This might seem a bit disjointed. Sorry about it. My mind is a bit jumbled as a whole usually.
I was walking my dog today when a truck started to drive by, but slowed down to coast along beside me. I glanced over. There were two young men in the car, blatantly staring at me. Thoughts of why they were staring and slowing down filled my head. I wasn't too worried considering the fact that my dog is menacing looking enough to keep creepers away. But it did get me thinking.
When I was thirteen and fourteen, all my friends starting getting attention from guys while I was the one left out. I wondered why I was the one that didn't get any attention, and I wanted it. I wanted it so much to be able to fit in and feel normal. I didn't realize that there was a difference in the attention that those teenage boys were giving my friends, and what I wanted.
I remember my mom telling me when I was younger - from the age of three to seven - ish - that there's a difference between good attention and bad attention, but most people don't know that. That the reason I was acting out and throwing tantrums was because I wanted attention, but I didn't know that there was such a thing as bad attention. I wanted someone to notice me, whether they were screaming at me or praising me.
I relate that to how I look at attention from people now. There is a vain part of me that wants someone to find me physically appealing, but there's a hell of a lot more to it than that. I do want someone to find me attractive, but not due to my body (at least not mostly). I want them to find my mind attractive. I want them to look at me as a person and be attracted to who I am, and not what I look like. Looks will fade and if someone is attracted to me solely due to how I appear, then I don't want to be around that person.
I know that I'm not to a point where I feel as though my physical appearance doesn't matter - hell, I still get freaked out sometimes when I'm in public and start to dwell on what other people are thinking when it comes to me. But that shouldn't matter. Because everyone is thinking that. We all think that people are thinking about us, when in reality they're too wrapped up in their lives to even think about you in that way. And even if they are thinking about me, it shouldn't really matter what they think because I don't know them. Because their opinions about me shouldn't affect me since they don't matter. Honestly, I feel like I should get to a point where I don't care about what anyone thinks of me, since I should be comfortable with myself.
I'm not there yet, but I'm admitting that I know where I should get to. That's a start, right?