In my day-to-day life, I am constantly aware of how I interact with the world around me and how I am being perceived. I want to be masculine, but I also want to be approachable and friendly. I try to be funny but I don’t want it to come off like I’m trying to “woo” someone and make them uncomfortable, I just want to be likeable. I want to wear nice clothing but also feel comfortable in the clothing. I feel pressured to be fit and to look strong.

I constantly am worrying over how people view me. “Am I being weird?”, “Am I making people uncomfortable by just existing in this room?” I just don’t interact with people who I don’t know anymore because of these anxious thoughts. I make myself unnoticeable and try not to attract attention. Even now, I don’t actually know if I make people uncomfortable. I’ll be sitting in class and all it takes is for me to make eye contact with someone for me to start thinking, “Oh no, they thought I was staring at them don’t they.” And thus begins the anxious spiral. Maybe these feelings are true: that people do think I am weird and I am making them uncomfortable. I am pretty sure its just anxiety.

Through much of high school I was never athletic. I was not sporty or fit, I played video games and I went to school and those where my two activities. I played tennis in my first year, and I was pretty good, but even still I did not look it. I was on the heavier side, I had acne, I had a terrible haircut. I didn’t feel very self-conscious for a while, but eventually that’s all I really thought about. When the pandemic happened, I decided that I hated how I looked. I started going on my families elliptical every day in between some of my classes, I started working out with my brother and my day every other day, and I would do leg and ab workouts every night before bed. It got to the point where I was exercising so that I could eat. I would have to earn the food, I couldn’t just eat it.

Nowadays I feel like I look pretty healthy. I (usually) eat right, and I stop myself from working out just to eat. But even though I’ve lost weight and gained muscle, I still pick at my shirt where I used to be bigger. I still cannot wear tight-fitting shirts, or even shirts with tighter fitting sleeves. I still love the colder months when I can put on a hoodie and forget about how I look.

In the reading about the definition of phenomenology we learned how it is the study of experiences from various first-person point-of-views. Regardless of how other people will see me, my experience in this world will always have me perceiving myself as less. In a similar way as we had talked about in class, where a women will be destined by society to feel out of place and always conscious of where they fit into, I am as well. I will constantly be wondering if I am doing the right thing, wondering how people see me, all the while viewing myself in a negative light. Life goes on and one day we may not have these standards. Until then I just remind myself that it does not matter much what others think of me, and that I should be happy that I’ve gotten to a healthier place than I was.