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I am trying, trying to really look at myself, strip off all the glitter and the glamour and the sexy walk and the blustering bravado. Figure out why I need people to think I’m tough, why I want to seem soft and feminine too, what I’ve done to reconcile the two. Trying to bring the honesty inside: it has to start here. I have to be able to really say these things to myself, and really accept them. I can write I am not nor will I ever be perfect a hundred thousand times, but what about the part of me that still wants to be perfect? The part that insists that if I just try hard enough, if I just dance well enough, if I just run fast enough, I’ll beat the sun to the horizon and be illuminated forever.

It isn’t going to happen.

There are people who love me now, here, as I am. And I have to believe that even if they don’t know all my weaknesses, if I haven’t revealed to them all the cracks in my veneer, if they haven’t sought them out, then that doesn’t mean they don’t know me. I need to believe that love is big enough to take all that in, regardless – that, even, maybe, they don’t need the veneer. That I don’t need it to guarantee their love, that I don’t need it at all.

But it’s like spending an hour to achieve the perfectly careless hairstyle: so much of the image I’ve spun around myself is that of a grounded, steady, honest person who doesn’t need ego petting. And I want that image in part because I think it will set me apart from the girls who shriek and flutter and wear lots of makeup, and I want the attention of the people who don’t want those girls. I was never going to be able to compete with them, so I made up something else altogether to be.

And she’s me, and maybe I need to accept that, too. It isn’t false; it just isn’t everything. I can acknowledge this: I need attention, but I am still shy and I don’t know how to get it, so I flutter and shriek in my own way, which is to act like fluttering and shrieking is something would never cross my mind. I want to say shameful again, but passing judgment is not the point. Just a catalogue of realities, a true look at who the hell I really am, after all.

Because I have to figure all that out before I can love myself. And until I get that down, I’m never going to be able to trust anyone else’s love, not really. And that isn’t very fair to them, now is it?

The funny thing is that I have no doubt whatsoever about my own love for other people. I feel really very confident that the love I hold for you, for them, for my family and everyone I love, that it is concrete and real and unblemished by my own emotional maraudings. I will do absolutely everything I can for love.

When I think of it, that is. And we’re back to selfish, again. When I think of it, the people I love take precedence over everything else in the whole world, myself included. But if I’m not thinking, if I’m just plodding along, eyes focused on my own little spinning world, then I might very well end up doing stupid hurtful things and slacking considerably in the arena of pure truthfulness.

I have to wrench myself back around: forgiveness. No I am not perfect, dammit. I will do stupid hurtful things and that’s okay because I’m trying, I’m trying, I am.

But you can tell the confidence isn’t real by the way I flick my eyes away if you look at me too long, by the way that I will couch my words in maybe, the way that that I avoid confrontation. At the very bottom of it, I don’t really believe that what I have to say is worth listening to; at the very very bottom, I don’t really believe that I am worth the attention you pay me.

Now that’s a thing to try and say out loud.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of being found out. Without ever meaning to, I feel like I’ve created an image of myself that now needs to be maintained: smart, capable, confident, strong sexy girl. In high school and college, even when I was doing fabulously well in my classes, I always felt like I was faking it, sliding by, somehow moving undetected through the system on the basis of some skill which wasn’t rightly mine. Like in Gattaca, I feel like I’m all the time playing at someone else’s identity, somebody who really actually understands the Calvin cycle in photosynthesis, someone who really actually knows how to walk into a room and make friends with new people.

I do all these things: I do them, I take my biology exam and describe all the workings of everything perfectly, I go to a party and chat with a perfect stranger for half an hour, but I feel like I’m cheating. Like I’m using somebody else’s brain and body, like the real me is somewhere watching, cheering, out of the way.

That sounds too divided, too close to schizophrenia or something; it’s like when I try to talk about the dichotomy between the feminine and masculine in me and I end up sounding like I have a split personality. But there is a continuum, a spectrum of what it means to be me. And on one side is the part that people fall in love with, and the other side is the part that the people who truly love me, love. But I haven’t really come to terms with the smaller, darker side; I don’t know how to love myself when I’m not being brilliant and witty.

Earlier, I wrote almost the opposite of this, that I feel like there’s a bright bubbling beauty inside of me, trying to get out. And what I realize, suddenly, is this: they are the same. The part of me that is imperfect and struggling and small is exactly the part of me that is most extraordinary. It is the part that’s me – not the me polished up to be attractive, or with the corners shaved off so that I can fit into somebody else’s perception of who I am, not the part that needs attention and fears loneliness and drinks too much and lies sometimes, none of that. At the very bottom, that’s who I am. And it isn’t perfect, and that’s exactly, precisely why it’s good.

And now, really, that’s a thing to say out loud.

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