positivelyBLEAK Grinning back into the abyss.

Non Conductive Negative Reasoning

Someone, either a stranger or someone close to you, says some­thing neg­a­tive about you. Months or even years later, you’re still hung up on it, even if you refuse to admit it about your­self. Meanwhile, someone pays you a com­pli­ment, and you forget about it as soon as the first blush wears off. What the fuck are we doing?

I called up my shrink and we chatted about this topic today. (Yup, I have a head­shrinker. I don’t believe in stig­ma­tizing that. For the pur­poses of this post, we’ll call him Doctor Shrink.) An ex-​boyfriend told me, over five years ago, that he thought I was slightly crosseyed, and I still catch myself staring into the mirror, trying to dis­cern if one pupil is a mil­limeter or two off from the other. I’ve asked more than one med­ical pro­fes­sional to take a look and address my inse­cu­ri­ties, and despite being told by not one but two doc­tors that they saw nothing unusual, I will still spend time in the bath­room mirror, trying to find the flaw.

When I came home from work yes­terday, S. told me that my hair looked pretty, and I smiled about that for about five sec­onds before moving on to some­thing else.

What the fuck?!

Paying atten­tion to my body has brought me a lot of internal joy; every run con­cludes with a feeling of plea­sure at the tasks that my body and my mus­cles are capable of com­pleting. Eating well and seeing and feeling the phys­i­o­log­ical responses to that fills me with sat­is­fac­tion. My mind catches up and says, “Look at the good that you’ve done for your­self, and see what your body is doing to repay you.”

Unwanted com­men­tary from others presents a problem, because it never arrives during the pri­vate times when I’m mar­veling over my suc­cesses. It comes during vul­ner­able times — would I still be men­tally beating myself up over an unwar­ranted com­ment about my eyes if I hadn’t been making an effort to look appealing and attrac­tive to my ex when he said it? Would I be thinking about neg­a­tive body image so much if I wasn’t stressing over landing a poten­tial pro­mo­tion? (I’ve been alter­nating between studying up on Cisco IOS and waiting to hear back from HR for weeks now and it’s taking a toll on my emo­tional state.)

(There are many rea­sons why he is now an ex, and his pen­chant for crit­i­cizing imag­ined flaws after I’d spent hours get­ting ready for a date is def­i­nitely one of them.)

The American metal scene offers little help; women are usu­ally regarded as a minority, and the phrase “metal whores” is thrown around as though we merely exist as penis recep­ta­cles or venue décor. I’ve seen Angela Gossow (from Arch Enemy) and Hecate (from Treachery and The Venetian Snares) described as “hot” more often than “talented.”

Anyway, Doctor Shrink let me in on a secret. Insults and crit­i­cism remain with us longer than com­pli­ments because we usu­ally believe them. It’s easier to write off a com­pli­ment as being con­ver­sa­tion filler, or back-​handed, or “they’re just trying to be polite.” When it comes to neg­a­tive com­men­tary, I’m at a loss. “Why would someone say that if it wasn’t true?”…forgetting entirely that some people are straight-​up jerkoffs, or even just thoughtless.

My psy­chi­atric home­work is to follow up neg­a­tive emo­tions regarding my body or my appear­ance with some­thing to remind me to take pride in my func­tioning body, and that I’m priv­i­leged to have a fully-​functioning corpus.

Even if it means doing 60-​second prone planks in the supply closet, which is exactly what I’m about to do after clicking “Publish.”