Being Me

Stage #2

Stage #2 - The Vile Insecurity

I am 11 when I first start feeling insecure.

But truth be told, I don't even know what the word means. At one of our life skills classes, we happen to hear the word from our teacher and the next second, it starts. Oh, insecure! It's a joke among my friends and I. But then, I soon find a dictionary and flip over the pages to 'I'. And there in tiny letters that only a magnifying glass can make out is carefully typed out the definition.

insecure adj. 1 not confident. 2 not firmly fixed. insecurity n.

I don't show it, but I'm utterly terrified. It's like the word has morphed itself into a living being and it is now terrorising me with its meaning.

And I'm afraid it's beginning. My brain registers the word like it's just made for me and I'm afraid. I can feel it slowly emerging in my head, slow and steady at it's scraggly victim. I just know.

Initially, it is with the little things. Her hair's so great. Her eyes are so blue. It is always just this admiration to other people. I'm not exactly belittling myself. But I can tell it is the beginning.

Because one day, this feeling makes itself entirely visible to me.

I am walking down the aisle of a grocery shop when I see an incredibly tall girl, her hair, a breathtaking ombre shade, inspecting jars of apricot jam. Her dress has a simple floral design across the neck and above her knees. Her hair seems to just hang in there like a princess's. She looks gorgeous, I think. And the next thing I know, I am glancing down at my old, plaid sweater and blue jeans that I love with all my heart, something I think is extremely cool.

My eyes find their way to the metal surface under the food items on display and all of a sudden, I feel angsty. The feeling is heavy, crashing down on me with the force of a mammoth. I don't know how to explain that feeling in my chest. Is it pain? Is it irritation?

My pale face, two lifeless eyes, my hair so dry it might as well have resembled a nest, I just can't take it. So, hurriedly placing back the pickle jar I had picked up just moments ago, I take off from the claustrophobic space even before the girl can look up and see me.

I am a disaster.

A disaster I don't like one bit.

And from that moment on, I feel it almost every single day. I feel a need to hide. Hide from everybody. Hide from the world.

God, it is horrible.

Thanks to my father's mercurial job, my mom, my older sister Kathy, and I, are accustomed to taking the airport at least once every year. We keep shifting places and neighbourhoods like bees skip over flowers and the only good thing that came out of it is that now, I have learned and mastered the skill of never getting too attached to one particular place. 

Taking the airport is always a torture for me. It is one of those places where you meet so many different kinds of people all at once. Of every religion and every ethnicity. People are short, people are tall. People are plump, people are bean-poles. I don't see how that wouldn't terrify me.

I will never know what to wear, and I will never know how to put my hair. Mom always shouts and makes a big fuss because I never get ready on time. I don't know what she fears, whether I'll make us all miss the flight or if I'll turn up looking better than her.

"You aren't going to audition for a modeling career, Tina! You're going, like, out of the state. That is all!" she says.

But the fact remains that whatever I come up with never looks right on me the moment I step foot out of my house. It is as though my mirror has a special erasing effect, removing all my flaws when I peer into it from every angle known to man. 

Dad often jokes how I'd be a very skilled gymnast.