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“When you were here before
Couldn’t look you in the eye
You’re just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You’re so f*ckin’ special.”

~ Radiohead, “Creep” 

“Your skin makes me cry” is one of my favorite verses ever heard in a song.

When I look at a face, my attention almost instinctively is focused on the fine area under the eyes, where this soft and vulnerable skin shows all that tiredness in puffiness, some thin lines, or dark circles. No one is conscious of that feature, making it seem so authentic and inevitable.

Not being conscious about the thin lines under the eyes is easy, right? But not being conscious about the whole load of thoughts about what is wrong with us sometimes (or always), is that easy?

And speaking about wrong, it could be the way we show our emotions when we don’t want to. I know it firsthand. My subtle facial expressions and eyebrow micro-movements feel like a mirror of my soul; my voice loses its temper, and then, I feel that I am seen through the X-rays soul-screening-eyes of our universe’s collective consciousness. It’s more funny than serious, I should say.

I’ll never forget, when I was a teenager, I struggled quite a lot to find my personal style, and that made me feel weird—like I would not fit. One particular day that I was really haunted by that idea, when I left the classroom, a boy with really tired eyes, came up to me with a cassette tape in his hands. He handed it to me and ran away as if he was ashamed of speaking to me.

The cassette was a compilation tape with mind-blowing love songs. I was in shock. What? I was being seen? He had a secret crush on me and I had no single clue as I was sunken in my thoughts of self-doubt. He was really cute, I noticed.

I could make a salad with all the things that make people feel weird (i.e. a body feature or the way someone loves “uncool” stuff—the list goes on forever and ever).

Now, try to imagine a perfect-looking person raised in a perfectly unweird family in a fantastic home, a person leading a perfect career, gaining a lot of money, and an overachiever all together with his perfectly shaped wife and his cute twins. Let’s be honest, isn’t this the weirdest thing you’ve ever imagined?

Did it cross your mind that this could be the setting of a mind-blowing terror movie? Yeah, mine too. Because this perfection does not fit humanity. It is not sustainable; it just exhausts and rips human souls apart. Perfection is a construction of the imperfect human mind that tries to fit people into metric systems in order to become measurable and expendable. Bonjour tristesse! Count me out, please.

So, let’s comfort each other by allowing this common humanity weirdness, and let’s go through life while not giving a sh*t about how others see us because second-guessing is a terrible waste of time and our souls meet outside social norms.

The cassette tape story fits us all, I promise. Celebrate this breathing body by allowing it to express itself, and please, don’t forget to sing along when “Creep” is on the radio, because the song is out and loud and gracious (and everybody loves it).