Content warning: I’m going to talk about body dysmorphia and fatphobia and in general things that might prompt extremely uncomfortable feelings about the physical self. Please take care of yourself and exit if necessary.

I apologized to someone today.
That sounds odd, almost condescending in a pretentious sort of way when phrased like that, but there’s a question for you: how do you refer to someone you used to be friends with, but who you haven’t spoken to in seven years?
The ADHD means I have no object permanence, so not speaking to someone for a long time under otherwise non-confrontational circumstances means I usually still consider them a friend.
But things got messy around that time, and it’s complicated.
I mention all this because this wasn’t a rando, but a close friend I did a bad thing to.
Anyway. I digress.
I apologized because I was an asshole when he (probably still he) let the social group know he wanted to be known as X instead of diminutive version of X.
I’m fairly ashamed to admit I didn’t get into it whole-heartedly and I even pushed back a little in the form of “I don’t think of you as an X.”
And then a short while after that, we stopped talking much. Possibly because I was an asshole and possibly because there was Intense Drama around that time period; who knows?
It doesn’t matter. I was an asshole about something I have been very vehement about defending for the last handful of years.
Some might think “oh, there’s hypocrisy for you”, and yes, but also, the thing is, I think it’s always useful to remember that often we hurt others where we were wounded.
Not an excuse! More of a warning to watch out for that tendency.
I didn’t get the support I wanted and needed every time I mentioned wanting to change my name, so when X wanted to change his…I wasn’t appropriately supportive of his needs.
You could say that I’d been “taught” that other people’s impressions of a person and what they should be named was more important than what the person thought themselves.
But no. I knew how lousy it made me feel then. So perhaps there was a slight element of “I didn’t get the support I needed because other people put their feelings above mine, so I’m going to be an asshole now because it’s socially allowed and even socially approved”.
So the reason I’m getting into all this isn’t for pats and praise. Whew, look at me, I did an apology like a decade later!
The point here is “maybe sometimes you gotta nudge the sleeping dog and dig up some corpses to properly inter them”.
I don’t feel great about the apology. For one thing, knowing how late it is makes me twitchy. For another, I’m going to have it on the brain for a while, wondering if there’s going to be a response (even though I said no response necessary).
But I was going to have it hanging over my head if I didn’t.
“This is a person who you should apologize to and you aren’t” dangles there, and I know I’ll bump into it every so often, and the bruise will only get deeper and darker with every bump.
The discomfort will pass. The awkwardness will pass. The relief of knowing I’ve put something fully to rest will stay with me.
Moving on towards… creating the self you want most to be.
Those of us who have played MMORPGs or D&D possibly have a little more experience with the notion.
And if any of you have, like me, gotten a wee bit of push-back from people about the characters you wanted to inhabit… time to reclaim the concept because do we have some work to do.
There are many facets to this, but above all, the most important thing to internalize is that “you get to look like whatever you like”.
As this is going to be mostly within your personal universe, I’m not going to get into “but maybe really deeply consider if you are ready for people’s reactions if you take inspiration from Anthony Loffredo”.
Sit for a while. Or lie down. Or take a walk.
But really think about what you feel the real you should look like.
There is a lot of messy stuff surrounding this, and I’m just gonna throw it out there: it’s okay to be influenced by the world in this, so long as you’re aware of what aspects of your wants are mostly from the world and give yourself (and others!) sufficient leeway in those areas.
Frex: the “me” I have constructed in my mind of “who I really am” has long hair, pale skin, nice tits, a perky ass, and the waistline I had in my 20s.
Pushing it, I feel, to want the waistline I had when I was 18, but I’m working on that thought. Is it really? Because I wasn’t that skinny as a teen.
Do I really feel more “comfortable” at a heavier weight, or is it that I feel more comfortable presenting myself as a heavier weight For Reasons, or is it that I don’t want to be accused of being fatphobic, or because I don’t want to “ask too much” or because I am pushing back a bit against my own socially-given fatphobia?
That is stuff for me to work on, but while working on it, it is okay to want that 18 year old waistline for “my inner perception of who I am and want to be”.
I feel there are three thoughts to hold here: it is good to imagine how the true you wants to be embodied; it is good to examine how those wants are being affected by airbrushed photos of celebrities and the like; it is good to reconcile who you are in meat-space with who you want to be in your mind.
As an example: I like tits. I like clothing that showcases tits (not necessarily on myself anymore, but I like seeing cleavage on other people because pretty). I like how they feel because it’s like a built in stress toy.
I do not like saggy tits as much because they don’t look as nice in swimsuits.
In this case, it hurts no one if I get plastic surgery for some tits that won’t sag (for a while).
Caveat: as long as I don’t think “saggy lumpy tits = age = bad”. Ageism is actually harmful. Acknowledging that real tits are unlikely to be a nice looking as human-made tits is probably mostly benign.
It especially hurts no one that at the moment we’re only considering mental plastic surgery.
The weight thing is more complicated because fatphobia is a real thing and hurts a lot of people.
There is little like being a fat woman in Taiwan, so I get it.
It is really, really, really hard separating “this is what I really do find aesthetically pleasing” from “I am beyond tired of being treated like I’m either invisible or trash because of my weight”.
But for the moment, because this is a journey and not a one-step thing, I’m going to say it’s okay to hold “I want to look like this in part because I will be bullied if I don’t but I also find it aesthetically pleasing in myself”.
Again with the “so long as we don’t extend this to other people and judge them for it, we’re just going to roll with it as a mental thing for now”.
In part, true-me/ideal-me weighs less because my joints are unhappy with the weight. So in my personal universe, I am the weight where and when I felt most energetic and happy with my physical abilities.
Tangenting smoothly into — but what about my chronic illness and disability? Is ideal/true-me disabled and sick?
Yeah. Yeah, even in my personal universe, I am disabled and sick.
Not because I “don’t want to be healed”, but because it would be actively detrimental to my mental state to be in denial about my disability and illness. I spent about a decade working on towards claiming “disabled”, and I’m not about to go backwards on that path because I deeply believe that denial of the self is what promoted my slide into chronic illness and then disability.
This is an imperfect and incomplete example of how to construct this mental meatsuit for your true self, your consciousness to reside.
There are going to be paradoxes and hypocrisies and contradictions. That is okay.
It has to be okay because we are all immensely complicated beings who swing on a range of spectrums.
But one has to start somewhere.
We interact with the universe through our meat-suit. So much of our experiences and existence is bound up in this meat-suit.
I thought about if incarnating the self could be done through feelings and words alone and decided that no, much like naming the self is necessary to properly manifest the self, because we are physical beings we must also be aware of what we are using to navigate the world.
We cannot heal wounds we do not know exist – sometimes we must dig them out from where they were hidden from us or by us so they can be treated.
It can be difficult to move towards a goal unless it is made clear — having a roadmap showing which way to go can be helpful.
Naming something is a key step towards acceptance. You cannot acknowledge something which has been denied.
Construct your avatar, your key to the world. Look upon yourself so you can really see yourself.