when compliments don't work

So, for various reasons recently, I've received a few compliments from gentlemen on my looks.

This is such an unexpected and unusual occurrence for me that I have serious cognitive dissonance reconciling the new information with the world as I know it to be.

"No no no, you don't understand, I'm the fat friend. The comfortable, I'll-never-want-sex-with-her, I can tell her everything, emotional punching bag, good for a laugh one. I'm not beautiful or sexy or delicious. I'm... Well... I wish I was... But I'm not.

I'm boys-yelling-from-cars-'you-fat-shit!' ugly.

I'm the recipient of reassuring-but-patronising-'there's-someone-for-everyone' comments.

I am not beautiful.

I'm beyond curvaceous, I'm just fat.

I'm hairy in all the 'wrong' places.

I have glasses.

I dress strangely.

I am not a thing of beauty and joy forever whose loveliness only increases."

Or at least, that's what I believe...

So when someone, especially someone I regard as... Gorgeous. Shining. Scrumptious. Sexy. Heavenly or just plain marvellous, compliments me...

Well...

Let's just say I feel exactly like Helena did in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when, thanks to Puck's meddling, her best friends BF and her crush who loves her best friend suddenly both start chasing her.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the man she loves and the man her friend loves, start complimenting her. Swearing undying love to her. And so of course, she, like me, experiences extreme cognitive dissonance, and deals with it by concluding they are mocking her.

I have to admit, it is REALLY HARD not to feel the same. I don't just disagree when someone's complimenting me. I begin to worry that for their own, strange, masochistic pleasure, they're bullshitting me...

Does anyone else have this problem?

Does anyone else feel like Helena when they receive a compliment? Anyone else tempted to scream:

Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?
When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?

 ----------------------------------------------------

O spite! O hell! I see you are all bent
to set against me for your merriment.
If you were civil and knew courtesy,
you would not do me this much injury.
Can you not hate me, as I know you do,
but you must join in souls to mock me too?
If you were men, as men you are in show,
you would not use a gentle lady so:
to vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts,
when I am sure you hate me with your hearts.


PS. Superpraise. What a word!!!