Ever have a day when everything sucks?  Straight outta bed and first off, before reaching the bathroom, ya smash your shinbone into some furniture.  Your wallet decides since you’re in a hurry that it’s a great time to grow legs and goes missing for thirty minutes… 

…and you cannot stop imagining that a mini, muscular, boil and open sore ridden creature is sitting on your head – stabbing each of your eyeballs simultaneously.  Grinning with glee as he flexes his biceps and shoves the knives in up through your head and eyes up until those dern hilts of the knives won’t let the knives go all the way through.

Well likely you’ve not my particular trolls, but your very own that take their own shape and do their own thang.

Point being.  You feel TERRIBLE.  Poop is better, at least poop can fertilize.  You feel worse than poop.

AND THEN…

You interact with someone, a well meaning, kind person.  

The perfect person to give ya a sucker punch, because they got you all vulnerable with their good person way of being.

And it comes.

This here good person gets you with their honest impression and earnest insistence.

They get you by telling yeh “you LOOK great!” (Or “good”; or “young”; or beautiful” etc)

And your entire psyche shrivels past a curtain and into the previously concealed gap in your chest.  The barrage of complimentary comments piercing the pretense you’ve been managing.  That “yeah you feel shitty and look in the mirror and see more shitty and it just doesn’t matter cause you got no choice but to have to go on so you do and so just fuck it” kinda coping.

Here comes this not a liar type person telling you something you feel is abbbbysolutely NOT true… getting you agitated, thinking to yourself, screaming silently, “you liar, I look HORRIBLE!  Don’t you see I’m in hell? And LOOK like it?”

That there is the ugh of ughs.  The ooogy.

That disconnect between how a person perceives themselves and how others perceive the person.

It happens to everybody I know who has at least a few insecure days…

There is added oooogy when living in pain.

Because then emotions are a tad extra raw.  Raw emotions are the ultimate in causing miscommunication.

The rawness blows thoughts along the drift of thinking that somebody telling you how good you look; well they are just either genuinely thinking so….. OR are full of…bullshit.  

Those compliments ain’t true.  You’re discounting my pain.  

You forget. How I look is a but a costume, hiding pain from casual observers.  

Of course logic says they really mean it, this is your issue, another thing to process in therapy.  The journey to separate ones’ sense of self apart from the consistent pain.  To perceive correctly is challenging what with the knives in me eyes.  I do try. And try. And try.

But.

You can’t help it. Not only is this previously trusted person now viewed askew with regard to your trust in gut feelings about whether they get you – you get hit with the devastating conclusion thinking they do not comprehend.

No matter their understanding that you feel damn bad.  You are in a mental space where you are certain you MUST look terrible.

UGH

OOOGY

So how the heckenheck is someone to deal with this, with you who has this issue?

Now mind you, OF COURSE if a person thinks something positive, including about the way they perceive another person looks, go straight on and tell that person those positives.

Only, be mindful.  Recognize the person you are complimenting may be reacting internally really poorly because they feel awful and that transfers into how they feel they look.

Just know.

Be mindful.

Yours in not knowing what the heck, but knowing that being communicative and kind is a good base from which to maybe figure it out,

Renée