An outside mirror
I befriended the bad boy of my class one day, during detention. No, I had not been grounded. At 12, I already suffered with migraines, and the best my school could provide me that day was a seat in the detention room. It was quiet and almost empty, with only the official bad boy dutifully looking at some vague point on the wall. He was surprised to see me there, since I was a perfect nerd, a shy, straight As kid. He was curious to know what I had done to deserve that, and I felt a funny kind of sympathy coming from him. I had always been half scared of him (to tell the truth, completely scared). But he didn't seem disappointed when I told him I had a bad headache (maybe he thought I had conceived a smart, well concocted excuse to skip class). He had been expelled from Math class and had some assignment to do which he ignored completely what was about. He wanted to finish and get done with that, but he didn't know what to do.
Although I felt my brain burn as if it were about to explode, I felt sorry for him. He didn't seem scary at all. I sat by his side, and tried to explain him what to do. I helped him do the whole thing and he was forever thankful. Not that we became close friends after that, but he never let anyone else in the class mess with me again. (I was short, younger than everybody, wore glasses, was plump, and shy, in short, a perfect victim for pranks and I had been known to fall for some quite cruel ones). One day I overheard him saying to the other bad boys of the back row of the classroom that they shouldn't make fun of me because I was really cool. The funny thing is that from that day on I thought I could be really perceived as cool if given the chance. It changed the way I held myself in school.
We are talking here of brief, fleeting, contacts among people, that sometimes help you see yourself in different eyes. Jump in time to meet a fortyish Livia, slightly overweight, not so recently separated from her second husband, battling a seemingly lost battle against a poor self-image. In a country that prizes youth and a flat belly above all, I felt like an invisible woman. One fine afternoon, I had a lunch appointment with a group of friends, something I was dreading because I generally fear groups. I was late. As I was greeting the hostess, there was by her side this guy I knew very superficially. He scared the crap out of me, for being so extremely serious and grave. "How lucky I am", I thought, "Now I have to talk with this guy". The funny thing was that he just smiled and looked at me as if he had never seen anything quiet similar in his whole life, and he approved that. It was not offending in any way, it was just something I had completely forgotten about. It was simply the way a man sometimes look at a woman.
That was the day I discovered I was not doomed to invisibility.
I also discovered that complete isolation is evil. We all need, once in a while, to check the mirror image we get from other people's eys.
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