“He’d be cute if he wasn’t so weird,” my roommate’s female friend confided to him during move-in day. He told me while we waited for our student ID photos to be taken. The revelation came as a shock. “Weird” was certainly accurate, but cute? I’d never been confused as attractive before. Now, at the tender age of 18, the possibility of cuteness left me reeling in a deep skepticism. What was wrong with her, to confuse me with a mildly attractive person? I wondered if perhaps she’d meant that compliment for someone else, but seeing as we were the only two helping her move in that day, that possibility seemed unlikely at best.
I began to silently rhyme as many words with “cute” as I could and, lost in an astute haze of diluted syllables, I hadn’t noticed the line scoot forward.
“No need to refute,” my friend said. “Anyway, we should’ve worn suits for this. Seeing as we didn’t, though, I guess the point’s moot.”
I mulled it over while smiling into the camera. “He’d be a hoot if he wasn’t so weird”—that made sense to me. I’d looked at my misplaced features many times in the mirror before. Awkward describes me, not cute. As my mother so frequently pointed out, I was, more than anything, overly critical.
But I couldn’t help that I viewed the world with such unbiased accuracy. She’d be critical too if it wasn’t for her incessant optimism. To me, happiness was akin to believing in God. One had to condition those beliefs, holding to convictions despite all the evidence to the contrary. I knew I couldn’t brainwash myself into positivity. I was, after all, too observant and witty to fall for such fallacies.
Was I depressed from viewing the world as accurately as I did? Sure. But at least I could hold onto that certainty, a lone, weathered buoy in a sea of self-doubt and shame. That certainty was my security blanket and sassy friend, ever-quick to point out when my flaws became minutely apparent: “She doesn’t like you. You’re strange and gangly. And worst of all, you bounced a fart off of the gym floor during stretches in PE today. Everyone heard, even if they pretended they didn’t.” I wanted this sassy friend to be honest, because that’s what a good relationship is based on: honesty—and unending castigation.
My critical lens pointed at mainly me. After weeks of hard evaluation, lying awake and staring at the dorm’s asbestos ceilings with remnants of old glow-in-the-dark stars shining back, I realized I wasn’t at fault. My parents truly deserved the blame for my ineptitudes—my issues. Sure, growing up they’d provided me with a roof over my head, my own bedroom, healthy meals, a means to attend a four-year university, et cetera, but they’d never bestowed any sort of sense of self-worth upon me. Surely that wasn’t something one earned.
I found myself becoming jealous of floormates who survived traumatic relationships with their parents — at least the origin of their problems was readily apparent, lighting up the darkness with the same sickly green as the plastic stars above me. All they had to do was trace the incandescence back to a handful of times Daddy got a little too drunk. My problems seemed to have no beginnings. Somehow they’d been secretly transplanted when I wasn’t paying attention, and they’d spread like ivy. All I could do was fight to cut them back without ever fully killing them.
Our ID’s arrived a few days later. I sat back on my bed and studied my face, the pale features, the receding hairline and the lopsided ears. “Maybe… maybe I am cute,” I thought, but killed the theory instantly. If I admitted I was wrong about my looks, everything I’d been so certain about would have to be questioned and considered too. Maybe I wasn’t incredibly witty—maybe I wasn’t hilariously awesome.
These days, whenever I have to unsheathe that old ID card to check-out library books, I look at the kid in the picture and see a lovable, cute idiot, fractured and unsure of himself, with no real reason to be.
The voice still visits me from time to time, when I’m alone and awake in the dark. “You’re bald and ugly,” it says as it settles next to me. “Shh…” I whisper back and we fall asleep to a long and assured quiet I’d lost to my nights, long ago.
