Embrace vulnerability

and Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover.

SLART Note: I wrote this back in 2015. I had a short stint of blogging but gave up after about 20 posts. Gratefully as of the date of this post in 2024, I have written over 100 Substack posts! Feel free to check them out later on!

Today, I attended a training course and arrived an hour early. Opting for comfort, I settled on a sofa and began browsing on my iPad.

Roughly 20 minutes later, an attractive woman took a seat opposite me. I contemplated greeting her but hesitated, fearing I might run out of things to say next, a familiar scenario for me.

I inadvertently eavesdropped on her conversation, she seemingly had an interview coming up. As I listened, a torrent of thoughts flooded my mind. I projected my anxieties onto her, worrying about whether she felt nervous. I thought about asking if she worked here, or confirming if she was also here for an interview, but I refrained and remained fixated on my iPad. It’s often simpler to hide behind a screen than to engage openly, right? I noticed her sigh and she took a deep breath, signs of possible nervousness, I thought. Then she departed to attend to her matters. Did I miss a chance to forge a meaningful human connection? Perhaps.

Interestingly, I didn’t dwell on this missed opportunity as I might have in the past. Previously, I would obsess over such moments, feeling guilty and worthless. It’s ridiculous, yet it felt overwhelmingly painful at the time.

Reflecting on the incident, I realised I had missed connecting with her because of my judgments about her. Although my judgment was positive, it still halted me.

Does this mean attractive, “beautiful people” are rejected just as ordinary, “average-looking” individuals might feel intimidated by them? I’m judging by my standards here, one may be beautiful, but as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

This made me think of an enlightening video by Dustin Hoffman discussing his experience of dressing as a woman for the film role in “Tootsie.” I can’t do it justice here, so I encourage you to watch it and then continue reading…

2024 Edit: Thanks for the magic of AI, I got the transcript of this video for those of you who prefer reading.

Dustin Hoffman says:

“Murray Schiskell, who’s been my dear friend for over 30 years, kicked off Tootsie with the thought of how you would be different if you had been born a woman. It stemmed from a conversation we once had, not about what it feels like to be a woman—since all sexes have pondered what it would feel like to be the opposite sex—but his question was different: if you were born a woman, how would you be different? That question sparked what became a long journey involving Tootsie, which took about two years before we even got a director, just working on different drafts of the script.

But I did go to Columbia and asked them if they would spend the money to do makeup tests so that I could look like a woman, and if I couldn’t look convincing, they would agree not to make the movie. They were perplexed by my request, but I intuitively felt that unless I could walk down the streets of New York dressed as a woman and not have people turn and say, “Who’s that guy in drag?” or react for any reason that would make them think, “Who’s that freak?” I didn’t want to make the film. I didn’t want the audience to have to suspend their believability.

When we got to that point and looked at it on screen, I was shocked that I wasn’t more attractive. And I said, “Now you have me looking like a woman, now make me a beautiful woman because I thought I should be beautiful. If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible.” They responded, “That’s as good as it gets, Charlie, that’s as beautiful as we can make you.”

It was at that moment that I had an epiphany and went home and started crying. I was talking to my wife and said, “I have to make this picture.” She asked why, and I said, “Because I think I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to meet for us to ask them out.” She asked what I was saying, and I replied, “There are too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.” And that was never a comedy for me.“