counterphobe (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
counterphobe) wrote2024-09-21 10:01 pm
counterphobe) wrote2024-09-21 10:01 pm
Entry tags:
animal/human
Or: 動物的/人間的. My favorite Ogre You Asshole song, the only one I listened to the summer before sophomore year, when I stepped out of myself and realized I had woken up in a new body.
I realize that at eighteen I haven't really been alive for long enough to learn how to be a person yet. This is doubly true for the fact that I had two of those years stripped to bones from me, all at home, not a word to a single person beyond my family that I could touch in real life. So maybe this is just growing pains. Or maybe I'm just especially weak.
My body was a neutral space for a very long time. I ran when I felt restless and stopped when I was tired. I walked to feel in the sun. I ate. I think childhood is like this: making friends with the animal of your self, with no ethical sense to distract from its impracticality yet. To me it's important to preserve this pristine condition and a perfect existence is one in which the illusion is rarely if ever shattered. Though I couldn't really say what kind of a life that would be, because it requires a blindness of self that is impossible with the constant perception under modern social conditions. I knew about my body when I realized I wasn't a boy. It just wasn't important yet.
When I hit puberty in earnest I was fourteen and the world had caught fever. So it took a while for me to tell. Gaining or losing weight, the shape of my face and my reflection in the condensation of my mirror sweating post-shower, it meant nothing to me without anyone to tell me it should. My self-image perpetually frozen in its last untouched frame, that slice of time, the lip of spring in my eighth grade year. Then sophomore year, back at school again, learning friendship, speech, and breathing in their new and unfamiliar ways, slowly I began to process how others saw me had changed. Miss and frown.
That winter my sister had an art assignment and asked to paint me. Took pictures of me shirtless and when I saw the resulting project I was taken aback by my visceral reaction of disgust. Because it was myself through another person's eyes, no longer fact but impression. It was the first time I thought: this cannot be me. It ruined my life.
I realize that at eighteen I haven't really been alive for long enough to learn how to be a person yet. This is doubly true for the fact that I had two of those years stripped to bones from me, all at home, not a word to a single person beyond my family that I could touch in real life. So maybe this is just growing pains. Or maybe I'm just especially weak.
My body was a neutral space for a very long time. I ran when I felt restless and stopped when I was tired. I walked to feel in the sun. I ate. I think childhood is like this: making friends with the animal of your self, with no ethical sense to distract from its impracticality yet. To me it's important to preserve this pristine condition and a perfect existence is one in which the illusion is rarely if ever shattered. Though I couldn't really say what kind of a life that would be, because it requires a blindness of self that is impossible with the constant perception under modern social conditions. I knew about my body when I realized I wasn't a boy. It just wasn't important yet.
When I hit puberty in earnest I was fourteen and the world had caught fever. So it took a while for me to tell. Gaining or losing weight, the shape of my face and my reflection in the condensation of my mirror sweating post-shower, it meant nothing to me without anyone to tell me it should. My self-image perpetually frozen in its last untouched frame, that slice of time, the lip of spring in my eighth grade year. Then sophomore year, back at school again, learning friendship, speech, and breathing in their new and unfamiliar ways, slowly I began to process how others saw me had changed. Miss and frown.
That winter my sister had an art assignment and asked to paint me. Took pictures of me shirtless and when I saw the resulting project I was taken aback by my visceral reaction of disgust. Because it was myself through another person's eyes, no longer fact but impression. It was the first time I thought: this cannot be me. It ruined my life.