It’s not like I felt 100% secure in myself before, but I didn’t feel exposed all the time. I cared about how I looked, but only to what I considered a normal degree. I spent time each morning doing my hair, making sure it looked nice, and that was that; I didn’t waste anymore time or effort. Nowadays I spend the whole day catching glimpses of myself in puddles and dirty windows, and I am never satisfied with what I see. I sit in my car before work, messing with my face, trying to manipulate my hair, eyes and general physiology into something presentable, but I never get out of my car feeling human. It’s like I’m always wearing shoes that are just a tad to tight.
It’s that feeling of opening the fridge to see what’s inside, closing it without having grabbed anything, and realizing you just checked your washing machine for food, and yes, you never even started that load of laundry, so you’ll be sleeping without sheets for the millenith time this century.
My face has no purpose, so everywhere it appears is another new nowhere. It’s not as I’m terrifyingly ugly, but I’m so out of place that I’m often mistaken for avant garde art, if an avant garde artist was on meth, and wasn’t really an artist at all but just some drug addicted 20 something sharing her “art” with her 97 Instagram followers, 8 of which are accounts she made to try and inflate her online persona.
I’m confusing to the public, regardless of the time, place, or lens through which I am viewed. Smartphone cameras consider my face as a smudge, so at least I can avoid being tagged in pictures posted to social media. But if you don’t exist on Facebook, are you even real? Without my opinions being expressed via Tweets and hashtags, I might as well not have opinions at all! My existence is a lie! Maybe I’m just the first of a new breed of modern ghosts. Maybe, if I spend another 5 years avoiding things like the Sun and any situation that has me interacting with another human being, I’ll finally just become a transparent blob. Perhaps, in that someday 5 years away, people who cast their gaze across the dotted lines of the early morning expressway will experience various levels of awe as they marvel at the modern wonder that is a driverless 2013 Honda Civic. Perhaps those people will even spare a thought as to why anybody would spend the money to retrofit such a vehicle to be self-driving, and perhaps even a few of those people will see the faint outline of my bulging form behind the wheel and realize this isn’t a technological wonder; it’s just a really pale and depressed fat human ragdoll.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself.
Or maybe I just don’t give a fuck about my life.
But honestly? I hate myself, and I believe I deserve to feel this way.
