Pants of doom

In school I *hated* poetry. It drove me nuts that there was no right answer yet they seemed to expect one from you. I could never pinpoint why I liked something or why I didn’t; it just was. Trust me; that answer never worked on any essay question. There’re so many things in life that don’t have an answer. Some things you just have to accept as is. People are like that. You can’t change them, and they are never all wrong or right. Yet for some reason it’s as if you are supposed to see others as one or another.

I tend to see people as the good and overlook the bad. This isn’t necessarily a good thing as it tends to bite you in the ass at a later date. There are also people that can point out flaws in any person from 400 yards away like some kind of judgmental sniper. You tend to wonder if that person will ever be happy with anyone let alone themselves. After all, they do have to look at themselves in the mirror everyday. Then there are the rare people that see your faults and accept them as the whole. They see what you hide and embrace it. I want to know how they do that, and thank them for it.

So today I was in the mall. Normally I love the mall and people watching because I enjoy making up stories about all the people that I see. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy myself because I was on a mission. I had to buy some dress pants. God I hate trying on clothes. If you’re one of those perfectly shaped people stop reading right here as nothing I am going to say will make any sense; It’ll all be over your head. Now if you stopped reading we can talk about you. Because really, who is perfectly shaped? What the hell would that be? Aerodynamically you should be a walking triangle with a point for the front of your body; that would be perfectly shaped. Anyway, that wasn’t my point. My point is that I had to run what I like to refer to as “the gauntlet”, or the dressing rooms.

I want to find the person that designs dress pants and ring their scrawny neck. I want them to have to go through this process of trying on pants after pants only to find out they’re still too small. I want them to have to carry an armload of the same color of pants around a busy department store. I want them to inhale and suck in with all their might only to find out that “loose fitting” is anything but. Then and only then, do I want them to head to their little drafting table. How hard would it be to stop designing for models the size of a designer lamp and start doing it for real people that have *gasp* curves.

So there I was cursing myself out and looking in the mirror at my ass. I couldn’t miss it thanks to the three mirrors in there specially designed for me to *have* to look at it. Of course it didn’t help that one limb was always forced to hold the “door” closed because of the broken lock as to not display all my secrets to passersby.

To be honest I was *not* happy. In fact, I’m sure that if that horrible woman hadn’t kept knocking on my shingle of a door to ask if everything was alright, I probably would have been crying. Why you ask? Well because I remember how things were. I remember enjoying shopping for clothes. I remember when I fit into a pair of fucking pants without using the Jaws of Life. I was mentally beating the crap outta myself. No one can say anything worse to you than what women seem to say to themselves at times like these. You might say I’m being melodramatic. Not really, I was looking at the personification of all that was wrong with my life. It was just another thing.

Then suddenly I realized what I was doing. Here I was worried about some of the more unpleasant things that people have said to me, and that I had said in my own mind. No, I’m not perfect. God, I’m *so* not perfect. And you know what? So what. It isn’t me. I’m more than the sum of what I see under bad lighting and poorly fitting pants. I realized that frankly I don’t give a fuck what those people who can only see the bad think. I don’t want them in my life anyway. I realized that by getting upset and berating myself, I was only making myself into the kind of person that I hate. I don’t judge others that way so why would I do it to myself?

So this is me... If you don’t like it I can’t worry about it. I need to worry about who I see everyday in the mirror not what. Was this epiphany enough to make me stop looking at myself in a negative light entirely? Well no of course not. But I did walk out of that dressing room with a pair of pants. I’m tired of this place I keep trying to aspire to be closed off into like a caged lab rat just to fit into someone else’s version of beauty. I am just me. And one day I will have the courage to show you who that is.

“The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.” -- Havelock Ellis