Shadow Body

Growing up, just like in many Eastern European households, my family would often criticise people's appearance on TV shows. The noses, hair, and eyes of the C-category celebrities and politicians were not safe from the remarks of the people I loved most. If I got a Euro for every time the sentence ¨Well, time DID NOT treat him well...¨ burst out from someone's mouth besides me within five seconds, someone appeared on the screen, and by now I might be able to afford a single-bed studio in Amsterdam.

The only person who balanced out these comments single-handedly was my wonderful grandmother, Anna. She always listened patiently to everything the rest of the family had to say, to conclude it with her iconic catchphrase:

¨Well, how lucky we are that only you guys (my family) are so beautiful...¨

She would carelessly throw these deeply ironic words at my, mostly overweight, average-looking family members with the grace of a 16th-century British Queen, which, in my eyes, she absolutely was. While I appreciated some of the carefully crafted, occasionally incredibly well-engineered one-liners about some show hosts' looks, in the long run, it left something in me that I have never managed to get rid of. I have always hated my body.

I started doing sports at the age of five with karate, then became a long-distance runner, played American football, became a street workout enthusiast, and recently got into swimming. The only thing stronger in me than my passion for sports was the fear of gaining weight. Since I was- and still am- dissatisfied with what I have, I could not imagine ¨becoming worse¨.

Besides physical fitness and my interpretation of what it meant, I have always been concerned about my facial features. I would always think, looking at others, "Man, I wish I had their appearance; I bet people would find me more sympathetic if I had THEIR look." Because that's what the concept of facial features came down to in my head—nothing but sympathy. I have been doing stand-up comedy for years now. I also produce multiple shows in Amsterdam, so I frequently welcome people at the door. By far the most common remark I hear after the shows would be people coming up to me after the show is done and say:

¨When we looked at you, we didn't think you would be funny, but we had a pleasant surprise!¨

or

¨You really didn't LOOK LIKE a comedian, so we were shocked when you went up on the stage!¨

or

¨The other comics were great and you...were good!¨

That last one might be on me, but you get the point. The constantly present thought of ¨what IS it in me that made you have those feelings?¨

I tried to be as kind and genuine with everybody as possible, so it must be something with me not being as handsome as the other men in the lineup, right?!

These thoughts would make me spiral. They filled me with anxiety and anger, and ultimately, they made me a worse performer. I did not succeed at the thing that gave me happiness because I was too caught up with haunting thoughts about my body and appearance. Unfortunately, these poisonous ideas would not go away in the other areas of my creative work. When we made commercials with my friends, those videos would perform the best on socials that I only co-wrote but did not appear in. To this day, those videos and sketches I wrote had the biggest success online and on stage that I did not show myself in. Of course, it could be because people resonated with the jokes more that I wrote when they heard them from someone else's mouth. They might have performed it better, used the stage more efficiently than I did, or for some other reason. But ultimately, my thoughts would lead me to a space where I question my appearance, leading to questioning my skills and ending up in a space of self-doubt, sadness, and misery.

Recently, since my grandparents passed away, we had to sort out things they left behind in their house. I discovered a letter from 1955 with a photo attached. It belonged to an ancestor of mine who sent it to my grandmother. The relative described how much fun he had at a wellness weekend in Heviz, a small Hungarian town famous for its spas. The photo featured thirty people in their bathing suits in an outdoor pool. It was a group of generally very attractive people, and I remember my enthusiasm at that moment: ¨Wow, I can't wait to see which of these people from the photo is our relative!¨ Then I read the following line from the author:

¨You can find me in the picture, I am the third from the left in the second row from the bottom¨

There he was. Perhaps the most Shrek-looking human I have ever seen. I acknowledged it with a smile and thought, I am not going to say this out loud, because that's exactly what my family would say. This was also an awakening moment that has since made me into a different person. I have learned not to be scared but to benefit from these thoughts and use them to my advantage if necessary. Use them comedically, but only when I talk about myself. I would avoid hurting others with such words at any cost. While I am still concerned about my physical fitness to some extent, I no longer feel like I am in an imaginary prison. Instead, now when I would hear somebody making fun of others regardless of the context, I would approach them and whisper with the right intonation: ¨Well, how lucky we are that only you are so beautiful...¨