Imagine that you were robbed. Not today, not right this minute, but that you were robbed. I guess that correctly you have been robbed; it's happened multiple times. That you were shoved into a dark alley, pushed against a wall, and told to hand over your money, which you did. Imagine that you didn't scream. Imagine that you did, and it didn't change anything. Imagine this happening multiple times, times where you said "No, I don't want to give you my money" and they walked away while you stood dumbfounded at your success; times when you said the exact same words and they took something more valuable, something harder to replace than money. Imagine you were robbed in Prague and didn't even know it until the next day, and people told you to carry your money in another pocket, travel in groups, or don't travel at all. They got your camera too that time, all those memories taken from you. Imagine that you have friends who were robbed at gunpoint and so when it finally gets to the point where you are able to talk about the times you've been robbed you feel like: well, yes, I was definitely robbed, but they were more robbed. You try not to make these comparisons out loud in the company of people who were robbed; you try not to make the comparisons in front of many people at all. Are there degrees of violation? You had something that you did not want to give someone else and they took it from you and that was not fair and the unfairness of it is the part of the conversation that is interesting. It seems like a lot of people who were never robbed have ideas about what it means but that's okay, you know what you know, and your friends know too. Imagine that someone comes at sits at the table with you and your friends. Imagine them describing having put a dollar on the table and someone picked it up. Were they robbed? Is it even the same word; can it be. Probably it's the same, probably it feels the same. I was robbed, she insists. Sure. In your mind, you're back in that alley, a strong hand at your throat, rats chattering around you, and all you want to be is anywhere but there. So if you want to know how this feels, if you want to know what I think, imagine that. 

Here in the center there is a girl who is dancing exactly the way she is supposed to. The directions are given and she follows them. She's doing what's expected and she knows she is because everyone is laughing, everyone is delighted. She dances more and more, harder and harder, to please the people. If they like a little, they will like a lot. You can see her thinking this, or you imagine you can. Stick your tongue out, say the words, and she sticks it all the way out, she wants to do well, she wants to please, she wants everyone to be happy. When they are happy, that is like being loved. She looks ridiculous, but they keep laughing and she keeps going. Behind her there is another child who isn't moving, who doesn't know how or doesn't want to follow directions. That's okay. Some people love music differently. When she looks over her shoulder she sees that behind her there is another child who dances a little, but not as well as our girl does, since nobody is cheering for her. Probably she gets love another way. It's later then that she notices the child next to her. The child next to her is covering her face. In her exuberance at being the center of attention she has failed to notice what falls outside the circle, and what falls outside the circle is crying. 

In this story you are the girl who is dancing. In this story you are the child who is not dancing, which is also an option. In this story you are the grandmother, laughing with delight, sharing the video with friends with famous people; "what a little actress!" you say. In this story you are the child who is crying.

There is delight and absence, there is laughter and there are tears. There's a lot of empathy for those feelings; you have a lot of empathy. What you don't understand is why nobody is comforting the child covering her face, why she's in the front row when she clearly doesn't want to be there. Surely there are adults making decisions here: a decision to put her there, made worse by decisions to film it, decisions to not help. You think of other situations where children are filmed and nobody helps. Can you imagine that? You find that you cannot. You wonder if it's the same kinds of people all the time, and you find that you suspect that it is. 

I sat next to fat people and thin people and medium people and I never took the elbow rest even though I thought a few times that maybe I deserved it. I figured out a way to drink beer and not get sick. I saw the ocean and swam in a pool which is thoroughly the opposite of what I would expect of myself. I thought a lot about what makes me laugh, and I laughed over and over. I cried a fair bit, though less than usual. I lived in the moments I was in, mostly. I watched a goodly amount of excellent television and a little not so good television. I bought a coat and boots and sweaters and went to cold places twice, on purpose. I ate so many oysters — so much seafood in general, as if the ocean was working to delight me and it was my job to be delighted. I was. I ate in front of a fireplace and my face and my heart were equally warm. I spent a day in beautiful and strange places I hadn't been, dimly recalling a language I had once been fluent in. I drove past animals and listened to Christian music that I didn't immediately recognize, then turned the radio off in horror and sang all the words to the songs I can still remember from those stretches of California that don't have radio stations. Cole Porter. Eurythmics. I tried to talk to you but you had headphones on. I slept in rooms without curtains, rooms without windows, rooms without heat, rooms without beds. Mostly I slept under quilts. I interacted with pets and generally enjoyed it. I watched someone being eaten alive by a feeling and finally understood that I do the same thing: it's not eating until you're full but eating like a fire that will consume as long as you feed it. I rode back and forth on the ferry and bought neither apples nor pears but was perfectly happy. I saw people I have loved in various intensities and at a range of distances for decades, and loved them more purely and simply and closely than ever. I did so many of my favorite things. I drank up all your wine.

I remember one time when I was a teenager wailing to my mother that I was sooooo ugly. And she told me, "it's more important to be smart than pretty." Which I understood, with the kind of self absorption that only a 15 year old with acne and a big nose can command: Even my own mother thinks I am ugly.

I think I was in my early thirties before I understood that she meant: beauty will not serve you as well as thinking will. Before I understood that she meant that I was smart.

In the meantime, in my teens and twenties, I vacillated so hard in my perception of my looks that I was probably a little crazy. I know I've talked about this before but it's just so weird to look at pictures and remember how awful I felt, so much of the time. On the one hand, people, particularly men, seemed to like to look at me. I watched a man at the gas station turn around to look at me and crash into a wall, pure slapstick. On the other hand, I had boyfriends who regularly told me that I was fat, that my face was weirdly lopsided, that I wasn't pretty enough to love. A woman stopped me on the street to tell me I could be attractive if I would just make a little effort. I got to a point where anything that might have been positive felt negative, like I felt even if someone said I looked nice it was from pity. I thought that anybody who looked at me would have looked at Joseph Merrick in the same way, I felt like anybody who touched me did so the way they might pet a snake. Some days I couldn't leave the house because I felt so guilty about inflicting myself on people. When I did get out, I apologized to people for my Cyrano nose, my horse teeth, my peasant's ankles, for freckles, until I had made perfectly sure that was all they saw. 

In my thirties, I had Squire, and a few things happened. One, I had a person in my daily life who did not care a bit how I looked. Two, I was way too tired to be thinking about my looks so damn much. Three, I got a job on the internet that meant nobody was looking at me and they truly only cared about how well I did my job.

This is when I came to understand my mother's words, finally.

And when I hit my forties, I noticed that some of my friends, friends who were deeply pretty in high school, were taking the aging process really hard. I was in my prime, mentally, and the fact that I was in decline physically was comparatively nothing to me. Wrinkles? Mostly laugh lines. Grey hair? I couldn't wait. I had the intellect now to avoid mirrors too well lit or people who negged me; I even had the word neg in my vocabulary. Sure, there were still moments, like the time someone came up to me on the beach and told me I was so brave for wearing a bathing suit in public. And sometimes I had my moments of self-doubt that I made all by myself. But for the most part I was busy figuring out what I could do with my brain and having a much better time of it. In the course of this I came to realize how incredibly boring talking about being ugly is. Oh, it's so so so boring, it's worse than talking about the weather. 

So now I'm fifty. To be honest I'm sometimes surprised at the extent to which vanity creeps in — I got permanent eyeliner, and that's really the least of it. Tattoos are transformative. It's like most other things, I guess — it's a lot easier to play in the water once you've learned how to swim. It still comes back, this wave of horror, and even just a month ago I had a minute where I couldn't breathe for fear of being pulled under it. But it's a receding wave, it's no longer likely to drown me. Also when I got enough white hair to justify it I bleached the rest of my hair to match it, all platinum, and listen to what wikipedia says about that: It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Indeed it is. We are.