I’m telling my daughter about an article I read charting the rise of the “ick” and how its bewildering randomness can destroy what looked like perfectly good relationships.
“How can you stop finding someone attractive just because of the way they chase after a ping pong ball?”
She chuckles,
“Yeah, or lose interest in your boyfriend for claiming his free chicken in Nandos”
Sure, being rude to waiting staff is a legitimate reason for dumping someone because it says something about who they are, but, “I went off him when I saw the way his legs dangled when he sat on a barstool,” seems less, well, thought out.
The psychological reason for the ick appears to be rooted in our need to leave nothing unexplained. That is to say, if we can’t quite place why it is we are going off someone we come up with some crazy reason for it, like “the way he runs for a bus wearing a rucksack.”
“What about self-icks? Do you think anyone ever thinks about those?” I ask my daughter.
Without looking at me she just says, “Don’t go there Dad, it will be terrible for your self-esteem.”
I don’t know whether she is saying that thinking of unattractive things about oneself will always have a negative impact on self-esteem or whether she is specifically referencing me.
In the same way that an ick you feel for someone else probably hides something more significant deeper down feeling a “self-ick” might occur when you find it easy to be down on yourself.
At first, I found it hard to think of anything ick-worthy in terms of self-criticism but then it became alarmingly easy.
Dropping things and having to pick them up by scrabbling around on the floor made me feel especially not in love with myself.
It made me think about an incident that happened recently.
I was going up an escalator in the shopping centre when one of my earbuds dropped out of my probably ick-worthy small ear canals.
I heard it bounce off the metal stairway but felt unable to turn around and look at what I imagined to be the smirks of my fellow staircase travellers thinking me as ridiculous as I was feeling myself to be.
If chasing a single earbud down an up escalator isn’t a well-known ick then there is no justice in the world.
When I got to the top wondering how I was going to live with myself for not at least having a cursory glance for my expensive loss a man came towards me with his hand held out,
“You dropped this on the escalator,” he said with his mouth while adding, “you jerk,” with his eyes.
Most of my self-icks seemed to be about feeling awkward as a tall man ill-equipped for anything nimble or requiring agility.
Don’t get me started on dancing.
It’s impossible to feel unobtrusive at 6′ 4″.
My daughter was right. I had never once before thought of my height as being anything other than quite useful but now it was showing itself to be a source of internal resentment.
“Have you got any self-icks?” I ask my daughter trying to preserve what little sense of self-regard I still had left.
She couldn’t really come up with anything which was both a disappointment and a relief.
It was an interesting experiment but I suppose what it really taught me was that, on the whole, hundreds of hours of therapy have enabled me to learn enough about my sense of self that I don’t need to make up strange stories to explain my sometimes powerful inner critic.
Being tall and a bit uncoordinated isn’t so bad. At least I can always see at a concert or peer over high walls, plus it’s not like I can dump myself if I really get tiresome.
I still don’t think I’d look for an earbud on the escalator but, in future, I’ll probably be sure to take them out before I get on.
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