Body-Image, Kafka and the Game of Transformation

It was the first day of my fourth standard  and the year was probably 1982. I was sitting on the sixth or seven row of classroom benches, when all of a sudden some of my batch-mates looked at me and burst out laughing. 'You have grown so fat in the vacations that we could not recognize you! You have almost doubled." The mangoes in the summer vacation did it. I had put on plenty of weight. From that day onward, I was nicknamed 'double'. I said to myself that something was seriously wrong with me and my body. I felt ashamed and I lost self respect. I was scared of people laughing at me too. I am laughable, I am awkward and I am weird, I said to myself and kept saying this for decades. In fact, I saw myself as so abjectly inferior in looks and I was so scared of classmates laughing at me that I even used to avoid combing my hair out of fear that they will laugh at me saying that even me - yes even me- is trying to look smarter!! I thought my nose was totally ugly and misshapen and  my soft pot belly appeared to me as if it was 'weirdly ungainly, and clumsy' as a sign of my being 'not fit enough to live'. I  But that wasn't all. 
It was probably in the eighth or ninth standard, when I remember a classmate named Rajat Doshi. He thought that my chest which had extra fat on it resembled woman's breasts. He used to constantly make fun of me by squeezing my chest, and saying ' pom, pom' and I used to get immensely hurt, hugely angry,  and ashamed of it. I hated him for it, but I hated myself even more. I carried these events in my mind and made them mean that there was not just something wrong with me but also my 'manliness' as my chest seemed 'feminine'. My doubts about something being 'inadequate' about myself and my 'manliness' continued as I stated thinking and believing that my penis is 'short' and I kept reassuring myself by measuring it at times and saying that it seems to be ok!
As far as my health was concerned, I was convinced that I was destined to be ill forever as "my unit was defective and there was an inbuilt manufacturing defect". This basically meant  I was unfit to live in this world and I was not made for this world. I was deeply resigned to my fate.
Whenever, I was with people, especially girls, I maintained a safe distance out of fear of people laughing at me. I avoided being noticed so as not to get 'caught' as someone who is awkward and shamefully inadequate in looks. I walled myself off from others. Obviously, I not only did not try to express my love or even talk to the girls I had crush upon, but I, who was ashamed of being who I was, was also ashamed of being timid and I punished myself for being timid. How can a girl love someone as 'unlovable' and 'deficient' as me? I became more and more reclusive, lonely, sad, very angry at myself and depressed. My sexual expression was in the safe 'risk-free' zone of fantasy and masturbation ( though 'fantasy' is hardly a risk-free zone, it used to run amok during night giving me terrors of being alone in the dark. I often used to imagine dead people turning up and invisible beings appearing all of a sudden and the very idea of being frightened frightened me!).  Like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kakfa's The Metamorphosis, I was morphed into a dung beetle. Kafka's story celebrates the power of human imagination and language in literally transforming what is considered 'real'. That I was a dung beetle was no myth or archetype but 'reality'. Kafka is not using 'magic realism', he is talking about real things. The idea that I 'am' deficient if not downright ugly, 'unlovable' and 'unfit' to live was so 'real' that when some girls actually proposed to me, I did not believe a word of it!!  I also remember that when I got engaged to Ashwini and she praised men for their looks and smartness, I told myself that how could she possibly love me and that I was 'not the man of her dreams' and due to economical reasons, she has to marry me. My self-image, my body image and my beliefs played havoc in my married life and love life. 
Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in their powerful book Three Laws of Performance state that our actions and behaviour is 'correlated' to how things 'occur or show up' to us and how the things occur to us arises only through and in language. Language is the context which determines how things show up in our life, and how and what we see. Our conversations determine what we see and how we see things. What is 'real' to us is determined by the language. The pretty girl walking on the crowded street becomes pretty for me when I have a conversation about her prettiness. She becomes 'real' as a pretty girl on the street. Otherwise there are billions of things on the street which exist at level of undifferentiated mass of experience. My conversation about her, 'differentiates and distinguishes' her from the mass of undifferentiated experiences on the street and makes her 'real' for me. My word creates my world. 
Same thing happened to me and my body. My conversation that 'something was wrong' with my body created this wrongness.That my body was 'awkward, clumsy, unattractive, defective' and that I was 'timid', 'unlovable' were the conversations which provided the context to how things occurred or showed up in my life. These conversations, however, remained in the background like 'blind-spots'. The black showed up only against the white background. In fact, when I look back, I am doubtful whether was 'really as obese' in those days as I had imagined I was. It was something like 'body dysmorphic disorder' where person isexcessively concerned about and preoccupied by a perceived defect in his or her physical features.
When I distinguished that I had created my body as it occurred to me with my own conversation, I took responsibility for the way my body is and the way it is not. Instead of seeing myself as a'victim' of my own body, or nature or my fate, I place myself in the position of the creator. I saw that MY conversations that my  penis is small, my belly is weak and weirdly flabby, my chest is 'feminine' , my nose is misshapen and that I am timid, 'defective unit' and unlovable created the contexts in which all relationships, including the those with myself, showed up. When I see this, I can 'drop these conversations', I dismantle this disempowering life full of suffering and struggle.
This, however, does not mean I am advocating 'positive thinking'. In positive thinking, the 'occurring reality' does not change. One keeps on mechanically saying positive things about oneself, because one 'knows' that 'something is truly wrong'. The things which are threatening or wrong are still threatening and wrong to people who are practicing 'positive thinking'. The people who try to think 'positively' fail because the assumption that the things are 'negative' does not change. The positive thinker does not take 'responsibility' for generating 'negative reality' through language.
Today, I see my body as being whole, complete and perfect and there is nothing wrong with it. I created a possibility of being comfortable with myself, peaceful in mind and relaxed with people of all genders. I can naturally be who I am, instead of fretting and feeling awkward about my looks and my body. I feel so happy and light about my body. The possibility of authentic and powerful self-expression and authentic intimacy shows up in my life for the first time. The resignation about my health vanishes and I standing in these possibilities, I take action......