I was at this college party back when I was in my early twenties and an attractive girl who knew me from Introduction to Art class walked up to me, not because she liked me, but because she needed to get something off her chest. She said, “I need to tell you something. You’re not the kind of person people gravitate to. You have this face that makes people feel stupid and you look like you’re always inhaling foul odors.”
Then keeping her head turned toward me, she walked backwards across the room and put her arm around this evenly tanned guy who was the type of person presumably free of my sour expression and she smiled contemptuously at me as if to say, “See you later, loser.” And to add to the insult, she made this scrunched-up face at me as if being in my presence had afflicted her with a dark cloud of stench and now she was leaving that stench and entering a more fragrant world where everyone smiled at each other because everyone smelled like fresh lilac.
I was stunned by the raw disdain she expressed toward me and I was equally stunned by the truth that I didn’t want to hear: I do have a way of looking at people like I’m judging them severely and that I’m smelling foul odors from them as if I disapprove of their entire existence. And sometimes I really do feel that way, but the expression is more often than not has little to do with judging others but more with a sense of general desperation that consumes me. I am desperate for answers about the problems of death and existence that always seem in short supply. I am desperate for courage and confidence and identity, but these things also remain scarce. My face therefore isn’t of a man disapproving of others but of a man who disapproves of life itself.
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