Road From Ridicule: Is Belonging Worth the Wait?

An exercise: Look in the mirror. Are you happy with what you see? If not, consider a past starting point– how far you may have come since then. Are you proud yet? If not, what do you want to change? What would you sacrifice to achieve it?  

Years ago, I vehemently said everything. 

Haunted

Our teenage years are never meant to be smooth-sailing, but mine specifically seemed straight out of a coming-of-age comedy. Laugh track echoing when the character enters the frame, a joke in itself to be there. The one who receives wedgies, locker graffiti, and slushies thrown at the face. 

With unkempt hair, dyed experimental colors (red with green, choppy bangs, as one example), scarily pale, heavier, and exaggeratedly crooked teeth before braces with rubber bands. Bubbly and loud,  I gleefully participated in choir, orchestra, and musical theater. Third chair clarinet and roles with no lines. 

When the pandemic hit and, with it, time offered in abundance, I forced a change. Found I preferred my body when hungry, my face when painted, my attention when sought after. That version of me, the unabashed and joyous self, still follows each move of mine. A shadow hovering close.

Purple highlights made blonde, neon hoodies exchanged for trending clothes that hugged my new weight. Abandoning musicals, I started playing volleyball instead. From frilly costumes to spandex and form-fitting jerseys.

Those in school who had sent me death threats began to like my Instagram posts. Boys who called me slurs commented compliments. 

On the surface, I got what I always wanted. Deeper, though, what felt unfinished gnawed. 

This past weekend, a friend visited me in Santa Barbara. She stayed in the sorority house and joined my friends in going out, trying everything from frats to band parties to the cold, late walk back through Isla Vista. 

She carries herself with unwavering confidence and charisma. Says all the right things that has her flocked with both platonic and romantic admirers. Friends constantly reaching out, quick in connections, and peaceful in her faith. I won’t assume and say it comes easy to her, but it does come to her nonetheless. 

What I hate to admit, is that I envy her– as I do perhaps with many people who also resemble this state of conventionally unflawed. Air of societal perfection. 

At brunch, she spoke of a coworker who greatly irked her. For reasons such as her “millennial quirkiness” and love for Disney. Or her tendency to giggle to herself unexpectedly and be over-apologetic. In other words, she found her to be weird. 

A part of me froze in hearing her say this. Who I socially aspire to be harshly differentiated herself from someone I related to internally. 

This was a verbal slap, a reminder of just how much I have done in the last few years to be perceived in the way I hoped. Yet, at the end of the day, I don’t see any of the work. Rather, staring back at me is my younger, hated self. 

There is no retiring being “weird,” for it does not leave you. Permanently entwined with who you are and what defines you. Only in suppressing it, putting physical and mental energy into changing, do you blend. 

My friend looks at me and sees– through what is projected superficially– herself. She confides in me, stands next to me with ease, because to her, we are similar enough to do so. I fall to this, cling onto it with desperation. This is what I’ve always wanted. Together, we are meant to collaborate in the inability to understand her coworker. Despite knowing this is how people once talked about me. 

Stripped bare, I felt like a fraud dallying in enemy territory. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, caught. 

After conforming to the degree I have– whatever opinion you have of such– I wonder if it was worth the change. If this “achievement” can be seen as so with all I lost to get here. If I am truly myself, or a shell of something unmade. 

History of ‘Weird’

How did the “odd” become outcasted? Which traits make them so? 

In Old English, wyrd referenced the supernatural, specifically those connected to fate and destiny. Think Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos of Greek mythology. All female beings of destiny.

 Then, in Middle English, Shakespeare revolutionized the term for the ‘Three Wyrd Sisters’ In Macbeth. Witches based off of the classical fates and Paganism. From this, the term “weird” grew to be of the unnatural, the strange. Puritans associated it with the hysteric hunt during the Salem Witch Trials for women deemed untraditional in their social and gender roles. 

Fast forward to the 19th-20th century, where lobotomies have begun to “treat” the “strangely disordered.” Yet their symptoms were of outspoken nature, rebellious attitude, sexual openness, and opting out of domestic expectations. To be eccentric and independent of social conjecture was odd. Now, we have transformed it for the unsettling, the unattractive, the unique. 

From figures like Mary Shelley, Julie d'Aubigny, Emily Brontë, and Joan of Arc to the minds of Sylvia Plath, Björk, Melanie Martinez, Mitski, and Otessa Moshfegh. Evolution of the weird.

With pop culture and social media, the “ideal” is broadcasted more widely. We are constantly consuming a universally curated normal and therefore are directly associating beauty standards and adept behavior with agreeable. This unification in media– this consensus– kills individuality, attacks awkwardness. 

The empowered became the socially rejected. 

A Past of Loathing 

When I published my first blog on female sexuality and the public feedback began, my body shook with anxiety. 

I transported back to the school bathroom where, hovering over the trash can, I stared at the hollow jacket of my missing pink, fuzzy diary. The pages were ripped out from within, my most inner secrets and thoughts lost and accessible to anyone. In a panicked hurry, I raced around campus, finding the papers separated and torn in random corners of hallways. 

Perhaps this is where my need to overshare stems from. I discovered my love for writing soon after; the urge to be interesting with what I have to say. To draw out reactions from people through the imagination. 

As all we do psychologically seems to trace back to, it is an attempt to grasp attention. Where I failed to be desired for my body or face or overall personality, I was forced to make up for in shock-factor. I became loud, read situations for humor, and spoke of/ acted out in ways that I knew appeared irregular. 

Openly talking about sexuality, and the conversation around it, a testament to that. 

Before finding this tactic, and the catalyst for doing so, I was bullied heavily growing up. 

Along with the stolen and mass-distributed diary entries, anonymous accounts were made. Posting off guard photos of me, the captions told me to stop eating or simply wrote “fat” or “ugly.” 

In the locker room for P.E., while changing, a group of girls would comment on my body, or call me “autistic” or the R-slur. Messages from classmates to kill myself, that the world would be better off. That I was embarrassing and weird. That my eighth grade geometry class wanted me dead. 

The start of high school truly felt like every stereotypical movie scene. Lunch either spent in a bathroom stall or crying on the phone to my dad.  

Then, slowly, I let myself change in the ways they had all asked me to. I got used to an aching, twisting stomach. Counted calories, added them up. Escaped onto my knees at a toilet if I was watched at dinner. 

I grew my hair long, bleached it. Donated everything in my closet. Switched to dainty jewelry and finally removed the clunky, wired braces. 

Talked to boys until one liked me enough to date. Developed the inability to leave the house without makeup. Abandoned every interest. Picked up new ones. 

When asked what I’d sacrifice to get here, I said everything and meant it. 

The Cost

A monster watches me now. Molded and sewn and fragmented. 

I made it. It is a result of my greed. There is pride, sure. As there is maternal love and ego. The creature is made of human parts. Woven heart and flesh. The creature appears human itself. A soul, a life. 

I resent my creation. A consequence of society. Against nature. I took a growing body and stunted it, made it my own with no intention for personal pleasure. The town requested the construction, yet now ask of my wariness, of my fear of them. 

Time has long passed and the stitches scarred. I wonder: is to “belong” worth the paralyzing dysmorphia? The paranoia of deformity?

 I believed attention was a debt I could work my way into being owed. That if I sacrificed enough, contorted enough, performed enough, I would earn the right to be seen. But now, I see it for what it is—a gift wrapped in fine thread, ready to unravel at the first pull. 

Validation is intoxicating but never quite satisfying, like an appetite that grows instead of shrinks when fed.

The world, once repelled by me, now reaches out. But with hands that hover, hesitant, as though I am something fragile, or worse, conditional. Passing inspection, but only under the right lighting, at the right angle, within the right frame. 

I enter a room, and I feel it—the way people notice me now, suddenly. They laugh at my jokes, lean in when I speak. Eyes flicker to my face, my body, the silhouette of something that was once invisible. The same people who once looked through me now seem to register me as a presence. The shift is subtle, slow, but undeniable.

And yet, the admiration feels like a thin sheet of ice beneath my feet, cracking at the weight of something I cannot name. Because while they reach for me now, I know they could just as easily retract. Acceptance is not unconditional. It never is.

The moment I slip, the moment I cross the fine line between confidence and insecurity, between charming and try-hard, between effortless and too much—I can feel the approval waver. The attention becomes a leash around my throat.

I have learned that people do not fear ego itself. They fear it in the wrong hands. The same traits that once made me “too much” are now seen as captivating—but only because I wear them with the right costume, the right polish. The world loves confidence in those who are already adored. They love an ego that knows how to disguise itself as humility.

But what happens when I slip into the same loud laughter, the same unfiltered excitement that once made me the punchline? Will they still find it charming? 

She lingers. The choppy hair, the off-putting conversation, the stomach that flowed over the waistline of jeans. Thighs spilling over seats. No matter how much I change, she follows—waiting, watching, ready to remind me that I am still her.

When someone leaves, when the validation slips through my fingers like sand, I do not feel like who I am now. I am transported back, as if no time has passed at all. My reflection warps, the body I built disappears, and I am that girl again— alone at lunch, flinching at the sound of nearby laughter.

It happens fast. A message left on read. A shift in tone. A glance that lingers just a second less than before. A joke that doesn’t land the way I expected. The high of being seen turns into the sharp drop of being overlooked, and suddenly, my mind scrambles to explain it. What did I do? Did I say too much? Not enough? Did they finally notice what’s underneath?

Because that’s what it always feels like—being noticed rather than being known. 

As if people are only entertained by the version of me that is palatable, adjusted, curated. As if they will stay as long as I play the role correctly, as long as I am careful.

And when they don’t stay, when the approval isn’t enough to quiet the noise in my head, I don’t just feel sad. I feel exposed. Like I have been caught in an elaborate deception. 

The self-hatred doesn’t stem from their absence alone, but from the realization that, deep down, I still believe they were right to leave. That no matter how much I try to outrun her, she will always be waiting in the mirror.

I know, logically, that people come and go. That validation is fleeting, conditional, unreliable. And yet, when it is withheld, it does not feel like a simple loss—it feels like confirmation. A reminder that no matter how much I change, I will always be one misstep away from that feeling.

And maybe that is the worst part. Not that they left, but that I always expect them to.

What I Gained, What I Lost

Was it worth it? I don’t know.

I know I no longer flinch at my reflection, but I also know I don’t fully trust it. I know I fit into conversations I once would have been excluded from, but I also know I measure every word before I speak. I know I am wanted in ways I never was before, but I also know that kind of want can be taken away.

I have outrun the girl I used to be, but I have not outrun the fear of becoming her again.

That’s the real cost. Not the change itself, but the knowing—knowing that acceptance is fragile, knowing that identity is a performance, knowing that even after everything, I am still searching for proof that I belong. Maybe I always will be.

I used to believe change would feel like shedding a second skin, like a fresh start, clean and absolute. But it turns out, change is more like erosion—slow, uneven, leaving behind strange remnants of what once was.

I grieve for what I gave up. I grieve for the version of me who never thought to question herself, who never wondered if she was only loved because she had made herself easier to love.

Maybe there is no real answer. Maybe I am both—the one who changed and the one who never truly left. Maybe the cost of belonging is never knowing if you paid too much.

But now, I also see it differently.

Change was not a loss. It was a choice. A series of choices, really—each one pulling me further from a version of myself that was built on survival, not joy.

Because now, I move through the world differently. Not cautiously, not bracing for impact, but with purpose. My voice does not falter when I speak. My hands do not shake when I take up space.

I learned to push through discomfort, to commit to things, to see efforts pay off. I’ve learned how to sit with hunger for more. More experience, more knowledge, more control over the person I am becoming.

And I like who I am becoming. Not because she is praised, but because she is mine.