Do I look funny?

So, I'm having one of those really just bizarre days, but in a good way... That is until I decided on today's post topic. It all started when I was eating lunch, and suddenly, this fox walks up to me. Now I don't live in the country. I'm in the middle of Virginia Beach, on Regent University's campus, eating a sandwich in between my bar prep class and sitting in the library. And then there was a fox. He kinda just looked at me, I looked at him, and then he just trotted away into some bushes.

So then I was listening to the Stupid Cancer Show. If you don't know, its a blog radio show, that I'm sure I'll have a whole post dedicated to at some point. Its very good; Monday nights 9pm eastern. If you go on, there's a live chat room, I go by robs723 and enjoy talking to people. Anywho, tonight's episode was all about sex and cancer, and I somehow managed to win a book by asking a question.

Now my question kind of got cut in two thanks to how much I could type in the chat box, so it got answered sort of awkwardly. But basically, it was how do you talk to a partner about how to be touched. The first part of the question that got lost described how I have no feeling from under my left ear and the left underside of my chin, through my left shoulder, and down into my chest. Nerve damage from a neck dissection. It screwed up everything from my golf game to how I like to be touched intimately. It kind of gives me the willies to have a light caress in that area that I can't really feel, or worse, a hard one that feels like pins and needles. Can you tell a guy not to touch you there... how do you get over how that feels? Can they tell that something is wrong? Do they get upset if you don't respond quite right? That was what I meant to be my full question.

So then it started me thinking about how I've looked since surgery. How one of my eyes squints more than the other when I smile. In general how the left side of my face, at least to me seems to hang ever so slightly. I wonder if my left arm or shoulder does the same. And so I got to wondering... "Do I look funny; awkward; a little off?" I'm pretty sure in my mind it is all exaggerated a little bit more; but I go through pictures and I see little differences, and see images of me where I just look weird. I mean maybe that's why I can't seem to find a guy to date; maybe they all look at me and see the weird and off balanced features that I see?

Little pet anxieties, and insecurities. And it isn't something anyone can make you feel better about. If they say they don't see what you are talking about, they are just trying to be nice and reassuring; if they actually don't see it, it's because they aren't used to looking at your face all the time, or didn't know you before. These are the thoughts that run through our minds and leave us in a perpetual circle of insecurity. I wish I could give you all some magic advice about how to overcome the thoughts; but I can't. I struggle with them to an obsessive point, cry about them at night, if I'm having a particularly sensitive day, and then blog when I can't think of any other way to get them out of my head.