That Awkward Moment When...

You realise you've been embarrassing yourself every day for a solid three months and didn't even know about it.

It all started at the beggining of Summer when I started a job at my Dad's office. It was a lot of fun for the first week or so, then boredom set in. And it set in hard. Fortunately, it didn't take me long to accidentaly discover one fun thing about the job: the bathroom.

Yes, the bathroom. You see, it was covered in floor to ceiling tile, which meant that the accoustics were horrible in the best possible way. Every little sound echoed and magnified itself. Of course, being me, I had the immediate urge to try singing. And so I did, and it was amazing.

So then I started lingering after my bathroom break to sing and hear my voice sound approximately one billion and three times more intense than usual. Then I started going in just to sing. Because, hey, the song that was playing on my ipod ROCKED and I TOTALLY NEEDED to sing along. No one would hear me, anyway.

Or so I thought.

I should have figured it out when I was walking across the parking lot one day and a coworker complimented me on my voice. Unfortunately, I happened to be singing along to my ipod at the time, so even though I didn't think I was singing all that loudly, I figured he'd heard me.

I finally did figure it out about a week before I was due to quit. I was walking past the bathroom when I heard two women inside talking. The bathroom wasn't soundproof. I seriously wanted to die. And that's the story of my life's most embarrassing moment.

Illusion: Shattered.

So, I found out something pretty mind blowing recently.

I've been self conscious about being shy for so long. In high school I just basically gave up on the idea of ever being actually liked by the people I hung out with. I'd just be tolerated. After all, that's all some one as awkward as myself was capable of. I just got used to being lonely.

I got to university, and it seemed like I'd actually made a couple friends. At first, I wouldn't let myself believe that people actually wanted to get to know me. I told myself that they just talked to me because I hung out with people who they actually liked.

But then yesterday, I skipped hanging out with my friends during my break to study for a midterm. I was still so used to just being tolerated that I figured they probably wouldn't miss me for a day. It was a couple hours later when I was talking to one of them and he asked where I'd been that morning that it hit me: I was actually missed. Which could only mean one thing: I was liked enough to be missed.

Needless to say I was thrilled. It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe I'm not as utterly unlikable as I've convinced myself that I am. The funhouse mirror that I'd look in to see a timid, awkward, generally hurting version of myself had been shattered. In its place were all the memories of feeling unwanted that I'd repressed and now had to reconstruct.

Looking back at the past five years, it's just crazy to me just how elaborate a lie I'd constructed for myself in order to keep that mirror, that false perception of reality, alive. People used to smile at me in the hallways out of pity. People would say hi to me because I looked lonely and it seemed like the right thing to do. Nobody knew or even cared who I was. All were lies I had told myself and believed. It makes me angry at myself to think that I thought I was smart, and yet, I was never able to put 2 and 2 together enough to realise that perhaps, just maybe, people were nice to me because they actually wanted to be.

On the plus side, now that my cycle of thinking so poorly of myself has officially been broken, I'll probably be a lot more confident from now on. :)

What I'd Forgotten About University

Post-Haircut Weirdness

So I did something today that I've always wanted to do.

I cut my hair really, really short. I went from about ten inches long to a pixie cut.

I kind of figured that if I hated it, I could just go buy a wig to wear until it grows out. Luckily, it looks awesome (I'm not saying it to brag, but I just love my new look).

However, there's some weirdness that comes with a really dramatic makeover. First, there's the feeling that there's something missing up there. Your head just feels lighter. It sounds really weird, but it's true. Then there's the fact that your brain still expects the hair to be there after it's gone. I only came home from the salon about four hours ago, and I've caught myself reaching for my non-existant ponytail once already. Also, people stare. I forget that I've had my hair cut until some one walks into the room and stares at me.

But the weirdest thing has to be how much I've stared at myself. I can't help but stare at any reflective surface: mirrors, windows, the powered down computer screen. It's just so weird. Honestly, I can't even describe how weird it is to look at yourself in the mirror after a big makeover. You have to experience it. The closest thing I can say is that it's like you don't recognize your reflection. It's like "Hey! Who's that person wearing my clothes?...oh yeah." maybe not exactly. Like I said, you have to experience it to know what I mean.

Hopefully I'll get used to this soon, I'm getting kind of sick of having these out of body experiences with the mirror; it's creeping me out just a little... :S