Is there any rat infestation you are not aware of?

Long back, I had realised that I do not consider myself conventionally pretty looking. Last year, during one of the conversations with my friends, she tried convincing me so hard that I asked her to give up. I was not going to get convinced. I had decided that I wasn’t pretty and never will be. I couldn’t tell her then but I have known since a long time that I have always tried to compensate for not looking pretty.

As a child, I would always try and get into helping anyone and everyone.

I turned myself into a role of a nerd or a mother and got mocked and laughed at myself. I never realised that that had at least some of its roots in the compensation or overcompensation for not looking pretty.

Then, there was a time when I started telling myself that looking pretty wasn’t important and considered that girlish and called myself not a girl and was proud of that fact.

I didn’t have any issues with gender identity. I just didn’t want to get into becoming pretty. That was something I was not and I was convinced that I never would be. So, I decided to learn everything that I could. I ended up learning and developing more as a person. The quest that started in overcompensation, ended in being independent.

However, I hit a roadblock here!

It was a great thing that I was independent. There was one thing pricking me like crazy though. Why was I feeling lonely?

I became independent not by wanting to be independent. It was an escape route. I had chosen to be independent to avoid social judgement and take away the right from society to see me in any context that was familiar. I was successful partially. I created my own world and lost myself into it. But that was the thing. I LOST myself into it. Was it good enough if you lost yourself in the process of avoiding society? For me, that was not good enough.

Then, a process of reacquainting myself with myself started. That process has opened so many new doors for me. This process has made me realise that how an inferiority complex can develop without any warning and how it can have several routes in your psyche.

I became best friend with my loneliness. It stopped bothering me. I started developing newer and finer coping skills and became more aware and observant than before.

But do I consider myself pretty? No. I don’t. I would never describe myself as pretty or do anything to make myself look pretty in the conventional sense. I still look at everything related to grooming as skill to acquire to live peacefully and most importantly independently in society. I don’t see anything wrong with it until and unless I am aware of the same.

I recently had a rat infestation. I learned a very important lesson from that. It is okay to have rat infestation if you are aware of it. If you do not know about it, you also do not know what it may eat away.

So, I am okay with this condition.

My only questions to all the people out there is: Is there any rat infestation you are not aware of???