problems – An Indelible Friend

We all know that horrible (kind of exciting) feeling when you see someone, think they’re fit, and you want to go up to them but don’t really know what to do once you get there. And normally, I’m pretty clumsy about it: I’m probably too loud and giddy, or too flirty or too subtle and then I spend hours after the time I saw the boy thinking about how I should’ve acted, or what I could’ve said, hating on what I actually said…it’s just a big old mess to be honest hahahah.

So I wanted to know, whether the boys us girls are embarrassing ourselves in front of, feel the same way in this situation…

And oh my god they do.

The overriding feeling coming from the answers I received though, was that they’d rather not feel like they have to make the first move. And I don’t blame them. We all know that this is a pretty toxic expectation of our society, but it’s also not an easy one to change. For example, I wrote an entire blog on how when I’ve made the first move it’s often made me seem like a slut…so…

But unfortunately, this huge pressure on young men has made some of them ‘not even bother’ because they ‘don’t know how’. Some boasted confidence with comments such as ‘I don’t approach, I get approached ;)’ but then went on to talk about how terrified they are of rejection. Not only that, they’re extra frightened that other people will ‘find out’ about it. And they’re especially wary of girls and their friendship groups because as they said, ‘once the girl hates you, so do all of her friends’. (*not always true, but fair assumption*)

Many were frightened of ‘having the piss taken out of them’. Or not being able to ‘come up with the most interesting conversation starter possible’. They don’t want ’embarrassing stories’ made up about them ‘failing’. And nobody wants the ‘reputation’ of always being the guy to ask lots of people out because then they look like a ‘f***boy’ and that’s not going to help them much either. Others also spoke about fears of ‘coming on too strong’, or seeming ‘creepy’ and accidentally ‘making the girl feel uncomfortable’.

So first of all, I’d just like to say that the fact all of these things are even thoughts going through your heads means that you’ve all got very little to worry about. You’re clearly decent, considerate, lovely people. A fact I already knew. Still I recognise, that my saying that won’t make the paranoia disappear.

Clearly, many of these boys don’t want to be that hyper-masculine, pushy version of a ‘man’, but they’re also not that comfortable with being the opposite. They fear that if they go in completely the other direction, they might be deemed a ‘coward’, ‘too quiet’, or just plain ‘awkward’. And finding that middle ground is difficult to do when you’re only 20.

It would also be entirely futile for me to respond to them and say ‘just be yourself’, ‘just relax’, or ‘try not to overthink it’. Since telling someone to relax in this situation is about as helpful as ‘where’d you leave it?’ when you’ve lost something.

But if these boys will allow me to give them a little piece of advice, since I’m part of the gender many of them are trying to pull, I’d say that awkward is not a deal-breaker. It’s not ideal, but it’s not a deal-breaker. Pushy and rude is a deal-breaker. So defo lean more towards awkward.

It’s completely unfair and pointless that we still have this social standard where boys are expected to make the first move. So I want to end this blog by making a request to all the girls reading this: do us all a favour and just risk it sometimes. If boys can be brave enough to put their egos on the line when they find someone attractive, then so can we. We’re all going to suffer some blows and experience rejection. It never feels great, but you don’t die either.

So f*** it: ask him out.

I think that loving your body and the way it looks every single day is impossible. But don’t worry, I don’t mean this as a massive downer, or some precursor to a hugely self-deprecating blog: relax.

I just mean it in the sense that having insecurities, and waking up some mornings thinking you look about as attractive as a sea cucumber (those things are not pretty, don’t try and tell me that they are), is not the end of the world. Insecurities are normal and healthy, as long as you don’t let them overwhelm you.

For me, the things I don’t love about my body are largely based around how I think I look when I move. I just don’t like the idea that my disability causes me to have a limp or is accentuated when I walk. This doesn’t mean that I think it’s a big deal when other disabled people have a limp, it just means that somewhere in my head, I feel insecure about whether I might have one. Does that make sense?

You might read that and think: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, why be bothered by such a minor thing? Plus, you are disabled, so if you did have a limp then it’d make sense and not be a big deal’. But that’s how insecurities work: I tell you what I don’t like about myself, you say you barely even noticed, that you don’t care and think that I shouldn’t either, I thank you, feel better for a second, but still duck my head before I see my legs reflected in shop windows.

So where do we go from there?

Well, what’s clear is that businesses prosper when people don’t feel good about themselves: that’s part of the reason we buy things. We’re also addicted to scrolling through social media and looking at examples of ‘perfect people’ in ‘perfect places’ with ‘perfect lives’. Basically, we like to see what’s beautiful.

So obviously a huge remedy to our insecurities would be to recognise that what we see on social media is a fragment of the truth, but we know this already. And obviously we need more varied representation of body types in the media, but it’s also impossible to represent everyone because each individual human is different – and there are a lot of us. So in all of this, we haven’t really been able to solve the problem…

And that’s because there simply isn’t a quick, one-step solution to getting rid of all of our insecurities. Humans will always find flaws in how we look because improvement, jealousy and seeking perfection are just in our nature.

But something that we can definitely try to do, is not let our insecurities consume us. By all means, feel it, and even wallow in it for a minute, but don’t let what you don’t like about yourself be the only thing you think about. You know you won’t like how you feel after thinking about it, so why waste your time like that?

We all have to become more aware of how we treat ourselves, so if you’re looking for a one-sentence piece of advice on how to do that, I guess all I can say is:

just don’t be a b****.

An Indelible Friend

Tag: problems

Question 1

We all feel like a sea cucumber sometimes