The House of Tiny Whispers

This Body is Ugly

There are moments, and...

Well, let's just say that there are moments for now.

There are good moments too, mind you, but the problem with good moments is that as soon as you realise that's what they are then you automatically acknowledge the bad ones. You can't have a one sided coin. So you go through your good moments and you only really know them as that afterwards, when they're memories. And memories are never as powerful as the original.

When I was little, I was a really, really good daydreamer. As in, people would be talking to me and I wouldn't hear a thing because I'd be off in my own world, unaware of my body at all, constantly in that half-dream state...you know what I mean. You must have been there, felt that. Those moments just as you're waking up or as you're asleep when you see yourself and feel yourself doing something - I don't know, maybe you reach out to pick up your phone or take a drink of water or something - and it feels so real, right down to the bumps of the stickers on the back of your phone or the drops of water on the side of the glass, and then all of a sudden it's like your entire perspective shifts. You're not holding your phone. You're not sat up. You're lying down and your eyes are closed. But for a moment you were so convinced, everything in your body told you that you weren't. I was really good at that as a kid.

So I remember standing on cliffs I've never been to. I remember sitting and dangling my feet off the roof of the school Chemistry block even though I never went up there. Good memories, except they're not. They never happened.

And the reason I mention this is because daydreaming is hard now. My body won't be convinced that it's somewhere else; it always has to make itself known. Tweaks of pain, that moment where your foot kicks out of its own accord, a rumbling stomach. I can't imagine myself elsewhere. Oh, I can imagine what it looks like, smells like, sounds like, feels like, but it's just narration. It's like the difference between seeing the world outside your window and actually walking out of the door. It's a pale distraction. And that's what it is; a distraction. A distraction from one of these moments. One of the ones I first mentioned.

Except that if you've been there and you know what it's like, you'll know they're not moments. They're hours, sometimes. Entire days. Nights. Especially nights. Those times when you have nothing to do, that's when they jump out and get you. And all of a sudden you feel ill. You look ill, you're sure you look ill. You feel ill. Something has been knocked off balance. Your eyes are the same, your body is the same, the situation is exactly as it was a second ago except now it's disgusting and horrible. And there are all these people around you, all so...real and confident and each so beautiful in their own way, and you so thin and finite that you think you could be paper ready to be blown away in the wind. For reassurance you find something about you that you know is real, your arm perhaps, and through this new lens it looks wrong. It looks pale and sickly and crossed with blotchy lines and when you hold it up to convince yourself that it's real, it's shaking. You hold it with your other hand and it's cold and that's when you see how ugly it is.

And once you've seen that, it's all you can think of. This ugly body, what makes it so different from everybody else's? And of course the answer, the sensible logical answer, is that, barring a few scars grazing your upper arms, it isn't. But that doesn't matter because moments like this are beyond logic and those little imperfections are all you can see, and even if nobody else can see them you can feel them burning away below your clothes, and now your whole body feels strange, like it isn't yours really, and then it's okay to criticise and boy, is there a lot to criticise! And you forget that five minutes ago you were peaceful and content and didn't care.

And this is the point where, if it is one of those long terrifying nights, you gather together this ugly body and slide out of bed and turn on the light because light = reason and darkness = uncertainty. And you find something else to do, except what? None of your books are interesting. None of your writing is good. There's nobody to talk to because everybody you could talk to has turned their back. Things are always so much more catastrophic at night, aren't they?

So you daydream yourself out of it. You try and imagine the simplest things. Walking down the street, greeting a friend, buying a packet of crisps. Good moments. You remember the last good moment and focus on that, pick apart every detail and trust me, that isn't a good thing to do when your mind is inverting everything and making it bad, because then you start to see things that aren't there. The look on someone's face when you say something stupid, for example. At the time it was just because, well, you'd said something stupid, but playing it back in this mood makes it personal. How stupid she is, that person was thinking. Or: how loud, how unbearably loud and noisy. Or: how immature. Or: how cold and shallow. How unthinking. How cruel.

In this way one moment can spin off and explode, like a negative of a firework. A dark explosion on a light sky, blinding you with darkness so you spin, disorientated and uncertain and afraid, and you can't find your way out because who would bother leading you, anyway? You're loud, noisy, immature, cold, shallow, unthinking, cruel, and nobody would want to.

And the more you think something, the more you believe it. Even if you don't really believe it. Orwell knew this, I think, how you can believe two contradictory things equally strongly, and he called it doublethink. It is what your mind can do when it is stuck between what it knows for sure and what it believes everybody, everything, is telling it to know. It doublethinks itself into believing something it knows can't possibly be true.

So all you who say be stronger, you try being stronger when the enemy is yourself. When you are strong, and I am strong, so is it. We are incredible, human beings are, in this respect. When you are so far in the dark you can't see the light then it's a Plato's Cave. But when your mind is strong enough to doublethink, trust me, that only makes it worse. Because if you can see both at once, you do this:

This is just a bad moment. Just sit tight and sit through it and it will leave you alone.

But it isn't.

But it will. Remember. Remember how good it feels to be doing something you enjoy. Just wait.

I hate waiting. I can't wait anymore. I'll go insane.

Then fight.

How? How do you fight yourself?

You're talking to yourself, aren't you? So surely you can fight back.

And you can. Little distractions. Little things that take up everything so that you have no choice but to push those dark thoughts aside. Daydreaming doesn't work, your body keeps shouting so you need something that takes up both. New music and new writing; it doesn't matter if it's bad, nobody will ever see it. That way there are so many things to concentrate on that you can't even properly pay attention to either, let alone to that little voice - your own voice - trying to make you listen. Yes, you can fight back.

But they always come back.

And you worry, always, that one day you won't be able to fight enough...

But that day is not today.