sermon in the dirt iii: a cult
the opposite of body dysmorphia, some bootleg therapy, and as my tree planting sermon continues a dark through-line emerges...
I think I have whatever the opposite is of body dysmorphia. In my internal world, I am the single best-looking person on earth. When I have photos taken, and those photos do not match my self-conception—which is of someone so miraculously good-looking that my beauty should be a threat to passing motorists and start wars and generally be a force of chaos in the universe—my impression is one of, that cannot be right. Your camera is broken.
Anyway, see above a photo from a shoot I paid someone to do only to be utterly shocked when the photos I got back were of me, and not a supermodel. I don’t look like this anymore—but what still registers as wrong about this picture is not that four or so years of change have affected me (mostly in the eyebrows. What was I thinking?), but that it’s not of the version of myself I invented in my head, which still feels more real, disconnected from reality or evidence though it may be.
When my therapist was leaving, she was trying to get through to me.
“I think you’re too worried about what is ultimately normative conflict,” she said. “So you’re dishonest with people about how you feel—you do this for so long that it builds up.”
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “And then, when I do finally freak out, I really lose it. And I’m not just mad at the person in front of me—the person who was like, wrong on the internet or said my favourite band sucked, or whatever. Or, rather, I am mad at them, but I’m mad with all the, like, appropriate madness of that interaction…”
“Mm.”
“And the anger I still have from being belittled or spoken over in a conversation.”
“Mm.”