The Art of Pretension

Someone recently asked me why I'm pretentious.

Should I have been annoyed? They said it in a way that was intended to hurt me but it didn't hurt me. I wasn't annoyed, I wasn't hurt and I wasn't angry. I just didn't feel anything. If anything, it's opened my mind in a way it hasn't opened in a long time. It's something I've always known but never acknowledged and I think I've just really needed to hear it. 

I'm an 18 year old teenage girl who spent the last 2-3 years using herself as a project to see how attractive she could become. After 16 years of being unattractive and being told that I'm unattractive, I'm now exhibiting successful results and I take pride in it because my personality makes me feel like I have nothing else going for me. Something I've been saying to myself since boyfriend left me is "if you don't have personality, at least you have your looks to rely on". And it's true. I think.

I'm irony and impossibility and a strange combination of so many characters that shouldn't go together. I don't know how to control it. I don't know whether to keep it all lock in or whether to expose it. If I do expose it, how will I do it in a way where all the personalities in me find a balanced medium?

I come across as somewhat pretentious because I'm scared. If people saw me the real, uncensored, vulnerable me then they would see the person on this blog and it terrifies me because if they rejected me then they would reject me for the "real", unmasked me. When I put up a facade and that facade gets rejected then I don't give it a second thought. That's probably why I didn't get hurt when the aforementioned person called me "pretentious". That's also probably the reason why Boyfriend leaving me hurt me so bad -- he was the first person in my life who made me feel comfortable enough to not feel the need to hide so much. I think him leaving me just proved to me even more that I can't be the person that I am because everyone who has ever come close to me has left me. My family, or more specifically, my sister was giving me permission to run away from home at one point because I was exposing so much of me. The only reason I'm starting to find some peace in life now is because I've started finding peace with my family and that is because I've restrained so much of the me that they used to see, I now act like I'm labotomised when it comes to them because it makes our interpersonal relationships so much smoother. Same with my friends.

I used to think so highly of Boyfriend that he was on the highest pedestal, if he told me to do a Romeo and Juliet with him I wouldn't have given it a second thought. I was crazy about him because I thought that he was the first person to ever choose to be with me but I was so wrong.

I try to be confident and be assertive and decisive and act like I know exactly what I'm doing and why, and at the end of the day all of this creates mask on top of mask on top of mask for me that I end up coming across as a pretentious know it all cow. I need to feel like I'm able to give myself guidance because the only person I have to rely on is me. In reality I'm terrified. I'm just a girl. At the end of the day I am still a teenager who's lost all her dreams and so much hope, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing anymore.