Hi, I am Mr Lark. In Chinese, I go by 拉克先生.

Let me start with a few facts about myself. I am hairy, dark-skinned, 167 centimeters tall, and losing my hair. I chose none of these. They arrived without asking my opinion, moved in, and showed no intention of leaving. Probability explains this well enough: I was born in Southwest China to short parents, and among a crowd of short relatives I came out on the shorter side. Genetics is real, and it is not polite about it.

When I wear shorts in summer, my legs look like a forest pending inspection. When I stand against a white wall in a photo, I always come out darker than I imagined, as if the camera holds a private opinion about me. As for my hair: hair on someone else's head is called a hairstyle. Hair in my sink is called data. I say this not entirely out of self-mockery; there is some statistical literacy in it too.

All of these things once made me feel inferior, and I tried to fix every one of them. The process went roughly like this: search for solutions, order the tools, and finally discover that the problem was never under my jurisdiction. This is how people with an engineering background handle things. I admit it is not elegant, but I cannot think of a more elegant way.

People want to edit their factory settings

When I was young, I believed that with enough effort, a person could modify himself into a more acceptable version. Looking back, this belief was a bit like thinking that if you write enough code, the hardware will improve on its own.

So I researched hair removal, skin whitening, height growth, and hair loss treatment. My attitude toward my body resembled my attitude toward a malfunctioning computer: wherever something looked wrong, I wanted to open it up. Unfortunately, a body is not a computer. It cannot be reinstalled, and it cannot be restored to factory settings. Worse still, after careful analysis, the so-called factory settings turn out to be exactly where the problem is.

I did write some shabby code in my youth. As far as I know, when software breaks you can debug it; when hardware breaks you can only accept your fate. Height, skin color, and hair follicles all belong to hardware, the kind that does not accept returns.

None of these traits arrived democratically. There was no vote, no hearing; they simply took office. For a long time I refused to accept this: why can't a person choose his own appearance? Later I figured it out. I cannot even decide what time I wake up in the morning. Wanting to negotiate with follicles and bones on top of that is clearly overestimating myself.

Insecurity is a long interrogation

The frightening thing about insecurity is not that it makes you feel inadequate. It is that it keeps you ready to confess, at any moment, exactly why you are inadequate.

Other people are not looking at you, but you have already looked on their behalf. Other people are not laughing, but you have already laughed on their behalf. The elevator mirror lights up, and the interrogation begins: are the leg hairs too conspicuous, is the face too dark, am I a head shorter than the crowd, has the hairline retreated again. Anyone subjected to daily hearings like this would crack, let alone an ordinary, unusually hairy man.

The meanest part of this interrogation is that it never reaches a final verdict. I later realized that body anxiety is a petty creditor: the moment you pay off one debt, it issues a new invoice under a different name. Today it dislikes your skin; tomorrow your height. Today you have too much hair; tomorrow too little. It has no interest in solving any problem. It only needs you to stay in debt.

A person who constantly feels he owes the world a better body cannot get on with his life properly. I have known many such people, including my former self.

Trying to change taught me the boundary

Let me state clearly: I am not against change. What can be changed may of course be changed. A cleaner haircut, some exercise, sunscreen, scientific methods against hair loss—there is nothing wrong with any of these. A large part of civilization exists precisely so that people do not have to leave everything to fate.

The problem is that some changes solve problems, while others are taxes paid to shame. The two look alike but differ entirely in nature, and you can only tell them apart by trying.

I tried them all. In the end I had to admit: some things can be optimized a little, but the underlying logic cannot be rewritten. My height will not become 180 cm no matter how sincerely I search. My skin will not exchange itself for a new shade because I resent it. My hair will not report back for duty in formation because I reason with it earnestly in the shower. I reached this conclusion by induction. The sample size is sufficient; the conclusion is reliable.

Accepting this fact brought me no joy at all. Real acceptance is never graceful. It does not arrive with a sunset and a soundtrack. It is more like a man who has exhausted himself, sits down on the ground, and says: fine, this will do for now.

Acceptance does not mean liking everything

For a while, I misunderstood what it meant to make peace with myself. I thought it meant loving every hair, every inch of skin, every centimeter of height. Later I found this demand too high, and too false. There is no need to package every flaw as a gift. A gift at least comes with a ribbon. Hair loss does not.

Russell said that diversity is essential to happiness. I believe this. But believing it is one thing; having it apply to yourself is another. Knowing that diversity is good, and cheerfully accepting that you happen to sit on the "diverse" end of it, are separated by quite a few years.

Acceptance is not suddenly deciding that you are perfect. It is admitting that you are not, while refusing to spend the main energy of your life prosecuting that fact. I may dislike my body hair without hating summer. I may dislike my skin without avoiding cameras. I may admit that 167 is not tall without shrinking automatically next to taller people. I may take my hair loss seriously without entering every fallen strand into my personal history of fate.

This is not a victory. It is a ceasefire. A ceasefire is already good enough. A person has too much to do in one lifetime to fight a daily civil war against his own skin, bones, and follicles.

A person is not a medical form

The body matters, of course. No one can pretend not to have one, because hunger growls, fatigue hurts, and the hair that falls in the shower reminds you of reality in very concrete terms.

But a person cannot be just a medical form either.

If you break me down into indicators—hairy, dark, 167, prone to hair loss—I do look like an unimpressive product specification. But that is not how a person is meant to be used. A person has his own way of speaking, his habits of doing things, the things he loves, the sharp remarks he manages to swallow, and the sincere words he finally says. None of these can be measured with a ruler, so none of them appear on a medical form. What the form leaves out is not necessarily unimportant. As far as I know, the most important things are generally not on it.

These traits of mine once made me feel inferior to others. They are still here, but their jurisdiction has shrunk. They can still affect my photos, my clothes, my hairstyle, and my mood, but they no longer decide whether I deserve to live well.

The peace I can manage is roughly this: I do not sanctify what I cannot change, and I no longer humiliate it either. I am still hairy, still dark, still 167, still worried about my hair. But I no longer intend to put myself in the defendant's chair.

It is hard enough for a person to arrive in this world at all. If he must first pass an appearance review of his own making before being permitted to live at ease, that would be unreasonable. I did not figure this out early. Fortunately, I did not figure it out too late either.