If You’ve Ever Felt Unlovable — This One is for You

I made my mom cry in a swimming pool once.

I was 14, we were in Greece with her best friend and her best friend’s kid, and I’d planted the seed of sadness — inadvertently, of course — the night before, at dinner.

The four of us crowded around our superbly clear plates, taking silly selfies and ugly selfies and selfies that steered away from both “silly” and “ugly” and beelined straight for how do you report your own face for being visually offensive? And me and mom were elite at it. We knew all the right angles, all the right poses, and so we of course purposely chose all the wrong ones for this compilation of photos (all the best memories are goofy, right?).

Then I made her sad.

Really sad.

I sent one of her photos — one where her entire face was scrunched up as though she was about to vomit— to her boyfriend and I captioned it, “Look! Mom’s thinking about you!”

Mom didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night (which, if you know her, then you’d know that was no easy feat). I’d never broken a heart before, nor had mine fractured either, so the blunt force of both happening simultaneously winded me. Took me a while to catch my breath. But then the next morning, whilst we were paddling in the hotel pool, I waded over to her tentatively. She half-smiled and my heart, which was only fourteen years developed and broken into fourteen billion shards, beat again for the first time that day. Maybe she won’t hate me for all eternity, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I’ll admit, I didn’t actually know what I was sorry for at the time. In my teenage defence, I thought what I’d done was harmless. My mom is beautiful at all times, all angles, always. It was just a silly picture with a silly tagline sent across an entire ocean back home. But to mom, it was so so much more than that.

Her smile grew larger but her eyes were tired. Whatever they were concealing, they were struggling to keep it back there. But I just didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to fix my mistake because I didn’t know what shape the wound was, how deep it ran, whereabouts I’d inflicted it. How could I cut a plaster to size if I didn’t know where it hurt?

So I said again, “I’m sorry,” weaker this time. Feebly. Mom splashed me and pulled me in for a hug. And then she explained what was wrong.

“I just don’t think anybody else would ever want me,” she told me.

That harmless selfie I’d sent to her partner wasn’t just a harmless selfie I’d sent to her partner. In her mind, it was a crack in the lens through which he sees her, with the potential to shatter their entire relationship. She worried that maybe he’d look down at her face filling up his phone screen and feel repulsed, perhaps realise that he doesn’t actually miss her whilst she’s away, and then pack up his PlayStation and leave.

The shock of that floored me.

Because trust me when I say this: I am not biased. I am a 24-year-old with a degree in science and a degree in publishing so I am totally justified when I publish this here scientific fact:

My mom is the Best Person To Have Ever Existed Throughout All of Space and Time™. Me and NASA are in agreement. The evidence is conclusive. David Attenborough is narrating her as we speak (well he would be, were she not passed out in front of an episode Grace and Frankie with mayo smeared on her lip. We’ve let Dave go home early).

So of course, knowing all of that for a fact, I just couldn’t believe that she could ever feel this way. As a 14-year-old who’d only recently discovered Robert Pattinson’s jawline and was about eight months away from catching that highly infectious disease commonly known as self-consciousness, I did not expect that to be why she was upset.

But I’m 24 now. And it only occurred to me today that I, too, am riddled with that very same disease.

“I just don’t think anybody could ever want me,” I told her.

That’s what I said to mom earlier this afternoon when the realisation hit me. Then I gestured at my whole self and added, “just look at me.” And she did. She looked at me how I imagined I looked at her when I was 14. With complete disbelief. Slight sadness. And then a little more.

But that’s how it works, right? We see our loved ones with rose-tinted glasses and ourselves through a shattered, blacked-out lens. We will never quite know how the rest of the world perceives us, so we can only make our own, personal, objective observations. And by “objective” I mean everything but.

“Em — ” she began, but I just shook my head.

I knew what she was going to say. The very same things that I was thinking back then. A list of all the astounding attributes that are tethered to her name, the layers of her soul — some lemon cake, others love letters from a planet full of people in love with her, all stacked up and sticky (from the cake icing, you animals) — and the starbursts that radiate from her skin. My mom is the like button as a human. But she was left feeling exactly the opposite and nothing I could have said then — or have said, repeatedly, every day since — will ever get her to believe it. Because nothing outside of herself can change her mind. Only she can do that.

“It’s alright momma, I know. But I just don’t see it. No matter what you or anybody else might see, I simply don’t. And I need to figure out how to fix that for myself.”

So this is what I’m doing. I’m not quite at the fixing stage yet, but I’m diving deep below the surface of that Greek hotel pool and I’m figuring it out. This is an empirical investigation and already I know exactly what the research title will be:

I Am Wanted.

“Someday, somebody will see what you don’t.” I’m going to say to myself.

I need to learn how to love what I look like, why I do what I do, who I am in all dimensions, inside and out. I need to know how to appreciate myself, how to see myself in clear view, full daylight, unedited, unpolished, unbelievable, and whilst I’m busy doing that, I’m repeating that sentence in my head.

Until I learn how to see it myself, I will at least trust that one day somebody else will too. Somebody will think my forehead is the perfect size. They’ll find my hooded eyelids fascinating and my endless appetite impressive. They’ll hang their shirts on my sharp hipbones and strap tiny pillows to my ankles to muffle their incessant clickiness, so that finally I can sneak to the fridge in the middle of the night.

They won’t think I’m too loud or obnoxious, but enthusiastic and excitable. They won’t label me a loser but a trier, not naive but hopeful. They’ll understand my oversharing and they’ll be patient with my impatience. They’ll hold on when I’m being clingy. And when I’m not. They’ll see the fear behind my jealousy and the doubt behind my self. They’ll smile at me when I smile. They’ll smile at me when I don’t. They’ll smile at every tiny space-themed pin badge attached to every item I own and they’ll frown along with me when I lose one. They’ll hear me when I’m silent. And they’ll listen to me when I’m chattering away about nothing, about everything, about the moon (or to it).

They won’t think I’m too much — but just enough. I will be their Goldilocks, their “just right,” their Earth, positioned at the perfect distance, in the perfect spot, in the perfect orbit around the sun.

And yeah, I get it. I do. I know we’re all taught to believe that fairy-tales are fictional, unrealistic, make believe. But isn’t it right there in the name? All we have to do is make it happen, because we believe that it will. I’m not quite at the believing part yet, but that won’t stop me from making. Making sure that my mom no longer has to look at me the way I did, at 14, in the swimming pool with her.

So I’m documenting this live-action to you as I sit, propped up in bed with a handful of Hobnobs, because life shouldn’t always be lived in hindsight. Retrospect gets too much respect. We only have now and we don’t need to wait for now to be over before we can learn from it, before we can understand it, before we can fix it. Because it’s not just me stuck in this place. It’s my mom, too. It’s also her and it’s him and it might even be you.

If I can figure this thing out, then we all can. Together.

You see, we are not unwanted. We are not unworthy. We are not unlovable. We are unbloodybelievable and I know one day I will wholeheartedly believe that with my whole heart.

Until then, I’m picking at tiny chunks of it and dipping them in my homemade self-love sauce. Stick them in the freezer. Let them solidify. Then glue them together with melted white chocolate and a lifetime of assurance that I am enough.

I’ll see that one day. No lenses — just sunlight.

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Oh hey, whilst you’re here: why not put the “em” into your “emails” and lob your name onto my mailing list for weekly em-bellishments on my rose-tinted, crumb-coated lens of life. It’s the equivalent of the reduced section in the supermarket (low value Weird Crap™ that you didn’t know you needed).