in defense of self portraits

I hate the way I look. And not in a "gee it's tough being pretty" kind of way. I just hate it. And seriously, I would love to be pretty. I would /love/ to live up to whatever it is people sometimes think they see. And before anyone jumps in and says, "Oh, Kate, of /course/ you're pretty" or "Are you calling me a liar?" let me say this: I am fully capable of respecting your position and of having my own opinion at the same time.

When someone I don't know or don't like tells me I'm pretty, my mind kinda says, "Huh..."

When someone I like (and this is astronomically worse when I have a crush on him) tells me I'm pretty, my mind says, "Oh good, I've tricked another one. Oh god, I wonder what he thinks is pretty. God, I wonder what it is he hasn't seen yet, 'cause he's missing /something/. Fuck, there's no way to figure that out, is there? Oh well, better just distract him."

This is typically when I lean in and get all snuggly, so at least there's no way he can look at too much of me at once ('cause it's hard enough to figure out those close-up "What am I looking at?" puzzles when you've seen the thing before) and it'll at least take him a while to piece things together, but then, oh yeah, my skin is awful, too, so we'd better not let him look too closely, well, maybe my hair smells good (and I bury my face in his chest).

(If we're not there yet, I just kinda start moving around a lot.)

The thing is, I'm constantly worried that one day he's going to see what I see and the whole thing'll be over. So I'm (again) in constant fear of disappointing people. And in the rest of my life, my instinct is always to push the negative opinion and see if I can get a chance to redeem myself. In this case, I can't stomach the idea.

Brilliantly, with the right light and eight thousand versions to choose from, anybody can look good. If you have a good friend who already knows how ugly you are (but is embarassed when she takes ugly pictures of people) you're set. I happen to have a digital camera (and a Polaroid, and, on occasion, such a friend).

But the truth is, I actually look more like this:


(photo courtesy of my mother)

Unfortunately, I don't have enough self-respect to claim, somehow, that it's ok that my favorite jeans and my favorite color combine to make me look three months pregnant, and what I thought was a cute pair of glasses and a sorta hip haircut are like every other accessory I've shunned (amounting to lopsided frosting atop what could otherwise have been a self-respecting store-bought snikerdoodle, calling attention—in their dissonance—to how awful and boring the foundation was to begin with).

(Side note: Almost everything I wear is designed to make me look less stupid, rather than actually attractive.)

Add to this that I seem to have been elected the test-case for all of my attractive friends, since I'm pretty good at flirting, but it frequently amounts to nothing.

Case in point: There's this guy I really like. The timing was never right between us, and we talked about that for so long that eventually we were just flirting, semi-constantly and inappropriately, but to no end. For a year. And then we lost touch and reconnected, and flirted over e-mail for another year. One day, as he was wont to do, he said something like "Why don't we just go to the coast and make out for a week" to which I said (as I had never done before) "Sure. Sounds good." He stopped responding.

After months of silence I got a mailing list e-mail from him. I responded, and we're sort of back in touch. Then the other day, he says this:

also I just wanted to tell you, in case my plane crashes on the way to Kansas, that you are one of the most attractive girls I've ever known. And lemme tell you, I've rubbed elbows with a lot of pretty girls in my time... but you're quite adorable.

I have no response to that.

I wish it were a fancy ring or something that I could just chivalrously refuse to accept. So my mind says, "Wow, I've fooled this one so well, I'd better not ever see him again." And every boy I've ever talked to about such things says, "He doesn't mean that, he just wants to get laid" or, "He's just saying that ... remember when he stopped speaking to you?" And I can't not respond 'cause then it's my fault we're not in touch, or he's embarassed at having said it, which he shouldn't be, 'cause I'm sure he only meant nice things.

So I guess I fret about it for a week, say "Thanks", and go upstairs and take pictures until I find one that's a little blurred out, taken with the camera facing my left side, in some warm light that hides my translucent skin tone, and say, yeah, I guess maybe he saw that angle—I'm kinda pretty there.