i have no idea what i look like.

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Every single time that I come home and I look in a mirror, it's a surprise. Every single time it is new. I feel like this video is important for me to make for you viewer as you digitally interact with me. It's this fact that I simply do not know what I look like. Not in any objective sense. And I know no one really knows truly how they're perceived, but I think it's beyond that.

[00:00:24]Like there's one thing to have your own self-image. And I think I used to have these constructions of a self-image in certain areas of my life. And as my hair would change and as I would get older, the self-image would update would but would still exist continuously. But I think for the past 2 years, that has no longer been the case.

[00:00:47]As soon as the camera is off, as soon as that I'm I'm not here, and as soon as there's no longer like a mirror for me to see myself, I genuinely am going to be so honest with you. I do not know what I look like. As soon as I walk out the door, it's almost like a memory that, you know, slips in one ear, out the other, like it's it's just gone. My my sense of of what I appear like disappears. And this is not a video necessarily about like body dysmorphia or anything like that. I think it has to more has to do with the way that my sense of self is contingent upon my exterior and that I don't have access to that exterior all the time. Right? So I think the problem is that for me every single sense of life is a variable that can be optimized. There's everything like anything that you do and anything that you live in can be isolated and optimized to be perceived by others as better, right? And so for you to then be a better person. And I think this problem is that a lot of my hopes and fears and drives and and senses of self relies upon some things that I can't control, which is other people's perceptions, right?

[00:01:57]And so specifically, it's like being someone who's been online and just someone who exists in this like lived experience. Let's be sociological, okay?

[00:02:08]As someone who lives in the kind of lived experience I do, being how I am and how I look, I've just gained this consciousness that the way that you p you are perceived can often times in social situations and in the world in this hierarchy that life beggets, the way that you are perceived by other people can in fact very well become more important than how you see yourself. And knowing this fact, right, I didn't just take that as like a variable, like a like a knowledge nugget, you know, I didn't just take that as like, okay, this is something to inform my decisions. I took this as a truth that began to completely change the way that I acted. Like for a long time, I realized that I wanted to be accepted.

[00:02:56]For a long time, I realized I wanted to be loved. And because I couldn't conceptualize this fact that the world is perceiving me on the basis of some invisible standard, I noticed that the way that I was treated growing up in elementary school and middle school was not what I wanted.

[00:03:13]As soon as I kind of had this truth that the way that you are perceived is more true than how you feel or even oftentimes the kindness with which you act. As soon as I learned that, that became my guiding principle, I think. And I just started to lose myself like at a young age. I remember the the day like it was in sixth grade when I started to realize that there was this thing that was being attached to me, this label weird, right, that would cause me to become even more invisible than I'd already felt in social interactions.

[00:03:52]Like I remembered that in, you know, different classes and whatever, some people just would instantly come in the room and even if they weren't, you know, already in a friend group with certain people, they would find people that would pay them attention or, you know, converse with them just for the sake of being in the same class. But I noticed that for myself that wasn't the case.

[00:04:12]And all these variables just started to become really clear to me. And I realized that it all had to do with the way that I was perceived. And ever since then, the things that I truly liked became extremely irrelevant compared to optimizing to be perceived a certain way. I remember like crafting a whole new wardrobe, going on Amazon, getting the red lifeguard sweatshirt. I remember um buying these like really weird long like horse riding boots that all these girls liked in my grade. and being and even though I had all these parcels like all of these, you know, exterior, you know, props to me that would help me be perceived better. I I would I would hoard them in my closet. Like I would have these couple things that I bought and I still wouldn't be able to wear them because I still didn't perceive myself as worthy enough. Right? Like I thought that like to be associated with this normaly thing, there still had to be something that about me that was normal and I just didn't feel like I was that way, let alone that people perceived me that way. So I didn't let myself I still didn't even have like this perception of myself that could be perceived as normal and I wouldn't even let myself improve on that even by these arbitrary standards that were given to me. So, like, ever since this point in middle school where I started to just like throw away the things that I actually liked because I just didn't even see why it was important anymore, I think I started to lose this like continuous sense of who I am. I think I started to lose this continuous sense of what I am to myself. You know, this idea of proving something to myself or the standard being my own never sat right with me because all of my goals relied on this exterior. all of my goals and all that I whatever relied on other people. You know what I'm trying to say?

[00:06:08]Like I I thought of the world as this big oyster to be accepted by, right? I thought of the world as something that I needed to prove myself to and often change myself for. And so like everything that was valuable depended on other people.

[00:06:26]And now that I'm realizing that I was doing this for so long, I think I realized first last year, I I've been trying to crack at this egg and bring back this person that existed inside me that has been gone for so long and I'm still just barely like peeling this hard-boiled egg.

[00:06:50]So now it's just to the point where I walk outside and because I see my body as a data point, I just cannot for the life of me fathom what the hell I look like. I literally I'm telling you right now, it feels like a blackout. Feels like when you're trying to recall a memory. I'll be walking outside. I'll be 5t from my building and all of a sudden, boom, that image of myself in the mirror is distorted and gone. And it's like I'll come back home after this full day of holding my body weirdly and like tensing and you know all this kind of stuff, right? Because I have this warp perception of how I'm appearing. I come back home and I think why did you not stand tall with like confidence? Like I'll come back home and just instantly see the mirror and think you are so long and elegant. Like you are so beautiful in ways that like you can't fathom that other people see too.

[00:07:45]That's the problem. I feel like for me, I walk into a room and the the the sense of self is immediately, you know, muddied by just all the different energies in the room.

[00:07:58]Like when I hear these sounds of these sirens, guys, do you want me to tell you what it feels like?

[00:08:06]It feels like I want like right here there's like a spark. It feels like whatever a neuron looks like and it's just hurting me every time I hear these sirens outside. I just wanted to clarify that to anybody who was wondering how I feel about sirens. Anyway, it's like these other energies in a room that I'm in completely cloud my sense of who I am. Like there's not enough space in my head for all these other energies in the room and clocking how they're thinking and my perception of who I am. Like it should be it should be lived in like my sense of myself and this continuity of like worth and beauty should be lived into the point where I don't even have to consciously think about the fact that I am appearing and operating normally. But because it's not lived in because for so long I was acting without a self locus.

[00:08:55]I was just acting as like a almost like picture myself and my internal state as like an individual who is frantic and grabbing at other like grabbing papers, right? Grabbing things to collect to make them seem legitimate. Like I felt like constantly like this, like constantly grabbing and constantly searching. Constantly searching for something to fill myself because I've emptied outside of myself, my internal world and who I was because she just wasn't pretty enough and because she just wasn't valuable to that environment. Like you could have thought of me as like almost like a multicolored [ __ ] like I mean freaking I feel like I was just this like multicolored tie-dye, you know, little speck in a sea of white, brown, and blue, and, you know, just very monotone.

[00:09:54]That was kind of like my town. People just wore the same things. People just look the same and act the same. And for some reason, that signaled more value to me because other people were doing it. I've always been an other people person. I've always been an other people person and that has not helped me in any regard. It has dimmed my light and now I'm scared that I will lose this light because of that fact that I'm in other people's person that I am someone who truly cares about the consensus and love. There's something about a group of people and the variety in that and the everything in that that attracts me because I think there's something like an everything inside of myself that wants to be expressed every single color of the rainbow, right? I feel like I take like I I can meet so many people and see myself here and there and there and there. I know everybody can do this, but it's like there's something about a group of people and the collective and it's validation and all of that. Like I value so much. So I feel like that is where a lot of my problems have extended because instead of just kind of keeping that in the empathy realm, I become this like projection of other people that I'm around. I noticed it today like I was in class and I had like this acting final and everyone was in this class just more free and chill. No one is judging each other. So suddenly I start to dance and start to do things that just like I would never do reflecting the people that I'm around. And it's just like, yeah, I feel like I'm constantly like whenever I see like whenever I'm outside, I constantly am like in this position where I'm looking at everyone else, I'm always in a corner and there's space between me and other people. Like there's always this bubble I notice. And like when I look through my eyes and I look at the scene around me, every single time there's at least like a one foot bubble between me and everything else and it's constantly like and it's everything is at my view, right? Almost for me to like observe and analyze all the time. This is just the way that I think that like I am oriented as an individual and it's caused me somehow to not know what I look like. I dissolve even though I'm still very much present.

[00:12:16]you know what I'm trying to say in social situations.

[00:12:19]So, if anyone feels like that, I hope that this helps you. And just nobody cares about what other people think.

[00:12:26]Stop checking. Stop looking.

[00:12:28][sighs] Yeah.