This is currently a one-shot, but it may become a beginning.
It's funny, but did you ever notice that the things that define us are often not the parts of us that we think about most? What we dwell upon is ultimately glossed over in others' minds, and the things we never question, the things that are just as intuitive to us as sleeping and eating, are exactly our qualities that make people hate us or befriend us or love us. Unless, of course, we dwell upon our lesser characteristics so strongly that our character itself is obscured.
Most people don't know the feeling, but there are certain types who are forced and who force themselves to crawl into this feeling and live there, curled up, shuddering and pathetic. Anyone who has an eating disorder knows that anything good and right and redeeming about them is completely overshadowed by their horrible, bloated, undisciplined body, and further by the skeletality they are dimly aware of imposing on themselves, and further still by their adopting this knowledge as a mindset and clinging to it through pain and fear and shame. Addicts, too - they know that their hollow eyes, their pathetic self-rationalizations are all anyone sees of them anymore.
Those who have recovered from these states treasure every moment of the feeling many take for granted, that peace, that stillness, finally landing after plummeting non-stop for years. They fight to bring back who they really are, and the calm after the battle is made far sweeter by the constant presence of the pit they've scrambled out of, the pit that is now negative reinforcement, urging the forward motion of recovery to keep out of its clutches.
And then there is me. I know the feeling, too. It is a fierce awakeness, a blazing, heartening bitterness like hot black tea. I look at photographs of myself as a miserably awkward teenager and realize that, while I haven't aged much since them, I look like I've grown up. I don't need floppy, unstylishly overgrown hair to hide my eyes from everyone. I no longer feel stalked by malicious laughter. No one laughs at my forgetfulness anymore, and with my terror of forgetting gone, my inability to remember has regressed to the level of a mere quirk.
The funny thing about each of these changes is that all I had to do was discover something, for one small tumbler, one lock in my mind to click into place, and suddenly another mark of self-imposed inferiority became only a memory.
It all started with one change like this, one turn of a key, one lifting of a curtain I hadn't known was there. The tumbler in the lock was immensely tiny, so small that it went entirely unnoticed, probably because most people were lucky enough never to need it.
Even now, I don't know exactly how I stumbled upon it, or when, or why, and how I made it turn is even further beyond me. I know only that it must have happened, and that because I am only too able to turn back and hide again, I am determined, I am convicted, that I never will.