Self-Acceptance: David and Me

Throughout the class, I had a hard time working up the confidence to express my thoughts and experiences. It amazed me how some of the students opened up, completely exposing their vulnerability and experiences. Like my seven billion fellow humans on the planet, I have my secrets and insecurities. I thought it extremely brave of these students to face their obstacles so fearlessly and proudly. So, that being said, I welcome you into my seldom-shared thoughts for the remainder of this paper.  

                                                                                                                                                

“Eat.”

“You don’t need to.” (The familiar voice assures me with its sneering, painful remarks.)

“Eat!”

“Stop it.”

“Eat! Eat! Eat!”

“You are disgusting, you can’t eat. STOP EATING!”

(My stomach begs, but my brain does not comply.)

115 lbs, 110 lbs, 100 lbs… Keep going.

“You have to do something about yourself now or else no one will ever like you. What have you got going for you? Let me enlighten you. Look at yourself. You’re dumb, talentless and ugly. You can’t focus in school. You struggle to make a C. You can’t even keep a boyfriend. You simply aren’t good enough. Why waste their time with you when they can find someone prettier, smarter and better? YOU MESS EVERYTHING UP!”

Restrictions. Obsessions. Anxieties.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Everything.” (The voice re-visits with more reassurance.)

“I’ll work out, I’ll stop eating. I will do anything to feel better about myself.”

“You will be skinny and lovely and all of your problems will go away. Nothing else will matter because you will have reached your goal. You will have perfection at last, I promise.”

(I’m assured.)

Blood, sweat, tears. Lots of tears.

“You’ll never be good enough. Every other girl can be intelligent, thin and perfect. All of that work and this is the best you can do? What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything.” (This time the voice doesn’t have to say anything.)

                                                                                                                                               

Would you be friends with someone who told you these things? Would you love someone who hates themselves? I hope the answer is no. So why do so many of us talk to ourselves like one of our worst enemies would? Why do we hate ourselves and why do we convince ourselves that we need to be someone we aren’t?

Immediately upon reading Giovanni’s Room, I hated David. He is selfish, egotistical, stubborn and exceptionally good at running from his problems. He hates himself and can’t accept who he is; he is a lost soul. But as I reflected more on David after finishing Giovanni’s Room, I reached a very hard realization: I am David. This may seem a little over-the-top, but I have had my many issues with self-acceptance as well. At the very beginning of Giovanni’s Room, as David looks back on everything he has learned from his time in Paris, David says,” I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France” (21).

            Though I may not have hopped on a plane to France and gallivanted around Paris with a beautiful Italian man to escape my reality, I too have been lost. What pained me the most was the fact that David was so ashamed of himself and his homosexuality. He loved Giovanni. That’s just how he is, so why fight it? Giovanni puts it perfectly when he finally sees through David’s cold, emotionless exterior when David says he is leaving him for Hella: “You are not leaving me for her…you are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies” (140), “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink…You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities…Look, look what you have done to me” (141). The more he believes his own lies, the more he sinks into a destructive downward spiral. Like David, there was a time when I was so unhappy with myself that I tried desperately to be someone else. I felt pressure to reach the goals I thought were expected of me. I became my own worst critic, internalizing my frustrations. I became as cold and detached as David. In my mind, I wanted to get rid of all of my flaws so I could be perfect. The malicious voice inside my head that filled me with discouragement was the same one that motivated me to try harder and be better. I began to feel Gollum from Lord of the Rings; I was going crazy and arguing with myself. This forced me down a miserable path. All of that hard work trying to achieve perfection while running from a person I convinced myself to hate created a vicious cycle of disappointment for me. I would criticize myself, starve, deny I had a problem, and repeat it all over again when I found I still wasn’t satisfied.

            David says on page 21 that he always knew (despite his attempts at ignoring it) that he could not live his life pretending to be what his father and the rest of society thought he should be. I knew deep down from the start that I would always be Peri Nicole Boylan no matter how much I wished I wasn’t, even though I felt by society’s standards I was not smart enough, pretty enough or good enough. I couldn’t avoid being me forever. The journey of trying to prove myself wrong only set me back. While David starved for an answer to finding himself I starved to reach perfection. Though our problems may seem worlds apart from each other, the results are the same. If you can’t learn to accept yourself for who you are, it will only lead to unhappiness in the long run.

Now a few years later and little bit wiser I have been able to take a step back and tackle my insecurities head on (with much help from family, councilors and best friends). As I sit here eating my tasty Pita Pit pita I can happily say that I am who I have always been and will always be and I don’t need to try and change that, only improve in a healthy way. I would like to imagine that after the last page of Giovanni’s Room, David’s story continues and ends the same way my story did. I hope he found peace with himself and began to allow himself to love freely and openly without thinking something is wrong with him.

While some days aren’t as easy as others and I still have to face a few struggles here and there, I push through just like everyone else battling their problems. What is life if you can’t be comfortable in your own skin? It’s exhausting trying to be someone you’re not. You have to do what feels right for you. Too much perfection is an imperfection in itself. There is so much more to life.