I’m in a mall in Sicily and I’ve fallen into a dream. Not the hazy, beautiful metaphor kind, the kind in Inception where every single dream character realizes you don’t belong and stares at you with wide-eyed silence while your whole body breaks out in clammy chills. I look back at the Sicilian Apple Store entrance, the only one on the island that my sweetie and I drove three hours to find. I longingly eye the fellow rotund angel that’s taken my phone, with promises of fixing the frozen screen. I try to let go of my OCD ridden instincts to never let anyone near my device, and remind myself that the Apple man seemed cozy and similar to a walrus. In the middle of Centro Commerciale Sicilia, near Catania, on a Saturday afternoon, I take a look around. Every single person in the crowded atrium is staring at me with visible disgust. I notice a little girl about seven years old tugging on her grandpa’s leg to point me out, her repulsion falls like a wave onto his face. Pointing, laughing, loathing surrounds me completely and I’m a goldfish cracker in the center of an ant colony. I check in with my sweetie to make sure I’m not just being a classic human and thinking everything is about me, but she confirms this is a rare moment of my perception not being warped by self-obsession. Is it because I’m fat? Is it because I dress like Magi in Fern Gully? I’m not able to really know why, all I know is I have to wait in this place for four hours until my phone is fixed. Teen girls pretend to vomit on me in the food court, families bond over their shared repugnance, a little boy stomps on my toe. Once the hours are up, I cling to my fixed phone and grease-stained bag of popcorn chicken, hoping the familiar herbs and spices will sedate me- (they don’t but I still enjoy them).
The next day I soak in the Tyrrhenian Sea, wondering about my worth. I don’t need a mall full of strangers to help me feel like I’m wrong or gross, I can wake up on any given day and find a million pieces of evidence for that. Probably about every other month I’m looking directly at that feeling, that I am not enough. There’s proof in how the world reacts or doesn’t react to me, there’s proof in how much less I have, there’s proof in the coldness I see in those who are meant to love me. I can try to prove my worth through many things- fame, achievement, money, thinness…I can fill the hole of not being enough with even more popcorn chicken, Labatt Blue 10.1, dissociating to The Challenge. I’ve done all of it, and I still cling to the grease-stained bag and find evidence of being unworthy.
Unworthy of what? Of love? Of life itself? It’s so sad, so deeply sad that I don’t feel my worthiness is intrinsic- because of course it is. Within me is my 18-year-old self- hopelessly in love with my best friend, and shaming myself terribly for loving her. Within me is my 14-year-old self- having my first orgasm while living with a pedophile. Within me is my 8-year-old self – lying in my diary about having 2% milk and winning the school talent show. Within me is my 6-month-old self- seeing everything for the first time, unable to move, at the mercy of giants with warm eyes. Of course these girls are worthy- they are pure and messy and complicated and filled with pain, and they are worthy. So perhaps my 35-year-old self is worth shifting my perspective, perhaps there is a feeling within- untouched by how the world does or doesn’t react to me? Perhaps beyond all the jadedness and wounds and ego that have been built by being bashed around, there is a light? Perhaps the exact same light within everyone, within every person in Centro Commerciale Sicilia, near Catania? Our defenses build up in curious ways, sometimes they lead us to find coldness in someone’s eyes that confirms we’re unworthy, sometimes they lead us to be repulsed by a passing stranger. The symptoms differ; the sickness is the same. I cannot control a lot, but I can remind myself of that same light. That I have little sparks deep inside me, that are eternal, and intrinsic. I feel them right now, and it helps me remember they’re within every person, even the ones who seem cruel. Our armor is like a cloud, and beneath it is a sun. I will try as hard as I can to love that sun, even when I can’t feel its warmth, wherever it may be.
