I often wonder and speculate about exactly where, when and how I went wrong. What decision was it that led me down the wrong pathway to the place I am now? What should I have done differently? Where was that turning point that doomed me to this pathetic excuse of a life that I lead?
Today, a memory came to me from the distant past. A memory that I must have suppressed over the years. A memory of the day that changed my life forever.
Over twenty years ago. I was in high school. I was in a class dedicated to public speaking. Against all expectations, I was acing the class - me, the totally shy quiet book nerd. It surprised me as much as it did everyone else. I was able to get up in front of a crowd of people, and put my nervousness aside, and concentrate on the task at hand. It was surprising how few people could.
Anyway, on one occasion, our teacher was able to secure the use of the school’s one and only video camera, and have the school librarian videotape our speeches, and play them back for us, so we could see ourselves.
I wasn’t very well prepared that day (okay, not prepared at all) and I had to wing it, making up the speech on the spot. So I only got a “B” that day, (the worst grade I got the entire semester).
After we had all given our speeches, the librarian played back the recordings. This was still a novel thing at the time - nobody at our school was wealthy enough to own a video camera. We watched the TV with interest. It was futuristic to see our fellow schoolmates on TV. But then the librarian played back my speech.
I was horrified and devastated at what I saw on that TV screen. My gods, but was I really that ugly? Was my nose really that big? Did my voice really sound that nasal and grating? Were those gooey orbs my eyes? Did I really have those nervous ticks? I looked like some sort of weird animatronic puppet, brought only halfway to life.
I had seen still photos of myself before, and of course had seen myself in the mirror, and I knew that I wasn’t handsome - but now thanks to the brutal honesty of video tape I realized that I was UGLY. Not merely unattractive, but downright offensive to look at. I was a weird shambling caricature of a human being.
My entire universe collapsed, and I fell into a deep dark depression. I now understood why none of the girls liked me. Even worse, I now understood that no woman could ever want me. My entire future was destroyed by seeing those few minutes of video tape. I lost all my hopes and dreams right there, on that day. I’ve never recovered from that horrible moment of self-truth. I am always hyper-aware of how I appear to others. I can see it in their eyes, the disgust, the pity, the nausea that I induce.
I let people walk all over me, just thankful that they allow me in their presence at all. I quietly accept it when I see the handsome, stupid guy get the promotion instead of me, when I see him get the girl, no, he gets all of the girls - instead of me. It’s okay. I understand. I wouldn’t hire someone as ugly as me either.
On that day, twenty-some years ago, my life was stolen from me by an electronic device recording my sound and image to magnetic recording tape. If only I had been born a few hundred years earlier, before the invention of video, before the invention of photography. Living back then, I never would have known the awful truth of how I appear to others. Blissfully unaware of my appearance, I might have made something of myself.
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