Being Forgotten is Painful + feeling ugly

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When I switched secondary school no one noticed I was gone until 2 years had passed. It is something I joke about but it is extremely painful and added to a list of insecurities. From my time there and bullying in school I already feel like people could turn on me at any moment and have developed issues with how I look (once being rated about a 4 and also finding a list with the rated attractiveness of some girls in my year that boys had made, being put somewhat in the middle).

Sometimes it goes past simply being forgotten, with people determined to ignore my existence. At least twice someone seemingly turned on me out of the blue, ignoring everything I said and not even looking at me in situations where we were close. It was strange on both occasions as things had all been well just the day before. You can't help feel but there's something repulsive they've uncovered and that maybe your existence is best ignored. I crossed paths with one of those people yesterday and a friend asked their reasoning. They said they knew of me and remembered suddenly turning cold (and by cold I mean their face was a stony sort of aggressive in my presence) but couldn't really remember why or what I looked like. That hit two insecurities. Owch.

Now I think my brain has reacted by trying to make me unforgettable on both a conscious and unconscious level. I used to have issues with not making expressions, now I'm overly expressive, my clothing is very loud, I am drawn to unhealthy things, things that should be bad make me feel better, I tend to shock people a lot with my humour + openness etc. It's helped me get a lot of friends and I do feel like I am being true to myself but there is a lot of anxiety attached to it.

I am desperate to not feel forgotten again and to matter but there is no way of knowing if that is the case until I'm gone from a place. I already have a weird persisting feeling that I will be left alone, despite things constantly becoming socially better and the pain I feel when I remember how so many people I spoke to every day didn't even realise my absence just makes it worse. If I am forgotten yet again after this I don't know how I'll cope because the thoughts I have when things are going well are already distressing.

Now as for my second point, I'm very frustrated. Me mentioning feeling ugly here is not one of things where I want to check if that's the case or not because I know logically it isn't. When I was rated a 4 etc, I was a overweight kid who didn't hold it well, with a slightly lopsided face, not exactly amazing teeth and almost invisible eyebrows/eyelashes. It's years later and I've lost a lot of weight, my jaw is fixed thanks to the amazing things braces can do and my eyebrows etc actually show in pictures. I'm even complemented on how I look sometimes. My problem is the fact that despite logically knowing all this I feel absolutely disgusting and don't know how to fix it. It isn't an ugliness necessarily linked to looks, but a feeling that there is something under all the good layers of me that makes me repulsive and taints everything good about me. Perhaps that's what those people saw and that is the type of ugly I feel like. It makes you feel guilty for making friends and trying to get close and there's nothing people can really do to make you feel better. I hate it and don't know how I'm supposed to feel better about either. I do cbt but that covers my intrusive thoughts and similar things, not deep routed issues.

I'm really sorry you feel this way.

It's good that you are able to get this off your chest here.

On my bad days, I "feel ugly inside," too.

Do you feel like you're having a "bad day"---or is this feeling constant, all the time?

You seem like a bright person.

You remind me of someone else here who is a high achiever.

I don’t remember what your interests are.

I think you’ve mentioned some of them in another thread.

Ivpin, you have so much going for you, that if only your goal could be to retrain the brain not to care one way or another what others think .... You've seen the benefits of the changes that you've made in yourself already, and confidence, is truly the most attractive trait you can hold. Feeling "ugly" does not serve you well .... it undermines your self esteem, makes you genuinely feel unhappy, makes you feel less capable, and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will walk with less confidence, most likely too. The reality is that you are not ugly. Attractiveness is highly subjective. It's truly in the eye of the beholder, but that aside, even by conventional standards very few people are genuinely ‘ugly’. Personally, I can only view certain behaviours as ugly, not looks. It's about changing your thinking. Focus on what you do like about yourself. When I was your age, the only part of my appearance I changed was my hairstyle. 16 was an awesome age to be! I was living ina tropical climate though, and everyone was just naturally "happier", compared to what I later discovered about other countries that see far less sun. Maybe it was cultural, too. Everyone was tanned, happy(generally speaking), sporting and like one big happy family, when I was 16. This has remained the way we are with each other, years later on Facebook. We remain very supportive of one another, and very much like family, both males and females. We look out for each other, no matter the distance. Wish that were your experience, but challenges about how we feel about ourselves, how others treat us, help to make us who we are, who we are yet to become. In spite of challenges, hun, hope you can rise above the negative, become resilient and true to yourself.

German is such a hard language to learn----despite the fact that English is a Germanic language.

Old English used to be very much like German.

It would be interesting if you read "Beowulf" in the original Old English.