I’ve spent years just as addicted to this idealized notion of attraction, and of being attractive. Of being different, of High School bullies, of years of loneliness, self-inflicted AND sometimes involuntary, and all that and so forth, though I don’t have a hate for anyone, cause I’m a frigging adult and I no longer need anyone’s approval.

For a long time, I seemed to be always looking over my shoulder, wondering at what people thought of me, what they said about me, if they noticed me at all, shy that I’ve always been. Maybe a bit of the scars left over from High School, but whatever. I was very quiet, almost demure, insignificant, trying to fade into the background. To be the observer, not the observed.

At times oblivious to any part of me that could be considered anything but fat and ugly, and all those other left-over bits from those 10 years with my ex-husband, slowly rotting away on the inside as I discovered that his love of me had, alas, only run skin deep.

In fact faux beauty, I suppose, was all he desired. He liked the mask, the me he had created in his mind, and not the real me that hid inside my shell, not confident in its value.

I know something of beauty as well, I can’t deny it. I was the pretty baby, cherub-cheeked, long-lashed blue-eyed one who was told this so often as I grew up that I’d be dense not to at the very least be appreciative of this truth, regardless of my perspective at any given time. Means nothing though if all that gets chipped away via vice and vanity, believing the opinions of those who do not see your value.

However, I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me, and some more years so hyper-conscious that I sank into a depression of sadness and loneliness. Yet still out hunting the snark as if some mysterious ‘other’ was going to fix this broken ugly spirit that still clung to me.

And still, I thought I knew what I was supposed to want, supposed to need and that there was some male other to complete me out there, somewhere. That’s what I had been told. You know? Some live in master of my body that never, in truth, ever satisfied my mind, the cerebral sort that I am. One after the other, some in short stints, some longer, but never staying long enough again to wound me so deeply.

Even now, today, it has only really been maybe two years since I put down my mask, acknowledged the addiction I’d had to beauty and the importance I had placed in these intangible things I had desired for so long, until I realized that every single time I had got it I became bored with it.

And, these other men that admire that man’s action in Toronto, admire his killing spree, they identify with his anger and blame all women for all the lonely hours they spend, sneering at the happy couples, the beautiful people, hand in hand. There they are, denied this, and it’s all women’s fault.

Well, isn’t that convenient? Isn’t it nice and easy to just blame everyone else for your belief in something that is as artificial as a porn star!

If one’s a duck, why try to be the swan? Seems rather daft.

Because there are those of us who have never fit within those tightly controlled standards and we don’t go on killing sprees. Never felt at home in the skin we were supposed to want to inhabit, flawless, curvy this way and not that way, the colouring, the size, the shape of it, modified from one decade to the next to taste, but always a standard model. Yet, some never fit, never could, never would, never maybe even wanted to. Who cares?

What you decide to concentrate on, you will get more of.

Give out hate like it’s mana from heaven? Well, you had better expect a good and big helping back at ya.

So when I look in the mirror, I don’t see what others see, saw, I just saw me, and always there was someone, some model in my own mind’s eye that I never lived up to. All I saw were the flaws, never my face and its truths. I’m no different. We are all unique. All the walking wounded, in our own way, can’t avoid it once you get to a certain age.

Because, in fact, those men who believe themselves to be involuntarily celibate are remaining in the child-mind state, allowing for the definition hashed out in High School to be the be-all-and-end-all. At some point, we are supposed to grow beyond our childish notions of what we think we deserve and recognize what we actually have is of far more value to us.

For those artificial facades hide the monsters that lie within our childish notions, eventually becoming the weakness that destroys, languishing in the collective basements, joystick in hand, of our parents, and never emotionally moving out of that mindstate. An addiction to the vulgar nakedness of some idealized icon of feminity, harbouring a diseased mind concentrated solely on what they are not.

Its all a trick, you know. A mask they, that shadow they that reside within, planted by many microcosmic of microcosmic seeds of sameness, born out of a desire to label and define everything we see, to be just the same as everyone else, and ignoring the quiet voice inside us that sometimes says…but, I’m not that, or I can not be that, am I still ok?

That I was not made in the perfect model of bog-standard beauty, as my hair turns grey and my teeth fall out, one by one become the monster I feared for so long.

And hence am not deserving of love and affection? Poppycock! Ride around long enough on that path and you’ll just find yourself going round and round like the stinking gases of Uranus.

So, in fact, it is pity I feel for those who feel such anger towards a whole swash of society they think has done them wrong, as they choose to believe these gross standards, choose hatred, live within the vile and ugliness they have learned to wallow within, unable to see that they’ve been tricked into wanting something that is fake, a faux, a lie.

That’s the real conspiracy.