Women terrified me until I was twenty-two.
Without hyperbole I had a full, blown-out phobia of the fairer sex. Also bees. I can remember in first grade there was a girl who I wanted to date, or whatever we called it back then. I knew that I wasn’t good looking enough, however. That horrible self-image lasted until (in college) my first girlfriend told me that I was handsome. And she was beautiful. With her validation I realized that all those years I had been lying to myself. It’s not like after that moment I walked around campus believing I was chiseled from stone. But I no longer thought of myself as ugly. All it took was one person’s compliment and my lifetime of thinking I was gross-looking went away. I’d love to tell you that I came to an acceptance of my attractiveness through intense self-exploration and maturity. Nope. It just took the prettiest girl I knew to tell me I was hot. Sometimes that’s all you need.
