Woody

If you’d asked me what I was like, you know, as a person or what ever, I would have said I was a pretty nice kinda guy. You know, I have quite a lot of friends, boys and girls. OK, so none you’d probably call best friends as it were, but a good few people I like to see on a regular-ish basis anyway. So yeah I’d say I was popular-ish. Which means I must be like-able, doesn’t it? I know I’m like-able. I know my self.

I think I know my self. I’m 47 years old for god sake, I should know my self by now, shouldn’t I? But what does that mean, My Self? I’ve seen the same face looking back at me in the mirror all these years now, is that what it looks like, my self? Is my face and my self the same thing? What if I’d never seen my face, and I only imagined what I looked like, how close would I have got to the truth? Would my imagined face be a more accurate representation of my self that the one that a random roll of the genetic dice has given me? One things for sure, I wouldn’t have given myself such a small chin, and my eyes wouldn’t be so close together as they are now. Am I’d have more hair. Definitely more hair.

Surely I’m the best judge of who I am, being me! 37 years I’ve gone about thinking people liked me, thought I was maybe a little mysterious, a little aloof, wanting to get to know me better, but they were not sure how I’d react if they tried to step past the welcome mat and make themselves at home. I thought the arms measuring the length of space between me and the people around me were my own. Until I read that e-mail.

“…is a fucking weirdo man!
- I know – makes me laugh the way he creeps about the place like a little insect
- That’s exactly it! Like a little woodlice scuttling about the place! Hahaa
- Woody! That fits to a tee. We were just calling him baldy before, but woody the wood lice is much better. Scuttling weird little freak!”


In the blink of an eye, I have been transformed into an insect. I know those people who transformed me hold sway in the heart of soul of the firm, they are popular with many friends whom they go out drinking with, and are probably sleeping with too. Once they hear that I am now a Woodlice called Woody, that’s all they shall see me as, forever. The name and the tragically, pathetically amusing image that goes with it shall spread like wildfire through the firm, fueled by my colleagues helpless insecurities and its own irresistible symbolic momentum. I am transformed in the eyes of all who know me into a filthy creature who lives in damp, warm, rotten places, a creature that scuttles terrified in a land of cynical giants. And this act of magic has been performed by an off handed comment by a junior clerk, someone half my age. How can they wield so much power over me, to transform me so completely?

There is no point in trying to manage my own image, my own self. It is not in my hands. The dissonance that exists between how I imagine my self and how my self is consumed by the world is as immeasurable as it is irrelevant. I am nothing more than the sum of every one else’s perceptions of me, and they amount to nothing more than an insect. This realisation has, as you can imagine, come as something of a shock to me. I am used to relinquishing power to those more powerful that myself, but I never realised how much I have relinquished seemingly without choice, or consciousness. Namely, everything I am, my very self. And not only to those more powerful than me, but to everyone who has ever set eyes on me. I didn’t feel a thing.

Now, now I feel small; vulnerable; as if even a careless child’s shoe could crush me and the world would not notice my vanishing. I feel as if I am lost in a land of giants, with a woefully inadequate shell that will fail to resist even the slightest attack. All I want now is to scuttle away from cynical eyes, to be with my own kind and hide somewhere warm; somewhere damp; somewhere rotten.

MJ 2004