident you are, the damage and the scars are there for life, and there will always be something that picks that scab of self-loathing and makes you bleed all over again.

With that horrible fact being said, there is actual hope to be found. As I said, when I have eventually begun a romantic relationship, it is almost always because of some run-of-the-mill encounter that begged to become something more meaningful, and not the romantic happenstance I had always imagined.

If someone invited me on a coed camping trip (like yours), the entire run-up would have been spent imagining scenarios in which some woman would fall head over heels and we’d spend a romantic evening in front of the fire. Of course, this never happened, but I never ceased to imagine such Hollywood romance.

The fact is that love moves at its own pace and odds are that, in time, you will find someone who gives you everything you need and needs everything you give. I don’t believe in “one true love.” I believe in Divine Complements.

I believe that all people complement each other to various degrees. Your friends, for example, complement your various social needs and vice versa. But when you’re looking for romance, you’re looking for a closer complement… someone who satisfies the gaps in your emotional life; someone who responds to your flaws and faults with compassion and kindness; someone who fits you like a glove.

For me, the dating process was more about finding out what does and does not complement me, than a search for any single “true love.” Dating people was about finding out about my needs, as well as finding out how well I fill the needs of another.

At the time, I thought dating was about making the other person love me enough to stick around forever. It’s not. It’s about learning more about yourself and about others, making mistakes, and saying you’re sorry.

If I had known this at the time, I don’t think I would have felt like I was in such a hurry to find love. I think that if I knew that finding love was more about luck than my seductive powers, I might not have beat myself up over the negative opinions of others.

Because, let’s face it, people are assholes. Your guy “friends” around the campfire? Assholes. The girls who would pretend they liked me and give me a fake phone number? Assholes. The people who base your worth on superficial contributions? Assholes.

And if you base your self-worth on the opinions of assholes, then you’re never going to be at peace. If you depend upon others to raise your worth, then you remain an emotional hostage to others.

You determine your worth.

That is where, ultimately, my confidence comes from. It came with age, it came through trial and error, it came after repeated exposure to asshole after asshole after asshole. My confidence came when I was finally fed up with feeling inferior and unattractive simply because other people declared that I was inferior and unattractive.

You do not have to accept what others think of you. They are only opinions, and just as you can accept or reject the political opinions, you are just as free to accept or reject the personal opinions of others.

In fact, you must.

You must stop allowing others to tell you what attractive means. Despite the appearance of Truth, attractive does not mean thin with big boobs for women and muscular Adonis for men. These are common definitions of attractiveness, to be sure, but they are common because magazines and television and movies have told us that this is what we should be attracted to, and, like it or not, people are influenced by what they read and see, and by what others think and believe.

Attraction is 100% subjective.

Yeah, you’ve got a campfire with six boys all agreeing on what “sexy” means and how your girlfriends fit that definition. But what you’ve also got are six boys all seeking to be accepted and “normal” and masculine, so they are simply repeating the “Truth” about beauty.

Even if one of those six boys was attracted to fat women, he most likely wouldn’t mention it in this setting. Once again, I can attest to that because I am a Fat Admirer and even with all my confidence and pride, I wouldn’t set myself up as the “freak” of the group by offering up my alternative theory of attraction. Most likely, I would sit quietly and nod my head to give the appearance that I am a “normal” guy.

The point is that there was more going on around that campfire than simply six guys who adhere to a certain beauty norm. You also have six guys who were competing with each other for masculine bragging rights and trying to assert their heterosexuality as forcefully as they could. Sadly, that’s what guys do when they are alone.

And the fact that they were drunk most likely inhibited whatever consideration they might otherwise have had for you. In short, they were being inconsiderate assholes.

But you do not need to feel like the “ugly, defective chick that no one wants” because you were excluded from their chauvinistic machismo. These are six guys who, from what I can tell, aren’t worth a single brain cell’s worth of worry. If they can’t have the decency to accept your discomfort, rather than dismiss you as a hysterical woman, then even if one of these guys came up to you today and asked, “Hey Jane, will you be my girlfriend?” you should say no.

Because the worst thing about having low self-esteem and a strong desire for love is that you can miss warning signals that a relationship is toxic prior to it even beginning. And, trust me, no relationship is 1,000 times better than a toxic relationship.

So, to (finally) answer your questions:

• Why do they have such high levels of self-esteem?
• How do you do it? How do you learn to love yourself for who you are?
• How do you learn to accept your appearance and embrace it?
• How do you stop caring about what other people think and say about you?

Personally, my self-esteem was hard fought. I went through what you went through and, eventually, grew so misanthropic and socially reclusive that I began investing time in myself. I reflected upon who I was and who I wanted to be; I began to think about all that I valued in myself (such as my imagination and humor), as well as those things that I don’t like (my annoyingness), and learned that both the good and the bad are integral pieces of who I am; I began to tell myself that the opinions of others are subjective and arbitrary, and that even though there are many, many people who dislike me intensely, there are those who are quite fond of me, and I them; I began to contemplate all that I had to offer someone who would accept me for me, rather than dwelling on the flaws (or perceived flaws) that prevented others from valuing me.

I learned to love myself as I am because I gradually understood that if I were headed for a lifetime of solitude, I best enjoy myself as I am, rather than how others want me to be. I learned to appreciate and admire the clever things my mind could do, the way I think and feel (things nobody else can see… they only see and interpret your expression of what you think and feel), and how my interior world could be so satisfying.

Basically, I began to force myself to focus on the positive things that I liked in myself and, eventually, I found Veronica, who also appreciates and values these same things. She’s just as aware of my flaws as I am, but they are only a fraction of who I am, not the defining characteristics.

As far as my appearance goes… that one is probably the most difficult of all, at least for me. I still want people to find me attractive, but I have simply come to accept that I’m not. And, yes, it hurts. It’s sad and depressing and I often wish I could simply change by snapping my fingers.

But, obviously, that can’t happen. I am who I am. And although others don’t appreciate it as much, I have begun reveling in my unique physiognomy. For example, I have really squinty eyes, which I hate. I would rather have nice, wide eyes. Instead, I have these slits aren’t all that attractive.

But, these are my grandma’s eyes. These are my father’s eyes. In fact, these eyes go back generations and I am simply the latest to acquire these attributes. At the same time that I dislike the shape of my eyes, I love the color. Or colors. They change with my moods (light grey when happy, dark grey when mad, green when… amorous).

So, I take a two-pronged approach: appreciate the endowment (even that which I hate) of my parental genetic comingling, and find those things about myself that I am genuinely pleased with. I think the former is easier to do if you have kids or if someone close to you has kids, because you get to see that genetic comingling develop. But nothing stops you from appreciating how the union of two people produced you, a completely unique individual.

Also, I’ve learned to accept that my body is just a shell that houses my mind. This body will deteriorate with time and my youth (which is equated with beauty in this country) will fade. The only thing that will remain in relatively decent shape for most of my life is my mind. So, I appreciate the utility of my body, its abilities and its weaknesses, in light of its service to my mind.

This ties directly back to attraction because, as anyone who has found love will tell you, it is the mind, the personality and the heart that ultimately determines true attraction.

Finally, how do you stop caring what other people think and say about you? You just do it. You just tell yourself that the opinions of others are arbitrary and subjective. You tell yourself that opinions are like assholes: everybody has one. Just because someone has an opinion of you doesn’t mean they are valuable or accurate or worthwhile.

This is a difficult one for me still. I still worry what people say about me, even though I often say “I don’t care.” What I mean by this is that I don’t care what people think about me (whether they like me or not), but I do care that people don’t misrepresent who I am, which is often very close to being the same thing.

I think the key is knowing who you are, regardless of what others think, and valuing who you are. Even if the opinions of others bother you, you must remember that the most important opinion is YOUR opinion of who you are. Improve that, value that, and you will find yourself more resistant to the opinions of others (not impermeable, but resistant).

I hope something in this massive response helps. I can feel the anguish in your words and it’s an anguish I have often felt. I wish I could simply transplant confidence to you, but confidence is something that you have to proactively work on. If you want confidence, you can have it, but you must put forth the effort and begin instilling value in yourself, rather than accepting it from others.

Jane, I wish you all the best in your search for confidence and if you ever need to talk about it you may contact me any time at atchka at hotmail dot com.