There's always something you hang on to after a relationship ends. Baggage is such a nasty word in that context, I think, because the things you hang on to aren't inherently bad.
With Chris, I hung on to a hatred of super cheap party dip, fast food, X-box, and weed, and I think my life is better for it. Also lavender baby oil and fingers in my butthole. And the term A+.
I'm carrying a lot.
With Allen, I made off with a reasonably light load. I came away from that relationship with a hatred of chicken and vegetable lasagna with white sauce, and Stacie Hertel. Poor Stacie ended up being one of those girls I was friendly with at arm's length for a little while, and she was so sweet, and the poor little lamb had no fucking idea I hated her so vehemently. She didn't deserve my ire, she was so fucking nice to me, and I was so dreadfully cold to her. I saw some very flirtatious messages from Allen to her (I only remember a new haircut and something about a bikini), and I misplaced my anger and contempt. We ran into her once at Best Buy, and she greeted Allen with the longest hug, and then she turned her attention to me and said it was so wonderful to finally meet me, and I responded with a very frosty and cunty, "You, too, I guess".
With Dan, I really, really, REALLY lucked out. I don't know if it's luck, or if I've just grown as a person and learned to let things go, especially ridiculous things that have no bearing on my life. I recognize what I COULD have come away from that relationship carrying...fear of abandonment (I have that, anyway. Hooray, BPD!), fear of opening up in a relationship, fear of relationships in general, fear of an imbalance in power dynamics in a relationship (with those power dynamics weighted between money and emotional acuity, never to balance out), and a fear of weak jawlines, but I didn't come away with any of those. You know what I came away from that relationship with?
A hatred of Anne Hathaway.
And I cannot cannot CANNOT stop hating her. It's just a thing. I'll never get over it, and I don't know what that says about me as a person, or if it's meant to imply something about my inability to get over Dan (which I have, but admittedly, it took a VERY long time), but whatever it is, I virulently fucking hate her. I. hate. her.
I was so fucking jazzed about the Ocean's 8 movie until I saw that her bitch ass was in it, and then I was overcome by such a rage that I couldn't function for a solid minute.
Of course, I will still go see Ocean's 8. In the theater, on opening day. Mainly because I love heist movies and grifting, but also because I, for one, am totally here for the femaling of male lead movies. You want to remake Snatch but with all women? You should, Guy Ritchie, because it would be hilariously on the nose in several ways.
I'm already planning on bringing a popsicle stick with a cutout of my face on it to put over Anne Hathaway's dumb face whenever she is on screen, because fuck her, that's why.
I realize that it's 1) childish and B) so disgustingly anti-feminist for me to drag a woman and hate her just for existing and looking the way she does, but that is the thing I fucking carry from my relationship with Dan...a fervent desire for Anne Hathaway to fade off into obscurity yesterday, so I can just forget she exists in the same way that masculinity as it applies to jawlines forgot Dan.
I may also be carrying a latent desire to make fun of Dan publicly because I had to hide it for so long, though Allen and I did tear into Dan a LOT while Dan and I were together. I took part in that with Allen because Dan was crushing my feelings and I was so bent on him loving me back that I stayed because I didn't know what else to fucking do about how I felt (telling him he was a jagweed crossed my mind on the reg, but I never had the balls to do it), and then when I was still getting over Dan, making fun of him was how I hid how much my heart hurt that we weren't together anymore, and I thought if I could verbalize enough bad shit about him, maybe I'd start to believe it. And now I make fun of him because it's funny, and I've fully grasped what a fucking shitwad of a dumpster fire our farce of a relationship was, and how lucky I am that I came through that fire like Daenerys Targaryen, the kind of bitch that doesn't take shit from mother fuckin' ANYBODY, always says what she feels and what she means, and will not fucking tolerate you stomping through my kingdom like you fucking own the place, men.
And fucking HATES Anne Hathaway. Little known GoT factoid, you're welcome.
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Thursday, December 14, 2017
The worst Bodhisattva in the eight fold path
I want to reflect a little bit about some body issues, and I'm going to be candid, and that's uncomfortable for a lot of people. It's hard to really relate in any way other than shoving assurance down someone's throat when they say things like, "I hate my body so fucking much", but that's generally what that's met with: a cascade of "don't be insane, you're gorgeous!" and "why do you hate your body?? You aren't fat, this attitude isn't healthy!"
Well.
I hate my body because I hate it.
I took this picture of me today:
To me, this body is huge. I absolutely hate my figure right now, because this is the biggest I've been in my entire life. My car accident really fucked my world up. I ate like I was still running 3-5 miles every day, because my body was still hungry like that for a couple weeks afterward, and then I spiraled down into the habit of letting my now husband, then boyfriend, cook deliciously caloric meals for me. Like curry, and beef with broccoli, and taking me out to eat all the fucking time, and really doting on me. Which my crazy frosty bitchy ass secretly LOVED, because it felt like genuine doting rather than pity or obligation, and the weight gain happened so slowly that I didn't even notice. Until one day, I was taking a selfie to send to Derek and I was like, excuse me there, ma'ams, but have you always been here? I was, of course, talking to my extensive collection of chins. They responded they had not, and I was dumbfounded. I didn't realize how big I had become until I was scrutinizing my self to send a naked picture to Derek. Which, I mean....I didn't end up sending. For obvious reasons. My chins talked me out of it, with my new tummy rolls echoing the sentiment. When we got engaged in 2014, I was around 210 pounds, a number I do not like telling anybody because I am very heavily caught up in what society tells me about weight. I hate our engagement photos with a fucking passion, because I'm massive in them. I was a very fit, very slender little runner when I met Derek, and to see my engagement photos come back with this...just...I don't even know how to describe myself...but the end of the story is that I was distraught over how I looked. I was supposed to be happy and in love in these photos, and my makeup had been fucked up, my hair had been fucked up (I paid a girl to do them and she was not what she promised, skill-wise), and I was FAT.
I hired a personal trainer, and busted my fucking ass in the year leading up to my wedding. I had my training twice a week, for an hour and a half each session, and then the other three days a week I hit up the gym on my own, for an hour or two, depending. I got REALLY strict with my diet, I counted calories, I got more sleep, I did everything right. I got down to 192 for my wedding.
That's about where I've been for the last two years, and I am FRUSTRATED. I'm frustrated about several things.
1. I'm frustrated because I do everything right. I'm as close to vegan as I can be without jeopardizing my health (even with multivitamins, I had lines in my nails, fatigue, all around bad health, and after introducing eggs, cheese, and the occasional piece of fish into my diet, my health has improved ENORMOUSLY. But my diet is more vegan than it is pescatarian). I workout every fucking morning, taking a three mile jog with my dog. I come home and do body strengthening workouts for 30 minutes every day. I eat well. No fast food, only the occasional sweet treat. I don't drink soda, I don't drink juice, I have a cup of decaf coffee in the morning with almond milk creamer, no sugar, and then water the rest of the day. I cannot make my body look like anything but those two photos, and I don't fucking know why.
2. For some reason, I am not allowed to hate my body. Nothing makes my husband more upset than me going on a tear about my wide hips and my flat tits and my fat arms and my thick thighs. He gets irate, he yells at me, we get into arguments about this fairly regularly. My friends, too. I know they just want to make me feel better, nut it's maddening when someone tells you to seek therapy as you gripe about your body, like you have a mental illness. I do not have a mental illness, I do not have body dysmorphia. I am a 192-200 pound woman, somewhere around there, that used to be exceptionally fucking fit at 170 and is rightfully upset to find herself in a bigger body than she's used to that is exceptionally slow to change. I hate people saying, "you're a babe!" or "I think you're super sexy" to me like that matters. The fact is, my body feels like a stranger to me, especially now. Because I feel HEALTHY. It's so defeating to see 194 on the scale when I feel like I should have a 180 weight. I feel fantastic. I'm not sluggish, I don't get tired through the day, I'm not winded easily, I feel strong (except for my bad arm) and like my body is at almost optimum performance power. I know I could be a lot stronger, and be doing more, and I already have a plan to do so when I finish my last class of the semester tomorrow, but where I'm at INTERNALLY feels wonderful. And then, when I see how much I weigh, it makes me cry, because it doesn't feel right. My body feels like it's in shape; my body LOOKS like a hot fuckin' mess. And I don't mean hot as in dudes want to cum all over my tits immediately. It sucks to feel like your insides and your outsides are not in harmony. And I am trying to fix it, but if there's progress, it's so slow that I'm more familiar with feeling dejected rather than proud or motivated.
3. My husband has this aggravating habit of following curvy models and curvy model collection pages on instagram. Now, I'm not one to freak out about fantasy when it's not close to being real. Porn doesn't bug me, having massive boners for celebrities, Hollywood, Internet, or otherwise, doesn't bother me. It's all fantasy, it's all healthy, it's totally cool. If it swings into reality, that's when I have a problem, but that's not the issue. My husband likes to show me pictures of these women and talk about how sexy and confident they are, which, you know, good for them! I'm so happy that women are happy and confident.....as a size 8. My husband follows CURVY women, not full figured (or plus sized, which is a fucked up term) women, and the two are not the fucking same. These women are fit, they are toned, they are just a little bit thick in areas like their thighs. They're all young and perky, they're exactly what people say "real" women should look like (I have beef about that bullshit, too, but again, not the point here). And I'm not sure how he thinks comparing me to women who have 24 inch waists with 36 inch hips and 32 inch chests is going to make me feel good about myself, but it doesn't. It makes me feel worse. Which brings me to my next frustration.
4. WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS UP WITH THE BODY POSITIVE MOVEMENT??? Look, a few things. The body positive movement SHOULD encompass all bodies. No one body is better than another, and it's important that people understand that society is made up of all flavors, and not wanting one kind of person's body type does not mean that body type is inherently bad. So women can be short and overweight, and it is perfectly ok for them to feel sexy, and for others to think they're sexy, just like a woman can be tall and lean, and she has every right to feel sexy in her skin, too. I understand this in my head, but in real life, I get very, very, VERY angry seeing thin, athletic women plastered all over the bopo instagram hashtag, and the love your body hashtag, and the hashtags that are meant to help women (and men, who do not get equal press in this movement, but definitely should) who are not exactly fitting in society's mold of hot and sexy find a following that helps them love themselves more without seeing their bodies as flawed. On top of THAT, I hate seeing predominantly white women all over these hashtags. White, able bodied women. It needs more diversity, because people in wheelchairs, people with dystrophy, people of color, people missing limbs....they don't get press, and they need and deserve representation. And it needs more diversity in looks, because for the great majority of love these hashtags gets, the women are pretty. They are still very attractive women. Like the women on my husband's curvy model pages. And look, most of us are not that white, not that pretty, not that fit, and not that curvy, and not that able. These movements are becoming exactly what they sought to topple down: impossible archetypes that make normal people feel bad. I am fucking sick of that shit, which leads me into my final complaint.
5. Seeing someone who is 200 pounds does not mean that person is unhealthy. I am pretty sure I'm healthier than the bulk of my skinny friends, though if you judged us by our bodies, the assumption is that they're skinnier, which means they're healthier. Nevermind that they eat like assholes and don't workout, and I eat well and exercise at least five times a week. We tend to place a lot of weight, pardon the pun, on how people look. Which is 100% ok, because, barring a lack of vision, we are visual creatures. Our first impressions are visual. And that's part of why I get so fucking hammed up about how I look, because I do not like it. And if I don't like it, that. fucking. MATTERS. But it doesn't mean that I hate myself. that's the important distinction, and I guess it's my primary point here.
I do not hate myself. not in the least. As a general term, I don't hate my body, either. My body is strong as fuck, it's able, I can do so much with it, it takes care of me, and I am grateful for what my body can do, and has done. I've given birth to two children, I've won races, I've built a home, I've volunteered in hurricane clean up efforts, I've done things in my communities. I don't have the balls to hate my body, because I know other people don't have the benefit of using theirs to the full capacity that I do. My body is, as a body, INCREDIBLE. Why is it so fucking difficult to reconcile the idea that I can hate my weight, hate my hips, hate my tits, hate my arms, hate my thighs, BUT be working on changing them in the same space that I'm grateful for them in?
It seems very difficult for people to understand, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because our instinct is to assure people of how little those things stack up against, say, your intelligence, or your wit, or your capacity to care for others. Or that those things we see as flaws are gorgeous and wonderful to other people, and shouldn't that count?
The short answer is? No.
No, how you feel about my hips doesn't count against how I feel. And you loving my body doesn't matter when I hate how it looks.
If you are complaining to someone about your body, and they respond with you're gorgeous, why can't you see it, they see it, maybe you should see a therapist if you can't understand your own beauty, you tell them to go fuck themselves and to stop gaslighting you, because that's what that is. Someone trying to convince you that your feelings are invalid and crazy instead of being there for you if you need time to vent.
Now, to be sure, there are people who genuinely DO have body dysmorphia. Who have eating disorders, or disordered eating. Who do not take care of themselves and enact self harm because of the way they view their body. And if you are concerned that a loved one is heading down that path, I'd suggest viewing this checklist against what you're noticing, and having a frank discussion about your concerns FIRST. If they laugh it off, and say it's just something they're going through that you should just listen to them about, trust them. It's 100% OK to keep a watchful eye on your friends afterwards, though, and even to be concerned that they're about to head down a dark, unhealthy road. But I can tell you there is a difference between a frank and open conversation about the possibility of maybe having an eating disorder and wanting to check in, and saying, "why don't you go see a therapist, you're unhealthy."
It is unrealistic to think that we are going to love ourselves after we've gained a lot of weight, or even if we've always been a heavier weight, because the shit society drums into our heads is dangerously effective. I feel inadequate as a woman for not looking like a fucking stellar model in lingerie. Cute, trendy clothes look like shit on me because I have a short torso and a high waist, and broad shoulders. Designers do not cater to women built like me, and I get this, and I am frustrated by it, and at the same time, it hurts to know that I am not as "real" to clothing designers as my thin, or even non-thin with reasonable proportions counterparts. I need a size XL for my chest, an M for my waist, an XXL for my hips, an L to an XL for my thighs, and an L for my calves. AND on top of that, I wear a size 11 shoe. I have a strange body, and admitting that marketing gets to me and I feel like an ugly, Quasimodo-esque failure when I see what I "should" be wearing sucks, but it's also accurate. My husband likes to say I'm crazy. My friends like to ask me if I've considered therapy. My mom tells me to get everything tailor-made because she thinks I have her kind of money?
My conflicts with my body are rational and valid. I've spent my life as a fit, muscular woman, and adjusting to a heavy body that is stubborn about losing weight, and isn't as youthful, full, and perky as it used to be, is really fucking hard. Really. Fucking. Hard. I have times where I don't want to have sex because I understand how my stomach looks, and the women my husband ogles do not look a thing like me, and do not have my body proportions, or my extra skin around my stomach. The women my husband ogles are either curvy and perfect, or thin and perfect. Always young, always pretty, never anything like me. And while yeah, fantasy is not something I am going to cause an argument over, it's ok for me to admit that seeing what his go to preference is when I'm not around really does make it feel an awful lot like he's settled when I am.
A lot of variables go in to having things about your body that you hate, and while I think the body positivity movement is a great idea (in theory), it also enforces this idea that you have to love yourself, and that's just unrealistic. You don't fucking have to love yourself. I don't HAVE to love my wide hips, I don't HAVE to think it's great that my stomach birthed two babies, a 7 pound baby girl, and a ten pound baby boy, and that the skin of my stomach never bounced back after the birth of my son, and it looks like a wet pile of raincoats when left to its own devices. I can recognize that my body is fucking AWESOME, but I don't like it's packaging, and that doesn't mean I need to see a doctor.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, body negativity isn't as bad as it's cracked up to be, and maybe, just MAYBE, what women like me, and men who think like I do, need is for other people to be a bit more present and a lot less talky when we air our grievances.
Well.
I hate my body because I hate it.
I took this picture of me today:
To me, this body is huge. I absolutely hate my figure right now, because this is the biggest I've been in my entire life. My car accident really fucked my world up. I ate like I was still running 3-5 miles every day, because my body was still hungry like that for a couple weeks afterward, and then I spiraled down into the habit of letting my now husband, then boyfriend, cook deliciously caloric meals for me. Like curry, and beef with broccoli, and taking me out to eat all the fucking time, and really doting on me. Which my crazy frosty bitchy ass secretly LOVED, because it felt like genuine doting rather than pity or obligation, and the weight gain happened so slowly that I didn't even notice. Until one day, I was taking a selfie to send to Derek and I was like, excuse me there, ma'ams, but have you always been here? I was, of course, talking to my extensive collection of chins. They responded they had not, and I was dumbfounded. I didn't realize how big I had become until I was scrutinizing my self to send a naked picture to Derek. Which, I mean....I didn't end up sending. For obvious reasons. My chins talked me out of it, with my new tummy rolls echoing the sentiment. When we got engaged in 2014, I was around 210 pounds, a number I do not like telling anybody because I am very heavily caught up in what society tells me about weight. I hate our engagement photos with a fucking passion, because I'm massive in them. I was a very fit, very slender little runner when I met Derek, and to see my engagement photos come back with this...just...I don't even know how to describe myself...but the end of the story is that I was distraught over how I looked. I was supposed to be happy and in love in these photos, and my makeup had been fucked up, my hair had been fucked up (I paid a girl to do them and she was not what she promised, skill-wise), and I was FAT.
I hired a personal trainer, and busted my fucking ass in the year leading up to my wedding. I had my training twice a week, for an hour and a half each session, and then the other three days a week I hit up the gym on my own, for an hour or two, depending. I got REALLY strict with my diet, I counted calories, I got more sleep, I did everything right. I got down to 192 for my wedding.
That's about where I've been for the last two years, and I am FRUSTRATED. I'm frustrated about several things.
1. I'm frustrated because I do everything right. I'm as close to vegan as I can be without jeopardizing my health (even with multivitamins, I had lines in my nails, fatigue, all around bad health, and after introducing eggs, cheese, and the occasional piece of fish into my diet, my health has improved ENORMOUSLY. But my diet is more vegan than it is pescatarian). I workout every fucking morning, taking a three mile jog with my dog. I come home and do body strengthening workouts for 30 minutes every day. I eat well. No fast food, only the occasional sweet treat. I don't drink soda, I don't drink juice, I have a cup of decaf coffee in the morning with almond milk creamer, no sugar, and then water the rest of the day. I cannot make my body look like anything but those two photos, and I don't fucking know why.
2. For some reason, I am not allowed to hate my body. Nothing makes my husband more upset than me going on a tear about my wide hips and my flat tits and my fat arms and my thick thighs. He gets irate, he yells at me, we get into arguments about this fairly regularly. My friends, too. I know they just want to make me feel better, nut it's maddening when someone tells you to seek therapy as you gripe about your body, like you have a mental illness. I do not have a mental illness, I do not have body dysmorphia. I am a 192-200 pound woman, somewhere around there, that used to be exceptionally fucking fit at 170 and is rightfully upset to find herself in a bigger body than she's used to that is exceptionally slow to change. I hate people saying, "you're a babe!" or "I think you're super sexy" to me like that matters. The fact is, my body feels like a stranger to me, especially now. Because I feel HEALTHY. It's so defeating to see 194 on the scale when I feel like I should have a 180 weight. I feel fantastic. I'm not sluggish, I don't get tired through the day, I'm not winded easily, I feel strong (except for my bad arm) and like my body is at almost optimum performance power. I know I could be a lot stronger, and be doing more, and I already have a plan to do so when I finish my last class of the semester tomorrow, but where I'm at INTERNALLY feels wonderful. And then, when I see how much I weigh, it makes me cry, because it doesn't feel right. My body feels like it's in shape; my body LOOKS like a hot fuckin' mess. And I don't mean hot as in dudes want to cum all over my tits immediately. It sucks to feel like your insides and your outsides are not in harmony. And I am trying to fix it, but if there's progress, it's so slow that I'm more familiar with feeling dejected rather than proud or motivated.
3. My husband has this aggravating habit of following curvy models and curvy model collection pages on instagram. Now, I'm not one to freak out about fantasy when it's not close to being real. Porn doesn't bug me, having massive boners for celebrities, Hollywood, Internet, or otherwise, doesn't bother me. It's all fantasy, it's all healthy, it's totally cool. If it swings into reality, that's when I have a problem, but that's not the issue. My husband likes to show me pictures of these women and talk about how sexy and confident they are, which, you know, good for them! I'm so happy that women are happy and confident.....as a size 8. My husband follows CURVY women, not full figured (or plus sized, which is a fucked up term) women, and the two are not the fucking same. These women are fit, they are toned, they are just a little bit thick in areas like their thighs. They're all young and perky, they're exactly what people say "real" women should look like (I have beef about that bullshit, too, but again, not the point here). And I'm not sure how he thinks comparing me to women who have 24 inch waists with 36 inch hips and 32 inch chests is going to make me feel good about myself, but it doesn't. It makes me feel worse. Which brings me to my next frustration.
4. WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS UP WITH THE BODY POSITIVE MOVEMENT??? Look, a few things. The body positive movement SHOULD encompass all bodies. No one body is better than another, and it's important that people understand that society is made up of all flavors, and not wanting one kind of person's body type does not mean that body type is inherently bad. So women can be short and overweight, and it is perfectly ok for them to feel sexy, and for others to think they're sexy, just like a woman can be tall and lean, and she has every right to feel sexy in her skin, too. I understand this in my head, but in real life, I get very, very, VERY angry seeing thin, athletic women plastered all over the bopo instagram hashtag, and the love your body hashtag, and the hashtags that are meant to help women (and men, who do not get equal press in this movement, but definitely should) who are not exactly fitting in society's mold of hot and sexy find a following that helps them love themselves more without seeing their bodies as flawed. On top of THAT, I hate seeing predominantly white women all over these hashtags. White, able bodied women. It needs more diversity, because people in wheelchairs, people with dystrophy, people of color, people missing limbs....they don't get press, and they need and deserve representation. And it needs more diversity in looks, because for the great majority of love these hashtags gets, the women are pretty. They are still very attractive women. Like the women on my husband's curvy model pages. And look, most of us are not that white, not that pretty, not that fit, and not that curvy, and not that able. These movements are becoming exactly what they sought to topple down: impossible archetypes that make normal people feel bad. I am fucking sick of that shit, which leads me into my final complaint.
5. Seeing someone who is 200 pounds does not mean that person is unhealthy. I am pretty sure I'm healthier than the bulk of my skinny friends, though if you judged us by our bodies, the assumption is that they're skinnier, which means they're healthier. Nevermind that they eat like assholes and don't workout, and I eat well and exercise at least five times a week. We tend to place a lot of weight, pardon the pun, on how people look. Which is 100% ok, because, barring a lack of vision, we are visual creatures. Our first impressions are visual. And that's part of why I get so fucking hammed up about how I look, because I do not like it. And if I don't like it, that. fucking. MATTERS. But it doesn't mean that I hate myself. that's the important distinction, and I guess it's my primary point here.
I do not hate myself. not in the least. As a general term, I don't hate my body, either. My body is strong as fuck, it's able, I can do so much with it, it takes care of me, and I am grateful for what my body can do, and has done. I've given birth to two children, I've won races, I've built a home, I've volunteered in hurricane clean up efforts, I've done things in my communities. I don't have the balls to hate my body, because I know other people don't have the benefit of using theirs to the full capacity that I do. My body is, as a body, INCREDIBLE. Why is it so fucking difficult to reconcile the idea that I can hate my weight, hate my hips, hate my tits, hate my arms, hate my thighs, BUT be working on changing them in the same space that I'm grateful for them in?
It seems very difficult for people to understand, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because our instinct is to assure people of how little those things stack up against, say, your intelligence, or your wit, or your capacity to care for others. Or that those things we see as flaws are gorgeous and wonderful to other people, and shouldn't that count?
The short answer is? No.
No, how you feel about my hips doesn't count against how I feel. And you loving my body doesn't matter when I hate how it looks.
If you are complaining to someone about your body, and they respond with you're gorgeous, why can't you see it, they see it, maybe you should see a therapist if you can't understand your own beauty, you tell them to go fuck themselves and to stop gaslighting you, because that's what that is. Someone trying to convince you that your feelings are invalid and crazy instead of being there for you if you need time to vent.
Now, to be sure, there are people who genuinely DO have body dysmorphia. Who have eating disorders, or disordered eating. Who do not take care of themselves and enact self harm because of the way they view their body. And if you are concerned that a loved one is heading down that path, I'd suggest viewing this checklist against what you're noticing, and having a frank discussion about your concerns FIRST. If they laugh it off, and say it's just something they're going through that you should just listen to them about, trust them. It's 100% OK to keep a watchful eye on your friends afterwards, though, and even to be concerned that they're about to head down a dark, unhealthy road. But I can tell you there is a difference between a frank and open conversation about the possibility of maybe having an eating disorder and wanting to check in, and saying, "why don't you go see a therapist, you're unhealthy."
It is unrealistic to think that we are going to love ourselves after we've gained a lot of weight, or even if we've always been a heavier weight, because the shit society drums into our heads is dangerously effective. I feel inadequate as a woman for not looking like a fucking stellar model in lingerie. Cute, trendy clothes look like shit on me because I have a short torso and a high waist, and broad shoulders. Designers do not cater to women built like me, and I get this, and I am frustrated by it, and at the same time, it hurts to know that I am not as "real" to clothing designers as my thin, or even non-thin with reasonable proportions counterparts. I need a size XL for my chest, an M for my waist, an XXL for my hips, an L to an XL for my thighs, and an L for my calves. AND on top of that, I wear a size 11 shoe. I have a strange body, and admitting that marketing gets to me and I feel like an ugly, Quasimodo-esque failure when I see what I "should" be wearing sucks, but it's also accurate. My husband likes to say I'm crazy. My friends like to ask me if I've considered therapy. My mom tells me to get everything tailor-made because she thinks I have her kind of money?
My conflicts with my body are rational and valid. I've spent my life as a fit, muscular woman, and adjusting to a heavy body that is stubborn about losing weight, and isn't as youthful, full, and perky as it used to be, is really fucking hard. Really. Fucking. Hard. I have times where I don't want to have sex because I understand how my stomach looks, and the women my husband ogles do not look a thing like me, and do not have my body proportions, or my extra skin around my stomach. The women my husband ogles are either curvy and perfect, or thin and perfect. Always young, always pretty, never anything like me. And while yeah, fantasy is not something I am going to cause an argument over, it's ok for me to admit that seeing what his go to preference is when I'm not around really does make it feel an awful lot like he's settled when I am.
A lot of variables go in to having things about your body that you hate, and while I think the body positivity movement is a great idea (in theory), it also enforces this idea that you have to love yourself, and that's just unrealistic. You don't fucking have to love yourself. I don't HAVE to love my wide hips, I don't HAVE to think it's great that my stomach birthed two babies, a 7 pound baby girl, and a ten pound baby boy, and that the skin of my stomach never bounced back after the birth of my son, and it looks like a wet pile of raincoats when left to its own devices. I can recognize that my body is fucking AWESOME, but I don't like it's packaging, and that doesn't mean I need to see a doctor.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, body negativity isn't as bad as it's cracked up to be, and maybe, just MAYBE, what women like me, and men who think like I do, need is for other people to be a bit more present and a lot less talky when we air our grievances.
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
The problem is, there's a German Shepard in your toilet.
If you're in the business of learning really disgusting things about another person's bowels today, have I ever got a story for you.
I'm a bit weird about poop. I don't play in it or anything like that, but I've always been deeply ashamed of the fact that I do it. Or fart. Generally, anything that comes out of my asshole is enough to send me into a shame spiral that is hard to get out of. For instance, I have never farted on purpose in front of anybody but my sister, and even then, it was just because she lived in the same room as me and I was not going to spend all fucking day holding in my farts. That's just unhealthy and uncomfortable, so I pushed that behavior off for a few years. Amber and I have been best friends for almost twenty years (twenty next year!), and I have never farted in front of her, or pooped around her. It took me fifteen years to be able to tell her I was pooping and texting her at the same time. I can do that now and it's not a big deal, but it took a LONG time.
I never mentioned pooping to Chris, and we lived together. He farted and shit with the bathroom door open, there was no privacy boundary there for him. Allen was the same, though I eventually got to the point where I could tell him I had to poop, and he needed to vacate the area because I didn't want him to hear it or smell it or give any other clues to the fact that my anus served the same purpose as everyone else's. I didn't fart on purpose around him, but it did happen on accident in my sleep. Because of COURSE it did, I was a human woman holding in farts. Same with Dan, though with Dan, it was reciprocal. Neither of us talked about farts or poops, or bodily functions at all. And I will say, in the...I'm muddy about how long we were actually together...Anyway, body habits were not a thing we discussed when we were together. Dan never farted in front of me (he did on accident once, but as a person with good upbringing, I pretended I didn't notice by saying, "for what?" when he excused himself. I am perpetuating the problem of dwindling bodily intimacy), though because we "lived" at his place, he of course pooped, and his walls were so thin that I could hear EVERYTHING and I would sit in the living room with my ears burning out of embarrassment thinking to myself, "no fucking WAY will I be pooping at this abode's commode". And I never did. There was one time, my friend Anali was trying to get a dating feel for Dan's friend David, so we were over at Dan's watching movies and eating pizza, and I was struck by some kind of shit emergency, and I made an excuse about my period coming, and then ran to walmart and shit for a decade in their public restroom, sweating and packing myself full of self-loathing. And then REALLY going full gusto by buying a pack of tampons and shoving some in my purse.
Of course, I live with my husband now, the romance is gone, I know he shits, he knows I shit, and while I still do not fart in front of him, it's something that's no secret. We're human people that are married and live together.
I'm still weird about poop, though, and today, when Amber needed a little bit of a pick me up, I decided to tell her about my most embarrassing poop story, of which I have a few, but this one takes the shitty, shitty cake.
I was plagued by nervous guts as a kid. As an adult, this is less of a problem, but every once and a rare while, when I'm REALLY nervous, my tummy will seize up, and my asshole will demand that I find a hole to squat over, because I'm going to shit, whether I want to or not. As a middle schooler, I could usually hold in my first day of school nerves until the end of the day, when I was home and on my own turf, and could shit without shame. But the first day of ninth grade was different, for some reason, and this is the first in several truly embarrassing stories where my body was a vile betrayer in such a public forum; where the slightest sprinkling of bad verbal press could make or break your happiness for the next four years, my body decided it didn't give a fuck about my popularity. And let's be honest, my popularity was a lost fucking cause. I was fluffy headed, I wore glasses, I was tall and oddly built, and as we previously learned, my mom dressed me in the most painfully odious clothes. Also, she didn't let me shave past my knees, and as I'm Italian and Armenian (I recently learned that, and I think it's so cool), I am as hairless as a gorilla, so I was walking around with an afro, bad clothes, Sally Jesse Raphael glasses, Garfield shorts, and legs that were half smooth, half Robin Williams. Now that I've repainted that amazing picture of me as a 9th grader, it'll make the rest of this story even worse.
I couldn't hold my tummy nerves. My body made it clear that I was going to shit, the only thing that would change in that scenario was where I did it. I could either keep trying to hold it and shit my pants, or I could find a bathroom, get over myself, and shit where I was supposed to. so I rushed to a bathroom, and it should be noted that our high school was too full, so we were in a valley of portables off site. Our restroom was a portable, too. Without a door. So it was three stalls, completely "open" to the outside. But I was lucky, nobody was outside, nobody was in the restroom, I was totally free to shit as noisily and stinkily as I could. And I REALLY fucking needed to, so I did.
For what felt like the next twenty years of my life.
It sounded like what I imagine the gates of hell sound like, and smelled worse. It was an all around unpleasant time, but it was desperately needed. After however many eons of raucous shitting I did was over, I felt AMAZING. Like a brand new person. I had stopped sweating, my body wasn't shivering and cold anymore, and most importantly, I had managed to not have anybody come in and disrupt my exploding asshole moment that so desperately needed to happen.
I was washing my hands, feeling so much better about my life, and my bowels, and the school year in general, when I looked outside the open door to the bathroom portable.
There stood two of the most popular girls in school. Like statues. Statues that had obviously been standing there, silently biding their time to see who those horrible ass noises and smells and plops belonged to, and oh god oh god oh god, it was me. The noises belonged to me. I couldn't pretend someone else was in there, or that I had happened upon the noises, too, and yeah, popular girls, what kinda monster has a stomach that makes sounds like that, ammiright??? There would be none of that. It was plain to these two beacons of popularity and social grace that I was the culprit. I was caught brown handed, a pooper among the elite. The three of us stood in our spots for a frozen second, me panicking, them taking it all in, and then the laughter started. They were laughing at me. Incredulously, earnestly, judgmentally. They were laughing at me, and I stood there and took it, because what was I going to do, defend myself? Scream at them, "Hey, you fucking perverts, who the fuck sits outside a bathroom and listens to someone feverishly squirt out their emotions AND their horrible breakfast? Gross, you guys are gross, and you have the gall to laugh at me, you sick, sick, sick, sick fucks!" Well...yeah. Yeah, I should have done that. Because it's true, it takes a really weird person to want to sit and listen to someone shitting. While we all laugh at poop and farts, this was going above and beyond. It's a level of curiosity that I do not understand, as an adult, but I was utterly ashamed by as a child.
Was the entire school going to find out? I was so fucking nervous. I hung back in the stall and sweat for an entirely different reason now, and the girls never came in. They just walked off, laughing at me, talking about me pooping like normal mean girls talked about my hair and my Garfield shorts. They never said a word to anybody outside of themselves, thankfully, though for the rest of the week, they would giggle and whisper to each other and look right at me when I crossed their paths. They probably talked more about my shit that week than any of my doctors have in my whole life, and I literally shit in a doctors hands a decade ago.
I have never moved on from that embarrassing moment. When we go out and I have to poop, I make my husband take me home, and he gets frustrated and asks me, "Can't you just fucking go in the restroom? NOBODY CARES!" Sure, nobody cares, but the ghosts of the popular girls will always always always be waiting for me outside of that bathroom, judging me and laughing at me. i'll stick to the bathroom at home, thanks.
I'm a bit weird about poop. I don't play in it or anything like that, but I've always been deeply ashamed of the fact that I do it. Or fart. Generally, anything that comes out of my asshole is enough to send me into a shame spiral that is hard to get out of. For instance, I have never farted on purpose in front of anybody but my sister, and even then, it was just because she lived in the same room as me and I was not going to spend all fucking day holding in my farts. That's just unhealthy and uncomfortable, so I pushed that behavior off for a few years. Amber and I have been best friends for almost twenty years (twenty next year!), and I have never farted in front of her, or pooped around her. It took me fifteen years to be able to tell her I was pooping and texting her at the same time. I can do that now and it's not a big deal, but it took a LONG time.
I never mentioned pooping to Chris, and we lived together. He farted and shit with the bathroom door open, there was no privacy boundary there for him. Allen was the same, though I eventually got to the point where I could tell him I had to poop, and he needed to vacate the area because I didn't want him to hear it or smell it or give any other clues to the fact that my anus served the same purpose as everyone else's. I didn't fart on purpose around him, but it did happen on accident in my sleep. Because of COURSE it did, I was a human woman holding in farts. Same with Dan, though with Dan, it was reciprocal. Neither of us talked about farts or poops, or bodily functions at all. And I will say, in the...I'm muddy about how long we were actually together...Anyway, body habits were not a thing we discussed when we were together. Dan never farted in front of me (he did on accident once, but as a person with good upbringing, I pretended I didn't notice by saying, "for what?" when he excused himself. I am perpetuating the problem of dwindling bodily intimacy), though because we "lived" at his place, he of course pooped, and his walls were so thin that I could hear EVERYTHING and I would sit in the living room with my ears burning out of embarrassment thinking to myself, "no fucking WAY will I be pooping at this abode's commode". And I never did. There was one time, my friend Anali was trying to get a dating feel for Dan's friend David, so we were over at Dan's watching movies and eating pizza, and I was struck by some kind of shit emergency, and I made an excuse about my period coming, and then ran to walmart and shit for a decade in their public restroom, sweating and packing myself full of self-loathing. And then REALLY going full gusto by buying a pack of tampons and shoving some in my purse.
Of course, I live with my husband now, the romance is gone, I know he shits, he knows I shit, and while I still do not fart in front of him, it's something that's no secret. We're human people that are married and live together.
I'm still weird about poop, though, and today, when Amber needed a little bit of a pick me up, I decided to tell her about my most embarrassing poop story, of which I have a few, but this one takes the shitty, shitty cake.
I was plagued by nervous guts as a kid. As an adult, this is less of a problem, but every once and a rare while, when I'm REALLY nervous, my tummy will seize up, and my asshole will demand that I find a hole to squat over, because I'm going to shit, whether I want to or not. As a middle schooler, I could usually hold in my first day of school nerves until the end of the day, when I was home and on my own turf, and could shit without shame. But the first day of ninth grade was different, for some reason, and this is the first in several truly embarrassing stories where my body was a vile betrayer in such a public forum; where the slightest sprinkling of bad verbal press could make or break your happiness for the next four years, my body decided it didn't give a fuck about my popularity. And let's be honest, my popularity was a lost fucking cause. I was fluffy headed, I wore glasses, I was tall and oddly built, and as we previously learned, my mom dressed me in the most painfully odious clothes. Also, she didn't let me shave past my knees, and as I'm Italian and Armenian (I recently learned that, and I think it's so cool), I am as hairless as a gorilla, so I was walking around with an afro, bad clothes, Sally Jesse Raphael glasses, Garfield shorts, and legs that were half smooth, half Robin Williams. Now that I've repainted that amazing picture of me as a 9th grader, it'll make the rest of this story even worse.
I couldn't hold my tummy nerves. My body made it clear that I was going to shit, the only thing that would change in that scenario was where I did it. I could either keep trying to hold it and shit my pants, or I could find a bathroom, get over myself, and shit where I was supposed to. so I rushed to a bathroom, and it should be noted that our high school was too full, so we were in a valley of portables off site. Our restroom was a portable, too. Without a door. So it was three stalls, completely "open" to the outside. But I was lucky, nobody was outside, nobody was in the restroom, I was totally free to shit as noisily and stinkily as I could. And I REALLY fucking needed to, so I did.
For what felt like the next twenty years of my life.
It sounded like what I imagine the gates of hell sound like, and smelled worse. It was an all around unpleasant time, but it was desperately needed. After however many eons of raucous shitting I did was over, I felt AMAZING. Like a brand new person. I had stopped sweating, my body wasn't shivering and cold anymore, and most importantly, I had managed to not have anybody come in and disrupt my exploding asshole moment that so desperately needed to happen.
I was washing my hands, feeling so much better about my life, and my bowels, and the school year in general, when I looked outside the open door to the bathroom portable.
There stood two of the most popular girls in school. Like statues. Statues that had obviously been standing there, silently biding their time to see who those horrible ass noises and smells and plops belonged to, and oh god oh god oh god, it was me. The noises belonged to me. I couldn't pretend someone else was in there, or that I had happened upon the noises, too, and yeah, popular girls, what kinda monster has a stomach that makes sounds like that, ammiright??? There would be none of that. It was plain to these two beacons of popularity and social grace that I was the culprit. I was caught brown handed, a pooper among the elite. The three of us stood in our spots for a frozen second, me panicking, them taking it all in, and then the laughter started. They were laughing at me. Incredulously, earnestly, judgmentally. They were laughing at me, and I stood there and took it, because what was I going to do, defend myself? Scream at them, "Hey, you fucking perverts, who the fuck sits outside a bathroom and listens to someone feverishly squirt out their emotions AND their horrible breakfast? Gross, you guys are gross, and you have the gall to laugh at me, you sick, sick, sick, sick fucks!" Well...yeah. Yeah, I should have done that. Because it's true, it takes a really weird person to want to sit and listen to someone shitting. While we all laugh at poop and farts, this was going above and beyond. It's a level of curiosity that I do not understand, as an adult, but I was utterly ashamed by as a child.
Was the entire school going to find out? I was so fucking nervous. I hung back in the stall and sweat for an entirely different reason now, and the girls never came in. They just walked off, laughing at me, talking about me pooping like normal mean girls talked about my hair and my Garfield shorts. They never said a word to anybody outside of themselves, thankfully, though for the rest of the week, they would giggle and whisper to each other and look right at me when I crossed their paths. They probably talked more about my shit that week than any of my doctors have in my whole life, and I literally shit in a doctors hands a decade ago.
I have never moved on from that embarrassing moment. When we go out and I have to poop, I make my husband take me home, and he gets frustrated and asks me, "Can't you just fucking go in the restroom? NOBODY CARES!" Sure, nobody cares, but the ghosts of the popular girls will always always always be waiting for me outside of that bathroom, judging me and laughing at me. i'll stick to the bathroom at home, thanks.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Songs to make love to your old lady by
I'm not terribly shy about the fact that I've had a lot of sex with a lot of different people. I haven't hit the 100 mark, and if all goes well with my husband, I won't, but I'm not far off. If my husband were to cheat on me, I'd break 100 on my vengeance fuck-a-thon tour, easy. My ability to rope dudes into banging me isn't really the point here, but well done, me! Pun intended.
In my years of humping, I've learned one thing: men. are. the WORST. In my experience, which admittedly is large (but maybe not large enough to be an adequate sample size), only one man has ever bothered to get consent from me, and every other man has just taken what he wanted from my body without a first, much less a second, thought about how it might make me feel, or what I might want.
Let's see. I lost my virginity at 14, and it's such a pathetic story that I almost don't want to tell it.
ALMOST. But I will, because saying I don't want to tell the story is a lie.
I had been "dating" this guy named Richard, and he sucked in a lot of ways. Chiefly that he fucked around on me because I was too scared to fuck him. I didn't want to lose my virginity yet, and I certainly didn't want to lose it to Richard. Ew. He did this thing when we kissed where he'd like, only close his eyes 8/10ths of the way closed, enough so that you could a) still see the whites of the bottoms of his eyes and 2) be sufficiently creeped out when you could not only see the whites of his eyes, but when he'd flutter his eyelids like a dying butterfly. I may not have known about the hilarity of bad O faces at such a tender and naive stage of my life, but I made the right call, and I know it. I have a feeling his O face is the kind of shit Wes Craven got horror boners over. Ew ew ew. My reasons for thinking he sucked weren't all superficial, he was also ugly on the inside. I got a dig on him after he admitted to doing some serious rubbernecking with one of my closest friends at the time (WHILE I WAS AT A FUNERAL, that's the detail I can't help but throw in there. It's not funny, but it makes me look like more of a victim, and that's my current aesthetic), and I'm pretty sure the immediate Denzel circa Glory tear and the obvious anger and hurt are why I am such a fucking cunty cunt when people hurt me....his reaction was DELICIOUS and I will greedily feed on that shit anytime I have an opportunity. Don't look to me to act like a fucking saint. Richard had made the mistake of being vulnerable with me and telling me his mother had abandoned him when he was a baby, and his grandmother was raising him. When he come over to read me a letter of apology he had written about smooching on my friend (who never apologized for that, it's worth mentioning. I siphoned all of my anger at Richard, and none at Angela, because I misguidedly still considered her a friend, and as a friend, she was blameless. Which is utter horseshit, she went for that shit, too, and she's an ugly cunt for abusing our friendship that way. Unfortunately, all my 14 year old self could do was cry about it. I didn't know how to articulate, "go fuck yourself, your cunt is a dumpster and I hate your face".), I sat and listened to it out of some misplaced obligation, and when he was done, I told him that I understood why his mother had abandoned him, because he was worthless trash.
I wasn't wrong, and I'm pretty sure that's why Richard punched the steps of my house rather than punching me in the face.
Telling someone their mother was right to not love them is rarely enough dealt damage when you have a black hole for a heart, so I needed to compound the matter by going on a vengeful fuck a thon. You know, the virgin way. How I knew this kid, I can't even tell you, but I called up a 19 year old I knew named Alex and asked him if he wanted to fuck me. He said yes (gross. I was 14. MEN ARE FUCKING GROSS, what the fuck is it with all of you??), and came over straight away. He picked me up at my best friend Amber's house, and we left (not before he tried to fuck her, too, because men are gross, and men have always been gross, and men will always be gross because all men think they're the exception to the "men are gross" rule. None of you are), and I just want to catalog the differences between us, so I can really set the scene:
Alex = 19 Drea = 14
Alex = drove an admittedly awesome mustang Drea = 14 and still played with barbies on the DL
Alex = looked cool Drea = had pages from Disney Princess coloring books she had colored hung on her wall (aka not cool)
Alex = CAME TO FUCK A 14 YEAR OLD AS A 19 YEAR OLD Drea = would never.
So Alex comes into my room, which is, I kid you not, covered in colored pages from coloring books I had painstakingly colored and glitter penned into looking what I believed passed for fabulously artistic, but realistically passed for lame. I had stuffed animals all over my bed, I had a Barbie dream house tucked away in the corner of my room with Barbies pooled into a convertible, and probably a few on Barbie's horse (my Barbies were city, but in a very rural kind of way). I had glitter body spray on my headboard, and a large collection of medications for my beautiful, broken brain. I'm taking a long time to say that, had Alex taken stock of his surroundings, there's no fucking way I would have lost my virginity that day. I was very obviously still a child, and bonus, I was a child that needed to be medicated. Sub-optimal fucking material. But Alex had tunnel vision for my inexperienced vagina, and he noticed approximately none of this. Not even my AMAZING colored page of Ariel and the Prince Eric statue, I didn't even get the slightest compliment on how well I outlined the statue in silver glitter glue. Some fucking people, man, I swear.
I remember standing in my room, wearing a yellow and white three quarter sleeve top, and....oh, I wish I were kidding...jean shorts with an elastic waistband and a sewn applique of Garfield. Fucking GARFIELD. Fucking ELASTIC WAIST JEAN SHORTS. I didn't WANT to wear clothes like that, but my mom made me. Everything about this paragraph is terrible.
I stammered nervously that I was a virgin, and I didn't know what to do, and I think that's the most vulnerable I've ever been with a man in my entire life. Alex's instinct was to be 100% predatory, and of course it would be. When you want a wolf, don't be surprised when you get a wolf. Alex wasn't gentle, he wasn't kind, he treated me and my body like I was a 19 year old with experience. It wasn't rape, I wanted to lose my virginity to him in emotionally depraved desperation....but it certainly wasn't consensual. It was sex Alex's way, and even though Drea had no basis for comparison, I could have adequately told Alex that he was hurting me and being too vigorous. My failing was assuming that, as a virgin, I couldn't know what sex should be like, and Alex, as a non-virgin, had every idea what sex was like, and would only do sexing the way sexing was supposed to be done. This, of course, was a stupid idea. But I was 14, and I was allowed to be stupid about sex. I had no input or say in how that sex went down, I just kind of....laid there and handled it as best I could. There was no kissing, no caressing, none of the shit I so enjoy now. I was just a living dick sock to Alex, and that's the theme of my entire sex life.
I am Jack's breathing dick sock.
Alex is not alone in that he did not consider my body, my connection to my body, what I wanted for my body, or any part of me, in the sexual transaction. Alex gets a pass on asking me for consent because I asked HIM, and I never retracted the request. But he's the only guy that gets that pass, except for Gary, and even GARY doesn't get a complete pass.
When I was a more mature and wizened 14, I met a guy I had been talking to online in person. He was a more age appropriate 16. Old enough that he should have been disinterested, but not so old that I'd flirt with the idea of labeling him a low key pedophile. I met him outside, and he came with friends, and I assumed we were both acting in ways that would make us the most safe. I certainly was. He wasn't, though. We had been talking for a little bit when he corned me against a fence and started asking me questions about sex, and I didn't know what to do. Nobody had taught me to be assertive, nobody had taught me to say no, all anybody had taught me was that sex was for adults that wanted gonorrhea. So when he put his hand down my jeans (that had an ACTUAL waistband, thank you very much, and not a single applique of Garfield to be seen) and started fingering me in broad daylight and in front of his friends, I looked away and blushed in embarrassment as his friends egged him on. He noticed he wasn't getting anywhere and stopped after a few minutes, and I remember feeling so relieved, because what he was doing to my vagina was uncomfortable, mostly because he kept fingering the inner fold of my thigh, not my clit, but also because I was a prop, and my sexuality was reduced to little more than a set scene for a man's sexual heroism and bragging rights. Me now loves a good finger rodgering in a public place. It's illicit and naughty and that makes it VERY sexy, and perhaps it's because I want to empower 14 year old me, trapped against that fence, getting fingerbanged in front of four older boys and just taking it like a fucking champion (I am the fucking hero of that story, not him, no matter what he told his cronies as he walked toward all of them and, indignity of indignity, outstretched his fingers for all of them to smell). I cried when I walked away, because I was so embarrassed, and I didn't know what to do or who to talk to about it. I wanted to cry when he kissed me goodbye, because of course he did. He wanted to. He didn't ask if he could, but why would he think he didn't have access to my face when he'd just been knuckle deep in my thigh meat, but I held it together. I didn't know that I could say, "hey, what the fuck, you get your fucking fingers out of my thigh meat, that's not my clitoris, number one, and number two, nobody gave you permission, and number three, I think your face is wide and ugly and covered in pimples and I do not want your pimple fingers near my vagina." or some iteration of that in order to make him stop. I really, really thought this was what sex was like. And for the longest time, I was terrified of it. I didn't have sex again until I was 16, and no other boys touched me sexually until I was 16. I was so scared of being helpless and used and tossed aside. I went up in age again, and when I started dating Matt (who was as stupid as he was stocky. Corn fed country boy in the middle of Vegas, dumb as a brick but somehow the brick edged him out, and agro as fuck), I knew enough about how he made my body feel that I knew I wanted him to touch my thigh meat, but then to touch my vagina. With his penis. Rapidly. And a lot. When Matt and I fucked, I didn't feel ashamed or anything, but I definitely let him take the lead, because I still had no idea what I was doing, or what felt good for me, and I thought Matt did. I assumed he did, because he never asked what I liked, what felt good, how I was feeling, if I liked anything, nothing. He just grunted and humped.
Cool.
Matt and I stopped dating when he tried to use tarot cards to get my friend Steffie to sleep with him, and neither she nor Miss Cleo had had any visions of that happening. Matt got the emotional curb stomping. We only fucked once. I dated Gary shortly after, and he asked if he could kiss me. I was repulsed. Can you taste the irony? It turned me off that he didn't just kiss me. So I told him as much. I said something to the effect of, ew, don't be weird, just fucking kiss me if you want to kiss me, and if you think I want to kiss you back.
H ah aha, yeah, Gary, what an asshole, treating my body like it's attached to a woman that deserves to make decisions about who touches her, and in what ways!
Gary and I fucked, and he heeded my advice well. He just did what he wanted. I was merely there to be warm, wet, and moaning. A receptacle with no input on what was going on. This is why Gary doesn't get a whole pass. He only asked about kissing me, and everything else after that was out of my control, I guess.
Steven and I fucked for a little bit. Not long, but long enough for me to have what is now referred to as "the wheelbarrow incident" in my story telling repertoire. Steven and I were fucking, and I ASSUMED we were having a grand time, because auditory cues were pointing me in that direction, when Steven grabs my hips and flips me over, quite deftly, by the way. If I were anybody but me, I would have been exceptionally impressed by his lady handling maneuver. Nothing seems awry to me yet, because getting fucked from behind is hot, and I like it, so there's no cause for alarm. And then lightning strikes my eyeballs and my asshole at precisely the same time, and the waves of pain are so unexpected and alarming and vicious that I might have actually died for a few seconds. I died momentarily of uninvited dick to asshole contact. I remember screaming in pain and looking to Steven for an apology, as is customary, but instead, he grabbed my hips and doubled down the dick in the butt action. I yelled. I yelled the whole time it lasted, which to me, felt like a Dante's Inferno of eternity. In reality, it was probably about fifteen seconds. He finally stopped and instead of offering up an apology, told me his ex-girlfriend really liked it. I had found a note in his wallet from his ex-girlfriend, and she spelled would "woold" and Steffie and I made fun of her forever for it. I cannot expect much from someone like that. Jokes aside, Steven was just like everybody else.
I didn't want to fuck my daughter's dad, because I thought he was kinda gross. He was charming, but he wasn't terribly attractive to me, and the thought of having his penis near my delicate sexy parts was eh...less than desirable. He put the sex sex moves on me one night, and I squirmed out of his grabbers and told him I needed to go home, and he said, "you're not leaving here until you have sex with me." HUNKER DOWN, BITCH, I'M MOVING IN. Was what I should have said. But I didn't. I panicked and just did it, because I wanted to leave. While a man reading this, or even an assertive woman, may think to themselves, "obviously that's an idle threat, she should have just left", I think most women will understand the urge to just do it and leave, because if you keep saying no, you're probably going to find yourself in a situation that's worse than uncomfortable, unwanted, vaginal contact with a dick you're unenthused about. I was in his apartment, on his turf, who knows what he might have done to me if I kept insisting it was time to leave? I only insisted on leaving twice, and then I relented. And boom, there goes my prop body.
I am Jack's buxom, voiceless cum dumpster.
After Chris, there are dozens and dozens of stories of other men just taking what they want from me and not bothering to see if I am offering what they want. Dozens and dozens and dozens. Every man I've ever slept with. Every last one of them has found some hidden way to take advantage of a sexual situation, mostly by forgetting that my enjoyment counts, that I have a sexuality and I'm capable of inserting my desires into a sexual encounter, or that I'm saying "I don't like that, do it differently" to be some kind of coy bitch. Because I DID eventually find a way to chime in with what I wanted.
I can tell stories like this about every single man I've fucked. Most of them I don't remember, because they're as innocuous as something in this vein can be. A lot of it is fairly benign, like just not considering my sexual wants and needs, even when asked if I liked something and responding with a no. Not asking me for permission to touch me. Not asking for permission to kiss me. Telling me what I need to do with zero reciprocity. Fucking my face despite me gagging and saying stop. A whole lot of that, that's probably the most common one.
The first time Dan and I fucked, he also pulled a "you're not leaving here until we fuck" line on me, and it was both gross and exactly the push I needed. I had wanted to fuck him, but it put me in a moral quandary, so I needed a sign that I could. Dan disrespecting my no was, apparently, just the correct amount of force. Thanks, universe, for making men repulsive and inconsiderate!
The first guy I fucked AFTER Dan and I split up took his dick out of my mouth and slapped me across the face with it, said oops, and then put it back in my mouth, only to take it out of my mouth two minutes later to whack me with it, repeatedly and in amazingly fast succession. Like a jackhammer, but a fleshy penis. On my cheek. I didn't want it. I didn't like it. I told him so, and he rewarded my frankness by doing it again.
The hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dick pics I've gotten that I've NEVER asked for. The nudes men think they can demand from me and call me a frigid bitch for not delivering. The dating world is a surplus of men that are actually canker sores in clothing.
The first time my now husband and I fucked, which was the first date because I am a champion goddess of my desires, thank you very much, we went from consensual kissing (we had discussed this prior to our first date, as we just wanted to get it over with and see if there was chemistry. The whole thing was pre-planned) to his hand down my pants, and he hadn't asked me if it was ok. He was lucky that it was. But that's been the prevailing story: all of the men I've fucked have been lucky that I've wanted them to do the things they've done to me, because not a one of them asked to do the things they did.
For instance, an amazing sesh of oral from my husband turned into an entire fist in my pussy, and I can tell you that I never asked for that, not even on the most fucked up and depraved of Christmases. He just did it. You almost want to applaud his moxy and his dedication to treating my pussy like an audition prop for Sesame Street, or like some kind of human turkey. I'm pretty sure any Gynecologist would have seen my husband and been like, "Buddy, you DEFINITELY need a degree to have your hand that far up a woman". Making matters worse, it took three separate shouts of STOP before he did. And when he did, he told me that I just needed to stretch it out so it wouldn't hurt.
Let's get one thing straight here:
I understand that there is an almost complete blanket of consent once you get married, and that the safeword is something along the lines of "no" or "I'm not in the mood" or "get your fucking fist out of my vagina, Derek, I am not a bowling ball". This goes for relationships, for dates that are going well. In a small way, it's ALMOST understandable that men don't ask for permission. They get mixed signals about it, but there's a reason for that.
Women have been taught to be demure and to defer to men's whims, even when they want it, and men have been taught to take what they want because they're men. We live in an aggressively ignorant rape culture that's fueled by a pornography industry that gives as little fucks about women as I do about eating a live cow as its still living that's further driven by a patriarchy that teaches little girls that they are incompetent and only good for incubating babies, and teaches little boys that power is theirs for the taking, and that that power is forgiving if you want to, say, fuck teenagers and run for congress, or take pictures of yourself air grabbing a pair of titties on the woman that's sleeping and oblivious to your behavior. It teaches men that they can brag about grabbing women by the pussy and still be president, and that, if you're a woman, your character and fairly immaculate history is worth less than a predator's lack thereof. The glass ceiling is meant for women to press their tits against so the men standing on top of it can look down at us and ogle while simultaneously telling us bitches that show their titties don't deserve respect, but also you have to show us your titties because we are men and we want to see your titties.
Women know this. We all do. We know that men are never going to ask for our consent with our bodies, they're just going to treat us like a sex toy that comes with the aggravating feature of nagging about the dishes and various other chores. Men are going to figuratively and literally fist us and then make us responsible for why it hurts. I've learned this my entire life. Romantically, professionally, socially, as a parent, as a student. Every facet of my life as a woman slaps this in my face over and over and over again. It's weird understanding how I've been slightly party to this kind of thing, though, and even more weird that it took an evening of my husband being wrist deep in my uterus to recognize it. This is not to say that he, or any other man, gets a pass for this bullshit. The clock is ticking down to the time when men will no longer be the sexist juggernaut of unfettered power they are now.
The clock is also ticking down to my husband getting three of my fingers jammed into his asshole, because if he thinks that I'm not going to try and fist his anus so he can maybe get a small glimpse of appreciation for how much he harmed, shamed, and embarrassed me, he's more naive than I was at 14, thinking that fucking a 19 year old would make Richard sorry for hurting me.
In my years of humping, I've learned one thing: men. are. the WORST. In my experience, which admittedly is large (but maybe not large enough to be an adequate sample size), only one man has ever bothered to get consent from me, and every other man has just taken what he wanted from my body without a first, much less a second, thought about how it might make me feel, or what I might want.
Let's see. I lost my virginity at 14, and it's such a pathetic story that I almost don't want to tell it.
ALMOST. But I will, because saying I don't want to tell the story is a lie.
I had been "dating" this guy named Richard, and he sucked in a lot of ways. Chiefly that he fucked around on me because I was too scared to fuck him. I didn't want to lose my virginity yet, and I certainly didn't want to lose it to Richard. Ew. He did this thing when we kissed where he'd like, only close his eyes 8/10ths of the way closed, enough so that you could a) still see the whites of the bottoms of his eyes and 2) be sufficiently creeped out when you could not only see the whites of his eyes, but when he'd flutter his eyelids like a dying butterfly. I may not have known about the hilarity of bad O faces at such a tender and naive stage of my life, but I made the right call, and I know it. I have a feeling his O face is the kind of shit Wes Craven got horror boners over. Ew ew ew. My reasons for thinking he sucked weren't all superficial, he was also ugly on the inside. I got a dig on him after he admitted to doing some serious rubbernecking with one of my closest friends at the time (WHILE I WAS AT A FUNERAL, that's the detail I can't help but throw in there. It's not funny, but it makes me look like more of a victim, and that's my current aesthetic), and I'm pretty sure the immediate Denzel circa Glory tear and the obvious anger and hurt are why I am such a fucking cunty cunt when people hurt me....his reaction was DELICIOUS and I will greedily feed on that shit anytime I have an opportunity. Don't look to me to act like a fucking saint. Richard had made the mistake of being vulnerable with me and telling me his mother had abandoned him when he was a baby, and his grandmother was raising him. When he come over to read me a letter of apology he had written about smooching on my friend (who never apologized for that, it's worth mentioning. I siphoned all of my anger at Richard, and none at Angela, because I misguidedly still considered her a friend, and as a friend, she was blameless. Which is utter horseshit, she went for that shit, too, and she's an ugly cunt for abusing our friendship that way. Unfortunately, all my 14 year old self could do was cry about it. I didn't know how to articulate, "go fuck yourself, your cunt is a dumpster and I hate your face".), I sat and listened to it out of some misplaced obligation, and when he was done, I told him that I understood why his mother had abandoned him, because he was worthless trash.
I wasn't wrong, and I'm pretty sure that's why Richard punched the steps of my house rather than punching me in the face.
Telling someone their mother was right to not love them is rarely enough dealt damage when you have a black hole for a heart, so I needed to compound the matter by going on a vengeful fuck a thon. You know, the virgin way. How I knew this kid, I can't even tell you, but I called up a 19 year old I knew named Alex and asked him if he wanted to fuck me. He said yes (gross. I was 14. MEN ARE FUCKING GROSS, what the fuck is it with all of you??), and came over straight away. He picked me up at my best friend Amber's house, and we left (not before he tried to fuck her, too, because men are gross, and men have always been gross, and men will always be gross because all men think they're the exception to the "men are gross" rule. None of you are), and I just want to catalog the differences between us, so I can really set the scene:
Alex = 19 Drea = 14
Alex = drove an admittedly awesome mustang Drea = 14 and still played with barbies on the DL
Alex = looked cool Drea = had pages from Disney Princess coloring books she had colored hung on her wall (aka not cool)
Alex = CAME TO FUCK A 14 YEAR OLD AS A 19 YEAR OLD Drea = would never.
So Alex comes into my room, which is, I kid you not, covered in colored pages from coloring books I had painstakingly colored and glitter penned into looking what I believed passed for fabulously artistic, but realistically passed for lame. I had stuffed animals all over my bed, I had a Barbie dream house tucked away in the corner of my room with Barbies pooled into a convertible, and probably a few on Barbie's horse (my Barbies were city, but in a very rural kind of way). I had glitter body spray on my headboard, and a large collection of medications for my beautiful, broken brain. I'm taking a long time to say that, had Alex taken stock of his surroundings, there's no fucking way I would have lost my virginity that day. I was very obviously still a child, and bonus, I was a child that needed to be medicated. Sub-optimal fucking material. But Alex had tunnel vision for my inexperienced vagina, and he noticed approximately none of this. Not even my AMAZING colored page of Ariel and the Prince Eric statue, I didn't even get the slightest compliment on how well I outlined the statue in silver glitter glue. Some fucking people, man, I swear.
I remember standing in my room, wearing a yellow and white three quarter sleeve top, and....oh, I wish I were kidding...jean shorts with an elastic waistband and a sewn applique of Garfield. Fucking GARFIELD. Fucking ELASTIC WAIST JEAN SHORTS. I didn't WANT to wear clothes like that, but my mom made me. Everything about this paragraph is terrible.
I stammered nervously that I was a virgin, and I didn't know what to do, and I think that's the most vulnerable I've ever been with a man in my entire life. Alex's instinct was to be 100% predatory, and of course it would be. When you want a wolf, don't be surprised when you get a wolf. Alex wasn't gentle, he wasn't kind, he treated me and my body like I was a 19 year old with experience. It wasn't rape, I wanted to lose my virginity to him in emotionally depraved desperation....but it certainly wasn't consensual. It was sex Alex's way, and even though Drea had no basis for comparison, I could have adequately told Alex that he was hurting me and being too vigorous. My failing was assuming that, as a virgin, I couldn't know what sex should be like, and Alex, as a non-virgin, had every idea what sex was like, and would only do sexing the way sexing was supposed to be done. This, of course, was a stupid idea. But I was 14, and I was allowed to be stupid about sex. I had no input or say in how that sex went down, I just kind of....laid there and handled it as best I could. There was no kissing, no caressing, none of the shit I so enjoy now. I was just a living dick sock to Alex, and that's the theme of my entire sex life.
I am Jack's breathing dick sock.
Alex is not alone in that he did not consider my body, my connection to my body, what I wanted for my body, or any part of me, in the sexual transaction. Alex gets a pass on asking me for consent because I asked HIM, and I never retracted the request. But he's the only guy that gets that pass, except for Gary, and even GARY doesn't get a complete pass.
When I was a more mature and wizened 14, I met a guy I had been talking to online in person. He was a more age appropriate 16. Old enough that he should have been disinterested, but not so old that I'd flirt with the idea of labeling him a low key pedophile. I met him outside, and he came with friends, and I assumed we were both acting in ways that would make us the most safe. I certainly was. He wasn't, though. We had been talking for a little bit when he corned me against a fence and started asking me questions about sex, and I didn't know what to do. Nobody had taught me to be assertive, nobody had taught me to say no, all anybody had taught me was that sex was for adults that wanted gonorrhea. So when he put his hand down my jeans (that had an ACTUAL waistband, thank you very much, and not a single applique of Garfield to be seen) and started fingering me in broad daylight and in front of his friends, I looked away and blushed in embarrassment as his friends egged him on. He noticed he wasn't getting anywhere and stopped after a few minutes, and I remember feeling so relieved, because what he was doing to my vagina was uncomfortable, mostly because he kept fingering the inner fold of my thigh, not my clit, but also because I was a prop, and my sexuality was reduced to little more than a set scene for a man's sexual heroism and bragging rights. Me now loves a good finger rodgering in a public place. It's illicit and naughty and that makes it VERY sexy, and perhaps it's because I want to empower 14 year old me, trapped against that fence, getting fingerbanged in front of four older boys and just taking it like a fucking champion (I am the fucking hero of that story, not him, no matter what he told his cronies as he walked toward all of them and, indignity of indignity, outstretched his fingers for all of them to smell). I cried when I walked away, because I was so embarrassed, and I didn't know what to do or who to talk to about it. I wanted to cry when he kissed me goodbye, because of course he did. He wanted to. He didn't ask if he could, but why would he think he didn't have access to my face when he'd just been knuckle deep in my thigh meat, but I held it together. I didn't know that I could say, "hey, what the fuck, you get your fucking fingers out of my thigh meat, that's not my clitoris, number one, and number two, nobody gave you permission, and number three, I think your face is wide and ugly and covered in pimples and I do not want your pimple fingers near my vagina." or some iteration of that in order to make him stop. I really, really thought this was what sex was like. And for the longest time, I was terrified of it. I didn't have sex again until I was 16, and no other boys touched me sexually until I was 16. I was so scared of being helpless and used and tossed aside. I went up in age again, and when I started dating Matt (who was as stupid as he was stocky. Corn fed country boy in the middle of Vegas, dumb as a brick but somehow the brick edged him out, and agro as fuck), I knew enough about how he made my body feel that I knew I wanted him to touch my thigh meat, but then to touch my vagina. With his penis. Rapidly. And a lot. When Matt and I fucked, I didn't feel ashamed or anything, but I definitely let him take the lead, because I still had no idea what I was doing, or what felt good for me, and I thought Matt did. I assumed he did, because he never asked what I liked, what felt good, how I was feeling, if I liked anything, nothing. He just grunted and humped.
Cool.
Matt and I stopped dating when he tried to use tarot cards to get my friend Steffie to sleep with him, and neither she nor Miss Cleo had had any visions of that happening. Matt got the emotional curb stomping. We only fucked once. I dated Gary shortly after, and he asked if he could kiss me. I was repulsed. Can you taste the irony? It turned me off that he didn't just kiss me. So I told him as much. I said something to the effect of, ew, don't be weird, just fucking kiss me if you want to kiss me, and if you think I want to kiss you back.
H ah aha, yeah, Gary, what an asshole, treating my body like it's attached to a woman that deserves to make decisions about who touches her, and in what ways!
Gary and I fucked, and he heeded my advice well. He just did what he wanted. I was merely there to be warm, wet, and moaning. A receptacle with no input on what was going on. This is why Gary doesn't get a whole pass. He only asked about kissing me, and everything else after that was out of my control, I guess.
Steven and I fucked for a little bit. Not long, but long enough for me to have what is now referred to as "the wheelbarrow incident" in my story telling repertoire. Steven and I were fucking, and I ASSUMED we were having a grand time, because auditory cues were pointing me in that direction, when Steven grabs my hips and flips me over, quite deftly, by the way. If I were anybody but me, I would have been exceptionally impressed by his lady handling maneuver. Nothing seems awry to me yet, because getting fucked from behind is hot, and I like it, so there's no cause for alarm. And then lightning strikes my eyeballs and my asshole at precisely the same time, and the waves of pain are so unexpected and alarming and vicious that I might have actually died for a few seconds. I died momentarily of uninvited dick to asshole contact. I remember screaming in pain and looking to Steven for an apology, as is customary, but instead, he grabbed my hips and doubled down the dick in the butt action. I yelled. I yelled the whole time it lasted, which to me, felt like a Dante's Inferno of eternity. In reality, it was probably about fifteen seconds. He finally stopped and instead of offering up an apology, told me his ex-girlfriend really liked it. I had found a note in his wallet from his ex-girlfriend, and she spelled would "woold" and Steffie and I made fun of her forever for it. I cannot expect much from someone like that. Jokes aside, Steven was just like everybody else.
I didn't want to fuck my daughter's dad, because I thought he was kinda gross. He was charming, but he wasn't terribly attractive to me, and the thought of having his penis near my delicate sexy parts was eh...less than desirable. He put the sex sex moves on me one night, and I squirmed out of his grabbers and told him I needed to go home, and he said, "you're not leaving here until you have sex with me." HUNKER DOWN, BITCH, I'M MOVING IN. Was what I should have said. But I didn't. I panicked and just did it, because I wanted to leave. While a man reading this, or even an assertive woman, may think to themselves, "obviously that's an idle threat, she should have just left", I think most women will understand the urge to just do it and leave, because if you keep saying no, you're probably going to find yourself in a situation that's worse than uncomfortable, unwanted, vaginal contact with a dick you're unenthused about. I was in his apartment, on his turf, who knows what he might have done to me if I kept insisting it was time to leave? I only insisted on leaving twice, and then I relented. And boom, there goes my prop body.
I am Jack's buxom, voiceless cum dumpster.
After Chris, there are dozens and dozens of stories of other men just taking what they want from me and not bothering to see if I am offering what they want. Dozens and dozens and dozens. Every man I've ever slept with. Every last one of them has found some hidden way to take advantage of a sexual situation, mostly by forgetting that my enjoyment counts, that I have a sexuality and I'm capable of inserting my desires into a sexual encounter, or that I'm saying "I don't like that, do it differently" to be some kind of coy bitch. Because I DID eventually find a way to chime in with what I wanted.
I can tell stories like this about every single man I've fucked. Most of them I don't remember, because they're as innocuous as something in this vein can be. A lot of it is fairly benign, like just not considering my sexual wants and needs, even when asked if I liked something and responding with a no. Not asking me for permission to touch me. Not asking for permission to kiss me. Telling me what I need to do with zero reciprocity. Fucking my face despite me gagging and saying stop. A whole lot of that, that's probably the most common one.
The first time Dan and I fucked, he also pulled a "you're not leaving here until we fuck" line on me, and it was both gross and exactly the push I needed. I had wanted to fuck him, but it put me in a moral quandary, so I needed a sign that I could. Dan disrespecting my no was, apparently, just the correct amount of force. Thanks, universe, for making men repulsive and inconsiderate!
The first guy I fucked AFTER Dan and I split up took his dick out of my mouth and slapped me across the face with it, said oops, and then put it back in my mouth, only to take it out of my mouth two minutes later to whack me with it, repeatedly and in amazingly fast succession. Like a jackhammer, but a fleshy penis. On my cheek. I didn't want it. I didn't like it. I told him so, and he rewarded my frankness by doing it again.
The hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dick pics I've gotten that I've NEVER asked for. The nudes men think they can demand from me and call me a frigid bitch for not delivering. The dating world is a surplus of men that are actually canker sores in clothing.
The first time my now husband and I fucked, which was the first date because I am a champion goddess of my desires, thank you very much, we went from consensual kissing (we had discussed this prior to our first date, as we just wanted to get it over with and see if there was chemistry. The whole thing was pre-planned) to his hand down my pants, and he hadn't asked me if it was ok. He was lucky that it was. But that's been the prevailing story: all of the men I've fucked have been lucky that I've wanted them to do the things they've done to me, because not a one of them asked to do the things they did.
For instance, an amazing sesh of oral from my husband turned into an entire fist in my pussy, and I can tell you that I never asked for that, not even on the most fucked up and depraved of Christmases. He just did it. You almost want to applaud his moxy and his dedication to treating my pussy like an audition prop for Sesame Street, or like some kind of human turkey. I'm pretty sure any Gynecologist would have seen my husband and been like, "Buddy, you DEFINITELY need a degree to have your hand that far up a woman". Making matters worse, it took three separate shouts of STOP before he did. And when he did, he told me that I just needed to stretch it out so it wouldn't hurt.
Let's get one thing straight here:
I understand that there is an almost complete blanket of consent once you get married, and that the safeword is something along the lines of "no" or "I'm not in the mood" or "get your fucking fist out of my vagina, Derek, I am not a bowling ball". This goes for relationships, for dates that are going well. In a small way, it's ALMOST understandable that men don't ask for permission. They get mixed signals about it, but there's a reason for that.
Women have been taught to be demure and to defer to men's whims, even when they want it, and men have been taught to take what they want because they're men. We live in an aggressively ignorant rape culture that's fueled by a pornography industry that gives as little fucks about women as I do about eating a live cow as its still living that's further driven by a patriarchy that teaches little girls that they are incompetent and only good for incubating babies, and teaches little boys that power is theirs for the taking, and that that power is forgiving if you want to, say, fuck teenagers and run for congress, or take pictures of yourself air grabbing a pair of titties on the woman that's sleeping and oblivious to your behavior. It teaches men that they can brag about grabbing women by the pussy and still be president, and that, if you're a woman, your character and fairly immaculate history is worth less than a predator's lack thereof. The glass ceiling is meant for women to press their tits against so the men standing on top of it can look down at us and ogle while simultaneously telling us bitches that show their titties don't deserve respect, but also you have to show us your titties because we are men and we want to see your titties.
Women know this. We all do. We know that men are never going to ask for our consent with our bodies, they're just going to treat us like a sex toy that comes with the aggravating feature of nagging about the dishes and various other chores. Men are going to figuratively and literally fist us and then make us responsible for why it hurts. I've learned this my entire life. Romantically, professionally, socially, as a parent, as a student. Every facet of my life as a woman slaps this in my face over and over and over again. It's weird understanding how I've been slightly party to this kind of thing, though, and even more weird that it took an evening of my husband being wrist deep in my uterus to recognize it. This is not to say that he, or any other man, gets a pass for this bullshit. The clock is ticking down to the time when men will no longer be the sexist juggernaut of unfettered power they are now.
The clock is also ticking down to my husband getting three of my fingers jammed into his asshole, because if he thinks that I'm not going to try and fist his anus so he can maybe get a small glimpse of appreciation for how much he harmed, shamed, and embarrassed me, he's more naive than I was at 14, thinking that fucking a 19 year old would make Richard sorry for hurting me.
I love you, darling, but I must drive off this cliff now
I'm moving to motherfuckin' Hawaii in ten motherfuckin' months. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Some stories before Thanksgiving
Story one:
Few things were as alluring to me as the idea of being a psychic when I was younger. I couldn't really tell you why, I just knew I wanted to be a psychic. I can recall two accounts where I tested the waters on how believable my psychic prowess would be, should I ever truly develop it.
Episode one: My mom had this batshit crazy bird that she loved so fucking much. It was a Quaker Parrot named Mozart, and this bird was a little fucking shitheel. It only liked my mom, it swore like crazy, and it said really creepy things at night. Mozart liked to hide in my mom's hair, so sometimes, when I wanted to give my mom a hug, I'd furtively check her shoulders to see if her asshole watchdog of a dick bird was hiding in her hair, and when I saw nothing, I'd go in to hug my mom, and out would run this screeching little asshole, clapping it's beak at me and flapping its stupid wings, crawing the entire time, and I'd start screaming and run upstairs, drowning out my mom's laughter and Mozart's squawks with my frightened yelling. This was a once daily occurrence, at least, and you'd think I'd just settle for giving my mother a curt "hello, woman that birthed me" instead of a hug, but I didn't learn. It's no wonder nobody believed that I was psychic. I couldn't even determine with my eyes if a bird was around, how the fuck was I supposed to be believably omniscient? I used to wake up in the middle of the night and hear metal rattling and a very loud "WHATCHA DOING, BAD BOY?" being screamed from downstairs. It was Mozart's favorite thing to say. And then he'd repeat it. "Whaaaaaaaaaaaatcha doin'? Whatcha doin', bad boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?" Like some kind of ghost that really wants you to reconsider your life choices. My mom promises that she never taught Mozart to swear, so it must have been her husband at the time, but I'd walk by his cage and he'd jump over onto the sides and scream, "FUCKER!" and I'd be so sad about this dumb fuck bird's opinion of me that I'd leave the room and go do something else. Mozart was a fucking nightmare of a bird, and I used to daydream about the day that bird flew the coop.
Until it happened.
Mozart was always out of his cage when we were home, which made being downstairs EXTRA spicy and terrifying, and because my step dad was also a cunt of a human being with the intelligence of a dumb thing, he left the patio door open while cleaning one day, and Mozart literally flew the fucking coop. My mom was DEVASTATED. I had never seen my mom cry like that before, and it was heartbreaking for me (I was about nine at the time), and I didn't want to sit there, powerless, while my mom was hurting and mourning.
Obviously that meant it was time to fake a vision.
I planned this to a T...a really fucking stupid, poorly conceived, T. I would be playing outside, in the front yard, just in case my mom was watching (she never did, honestly, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I just have a flair for the dramatic), when the vision would come upon me. I would put my hand to my head, fall to the ground, twitch a little, and then jump up, full of vigor and psychic prophecy, and tell my mother that I knew where her beloved Mozart was. Obviously, my genius level planning forgot to account for two things: One, if my mother HAD been watching me, she would have assumed I was having a seizure; two, if my seizure vision went off unwatched and I were allowed to tell my mother of my third eye clarity, Mozart would need to actually BE where I said he was. This is why there are no heist movies with just children at the helm. Children are fucking idiots.
Out in the yard, I was struck by my vision (a marvelous performance. I definitely didn't phone it in, I am almost 100% positive I REALLY looked like I was having a seizure. Er, vision), and I ran inside and said to my mom, holding my hands up to my temples in a way that I thought signified I was breaking in a newly developed psychic power (but really, I was just universally signalling that I had a tension headache), and calmly stated, "Mom...I have seen Mozart. I know where he is." I don't remember my mother's reaction, but thinking objectively, I can only imagine that it was so hopeful and happy, and I have mixed feelings about that. I proceeded to describe where I saw her bird, and that I knew it was her bird instead of one of the other millions of quaker parrots that swarm Florida trees because, and I quote, "I just knew". I sounded less like a person who could psychically solve crimes and find lost things and more like a kid who just peeped her mom's missing bird in a very real, very non-psychic or stupid, way.
My idiot ass never bothered to make sure I explicitly stated I was struck with a vision. Because kids are fucking dumb and do not think things through, and thank fucking god for that shit, because I can catch my son's silly ass in a lie in .004 seconds. So my mom dragged me over to this area, and of course, the bird wasn't there, and of COURSE my mom was crushed. But also, let's be honest, a little bit of a moron herself for thinking that a bird, with wings, would sit in one spot long enough for a kid to fake a psychic seizure, explain in not-so-great detail the "seeing" of the bird to her grieving mother, and then trudge all the way over to a spot in the back of the neighborhood to look for it. I picked the back of the neighborhood because I figured that would make my vision more believable, for some reason. It didn't.
Episode two:
My timeline of trying to make everyone think I'm psychic is a bit muddy, honestly, and I don't know if these stories are in correct order, but I do know they're the same year. My little sister hadn't been born yet, and I was still growing out my unfortunate Richard Simmons haircut from the previous spring, so I looked a lot like an Italian mop with no fashion sense to speak of, and a large chip on her shoulder because of it, hiding under the most gigantic glasses ever put on a human face. A real winner. The kind of kid Beverly Clearly would write of in a low key effort to teach more popular kids about the negative effects of bullying. This was right before Thanksgiving, so I'm inclined to believe this was AFTER the unsuccessful "I've SEEN your bird" incident. I had been spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle, and I'm pretty sure it's their fault I wanted to be psychic. Not because of anything they ever said to me or tried to inspire in me, but because they were fucking REALLY into New Age hokum, and I always slept in the room that they turned into their library. So I would read up on chakras and past lives and near death experiences and psychics in the wee hours of the morning, as an eight year old, and it's no fucking wonder that I'm so god damn weird. My aunt had taken me to Stein Mart to buy a new dress for Thanksgiving AND Christmas. I remember the dress surprisingly well, because I modeled it as best I could after a dress I had read about in Anne of Green Gables. Anne's dress had been a pale, delicate blue, with buttons down the front, and puffed sleeves. I longed for puffed sleeves because Anne did, and I always thought of myself as Anne. My dress was a deep royal blue, with gold buttons in the shape of stars down the front, and gloriously puffed sleeves. My sleeves were a see through material, probably tulle or organza, with gold embroidered stars on them. They were so wonderfully puffy, I truly felt like a modern day Anne Shirley, but with even less desirable hair. My aunt and I were driving home from our shopping trip, and a semi that wasn't paying attention merges exceptionally quickly into the lane that my aunt's tiny little tin can of a car was occupying, and had it not been for my aunt's lightning reflexes, we would have been in a really bad accident. As it was, my aunt acted quickly and moved her car over, and started swearing and screaming at the driver of the semi. She was shaken, I was shaken, and you know what that means.
It was time to fake another vision.
My opportunistic ass perks up immediately and decides to seize the opportunity to rectify my mistake from a few months ago. I put my hands to my temples again (my family must have thought that I suffered from cluster headaches) and solemnly declared, "Aunt Julie, I had a vision that this would happen." My aunt turned to me and said, "What??" And I was so excited. "Psychic" me was given the berth to debut herself, and I was going to make it fucking GOOD, god dammit. So I took a deep breath and said, "Yes. Last night, I had a dream that we would almost be in an accident with a truck that looked exactly like that one." And oh, I remember feeling so proud and pleased and like this was going to change how my family saw me. My aunt looked at me, bewildered, and screamed, "Then why the hell didn't you say something when you saw the fucking truck????"
She had me there.
I can't tell you how I answered, all I can tell you is that I never tried to be a psychic ever again.
Story two, or the reason that I really wanted to write this blog:
I was kicked out of my mom's house when I was 15. Right before I turned 15, because I got to celebrate my birthday with my friends, and it was the last birthday I'd spend with them until my 21st. My actual removal from my mom's house was waylaid because I begged to be able to stay for my birthday. She considered it a last request for a dead man walking, I suppose, because being removed from Florida really upended my life. And those words taste like vinegar in my mouth, because I fucking HATE Florida. But it's true. The last Thanksgiving I spent with my mom, I was 14 years old. I spent my 15th and 16th Thanksgiving with my dad. My 17th Thanksgiving, my dad spent with his girlfriend and her kids, and left me alone. I remember eating rice with a sad slice of melted cheese, and some vinaigrette mixed in. I smoked cigarettes and watched HBO. My impression of a single man in his 40s with no friends was spot fucking on. For my 21st Thanksgiving, my daughter's dad and I had split, and I had moved back down to Florida in May of that year. By June I had my own job and my own apartment, and my dad was repairing a jeep he'd bought for himself to give me as a car. I spent my 21st birthday with my friends, and I was looking forward to spending my first Thanksgiving in years with my parents by splitting up the day between the two of them. I called my mom on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and said, ok, the jeep is still being worked on, can you come get me in the AM and then I'll have my dad pick me up in the afternoon from wherever you're spending Thanksgiving? My mom was silent for a long time, and then she said, "Uh, I assumed you were going to be with your dad for Thanksgiving. We're up in Apopka with Terry and Julie." I said, "Oh, ok, no big deal, I guess, happy thanksgiving!" and hung up. Because it wasn't a big deal.
Yet.
I called my dad next and said, "So, can you pick me up tomorrow in the AM? My mom is up at Terry and Julie's, so I'll just spend the entire day with you." My dad scoffed at me in the way that my dad does and says, "Drea, I uh, I don't know how to tell you this, but I thought you'd be spending the day at your mom's tomorrow. We're up in Longwood with Kevin and Melissa. The whole family is here! Sorry, princess, I just thought you'd be with your mom."
It was a problem now.
I suppose some of the blame can be laid at my feet. I didn't think ahead to make sure their thanksgiving plans included me, and in my arrogance, I assumed they were both so excited at the prospect of spending a Thanksgiving with me because they hadn't in years that I didn't bother to cement plans with either of them until the day before. I will accept culpability there. But it's much more fun to drag my parents through the mud for having an O. Henry kind of moment, but in a way that's cruel instead of heaartbreakingly kind. They assumed I'd be spending the day with the other without bothering to ask each other or, more importantly, me, to spend the day with either of them. I cried for a little bit, then walked over to Publix and bought myself some fancy (in a microwaveable way) ravioli, some bagels, and some lunch meat, and a few other odds and ends to snack on, and then I headed to the liquor store and bought a big fucking bottle of Cruzan mango coconut rum, because if I was going to spend the holiday on my own, I was going to get fucking BLITZED. And boy, did I fucking EVER. As I was walking into my apartment with my heavyweight contender for "world's saddest holiday groceries", my upstairs neighbor said, "that stuff isn't for tomorrow, is it?" I joked it off and said of course it wasn't, har har har! My neighbor asked me what I'd be doing, and I said spending a quiet day at home, since my roommates had left town to be with family the prior Friday. He wished me a happy holiday, I went inside, and I pictured scenario after scenario where I made my mom and dad feel foolish and left out, and I may or may not have broken into my cruzan rum early. I woke up the next day and started drinking fairly immediately, I drunkenly cooked myself some kind of disgusting breakfast of eggs and lunchmeat, and watched Maury Povich. By the time lunch rolled around, I was halfway done with my rum, I was calling Allen, who was busy with his own family, and otherwise feeling pretty shit about my life. Then I turned on my music and decided to dance. I danced and danced and had a fucking blast. I was listening to music so loudly and dancing drunkenly with so much fervor that I almost didn't hear my doorbell going off like crazy. I stopped my music, opened up my door, and there was my neighbor, holding a gorgeous plate of food, and smiling at me. When he handed the plate over, he said, "if you don't want to be alone, we're right upstairs. But if you do, I want you to eat something better than lunchmeat." I mean, rude, because those fancy raviolis were delicious, and my choice in lunchmeat was impeccable. But I was so grateful that someone had thought of me on a day where I felt so unloved and ignored that I gave him the biggest hug in the world. But only in drunk world. In sober world, I lunged at my neighbor, bottle of cruzan in hand, grabbing on to his shoulder and toppling some of the food off of the plate, yelling something about gratitude incoherently. Honest to god, I don't really remember much else of that encounter. I wasn't black out drunk, but I'm almost positive that I deleted the rest of it from my memory because it couldn't have made me look good. I remember plenty from the rest of the day. I ate my food that he brought down, I drunkenly called both of my parents, though neither of them answered, and I talked to Allen later that night about the shit day I'd had. Whether that was coherent or not, I'll never fully know. Allen says it was, but I think he's just being generous. I was pretty fucking sloppy drunk. I woke up the next morning with one of only two hangovers I've ever had in my life, and it was the closest to vomiting from alcohol that I've ever been EVER. I definitely did down an entire bottle of rum in one day, and I definitely did NOT drink any water. I stayed in bed all day and watched Kenneth Branagh movies and swore that one day, my parents would know how badly I felt my first Thanksgiving away from my daughter, where neither of them had the presence of mind to make sure I'd be ok on a holiday that would be hard for anybody going through a really difficult separation.
This is my year, mother fuckers.
My mom will be here tomorrow for two things: the first Thanksgiving she's ever spent with her grandson, and the first Thanksgiving she's spent with me since I was 14. I didn't invite my dad because I knew he couldn't come, but when I mentioned to him that my mom would be here, he shot me an indignant, :And you didn't ask your old man?" I responded with, "Oh, sorry, daddy, I assumed you'd be with Caryn." Which he will be, but he was still hurt he didn't get an invite. I feel vindicated on that level.
As for my mother, well....I certainly didn't go out and buy an entire bottle of Cruzan coconut for my own health.
Few things were as alluring to me as the idea of being a psychic when I was younger. I couldn't really tell you why, I just knew I wanted to be a psychic. I can recall two accounts where I tested the waters on how believable my psychic prowess would be, should I ever truly develop it.
Episode one: My mom had this batshit crazy bird that she loved so fucking much. It was a Quaker Parrot named Mozart, and this bird was a little fucking shitheel. It only liked my mom, it swore like crazy, and it said really creepy things at night. Mozart liked to hide in my mom's hair, so sometimes, when I wanted to give my mom a hug, I'd furtively check her shoulders to see if her asshole watchdog of a dick bird was hiding in her hair, and when I saw nothing, I'd go in to hug my mom, and out would run this screeching little asshole, clapping it's beak at me and flapping its stupid wings, crawing the entire time, and I'd start screaming and run upstairs, drowning out my mom's laughter and Mozart's squawks with my frightened yelling. This was a once daily occurrence, at least, and you'd think I'd just settle for giving my mother a curt "hello, woman that birthed me" instead of a hug, but I didn't learn. It's no wonder nobody believed that I was psychic. I couldn't even determine with my eyes if a bird was around, how the fuck was I supposed to be believably omniscient? I used to wake up in the middle of the night and hear metal rattling and a very loud "WHATCHA DOING, BAD BOY?" being screamed from downstairs. It was Mozart's favorite thing to say. And then he'd repeat it. "Whaaaaaaaaaaaatcha doin'? Whatcha doin', bad boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?" Like some kind of ghost that really wants you to reconsider your life choices. My mom promises that she never taught Mozart to swear, so it must have been her husband at the time, but I'd walk by his cage and he'd jump over onto the sides and scream, "FUCKER!" and I'd be so sad about this dumb fuck bird's opinion of me that I'd leave the room and go do something else. Mozart was a fucking nightmare of a bird, and I used to daydream about the day that bird flew the coop.
Until it happened.
Mozart was always out of his cage when we were home, which made being downstairs EXTRA spicy and terrifying, and because my step dad was also a cunt of a human being with the intelligence of a dumb thing, he left the patio door open while cleaning one day, and Mozart literally flew the fucking coop. My mom was DEVASTATED. I had never seen my mom cry like that before, and it was heartbreaking for me (I was about nine at the time), and I didn't want to sit there, powerless, while my mom was hurting and mourning.
Obviously that meant it was time to fake a vision.
I planned this to a T...a really fucking stupid, poorly conceived, T. I would be playing outside, in the front yard, just in case my mom was watching (she never did, honestly, I'm not sure what I was thinking. I just have a flair for the dramatic), when the vision would come upon me. I would put my hand to my head, fall to the ground, twitch a little, and then jump up, full of vigor and psychic prophecy, and tell my mother that I knew where her beloved Mozart was. Obviously, my genius level planning forgot to account for two things: One, if my mother HAD been watching me, she would have assumed I was having a seizure; two, if my seizure vision went off unwatched and I were allowed to tell my mother of my third eye clarity, Mozart would need to actually BE where I said he was. This is why there are no heist movies with just children at the helm. Children are fucking idiots.
Out in the yard, I was struck by my vision (a marvelous performance. I definitely didn't phone it in, I am almost 100% positive I REALLY looked like I was having a seizure. Er, vision), and I ran inside and said to my mom, holding my hands up to my temples in a way that I thought signified I was breaking in a newly developed psychic power (but really, I was just universally signalling that I had a tension headache), and calmly stated, "Mom...I have seen Mozart. I know where he is." I don't remember my mother's reaction, but thinking objectively, I can only imagine that it was so hopeful and happy, and I have mixed feelings about that. I proceeded to describe where I saw her bird, and that I knew it was her bird instead of one of the other millions of quaker parrots that swarm Florida trees because, and I quote, "I just knew". I sounded less like a person who could psychically solve crimes and find lost things and more like a kid who just peeped her mom's missing bird in a very real, very non-psychic or stupid, way.
My idiot ass never bothered to make sure I explicitly stated I was struck with a vision. Because kids are fucking dumb and do not think things through, and thank fucking god for that shit, because I can catch my son's silly ass in a lie in .004 seconds. So my mom dragged me over to this area, and of course, the bird wasn't there, and of COURSE my mom was crushed. But also, let's be honest, a little bit of a moron herself for thinking that a bird, with wings, would sit in one spot long enough for a kid to fake a psychic seizure, explain in not-so-great detail the "seeing" of the bird to her grieving mother, and then trudge all the way over to a spot in the back of the neighborhood to look for it. I picked the back of the neighborhood because I figured that would make my vision more believable, for some reason. It didn't.
Episode two:
My timeline of trying to make everyone think I'm psychic is a bit muddy, honestly, and I don't know if these stories are in correct order, but I do know they're the same year. My little sister hadn't been born yet, and I was still growing out my unfortunate Richard Simmons haircut from the previous spring, so I looked a lot like an Italian mop with no fashion sense to speak of, and a large chip on her shoulder because of it, hiding under the most gigantic glasses ever put on a human face. A real winner. The kind of kid Beverly Clearly would write of in a low key effort to teach more popular kids about the negative effects of bullying. This was right before Thanksgiving, so I'm inclined to believe this was AFTER the unsuccessful "I've SEEN your bird" incident. I had been spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle, and I'm pretty sure it's their fault I wanted to be psychic. Not because of anything they ever said to me or tried to inspire in me, but because they were fucking REALLY into New Age hokum, and I always slept in the room that they turned into their library. So I would read up on chakras and past lives and near death experiences and psychics in the wee hours of the morning, as an eight year old, and it's no fucking wonder that I'm so god damn weird. My aunt had taken me to Stein Mart to buy a new dress for Thanksgiving AND Christmas. I remember the dress surprisingly well, because I modeled it as best I could after a dress I had read about in Anne of Green Gables. Anne's dress had been a pale, delicate blue, with buttons down the front, and puffed sleeves. I longed for puffed sleeves because Anne did, and I always thought of myself as Anne. My dress was a deep royal blue, with gold buttons in the shape of stars down the front, and gloriously puffed sleeves. My sleeves were a see through material, probably tulle or organza, with gold embroidered stars on them. They were so wonderfully puffy, I truly felt like a modern day Anne Shirley, but with even less desirable hair. My aunt and I were driving home from our shopping trip, and a semi that wasn't paying attention merges exceptionally quickly into the lane that my aunt's tiny little tin can of a car was occupying, and had it not been for my aunt's lightning reflexes, we would have been in a really bad accident. As it was, my aunt acted quickly and moved her car over, and started swearing and screaming at the driver of the semi. She was shaken, I was shaken, and you know what that means.
It was time to fake another vision.
My opportunistic ass perks up immediately and decides to seize the opportunity to rectify my mistake from a few months ago. I put my hands to my temples again (my family must have thought that I suffered from cluster headaches) and solemnly declared, "Aunt Julie, I had a vision that this would happen." My aunt turned to me and said, "What??" And I was so excited. "Psychic" me was given the berth to debut herself, and I was going to make it fucking GOOD, god dammit. So I took a deep breath and said, "Yes. Last night, I had a dream that we would almost be in an accident with a truck that looked exactly like that one." And oh, I remember feeling so proud and pleased and like this was going to change how my family saw me. My aunt looked at me, bewildered, and screamed, "Then why the hell didn't you say something when you saw the fucking truck????"
She had me there.
I can't tell you how I answered, all I can tell you is that I never tried to be a psychic ever again.
Story two, or the reason that I really wanted to write this blog:
I was kicked out of my mom's house when I was 15. Right before I turned 15, because I got to celebrate my birthday with my friends, and it was the last birthday I'd spend with them until my 21st. My actual removal from my mom's house was waylaid because I begged to be able to stay for my birthday. She considered it a last request for a dead man walking, I suppose, because being removed from Florida really upended my life. And those words taste like vinegar in my mouth, because I fucking HATE Florida. But it's true. The last Thanksgiving I spent with my mom, I was 14 years old. I spent my 15th and 16th Thanksgiving with my dad. My 17th Thanksgiving, my dad spent with his girlfriend and her kids, and left me alone. I remember eating rice with a sad slice of melted cheese, and some vinaigrette mixed in. I smoked cigarettes and watched HBO. My impression of a single man in his 40s with no friends was spot fucking on. For my 21st Thanksgiving, my daughter's dad and I had split, and I had moved back down to Florida in May of that year. By June I had my own job and my own apartment, and my dad was repairing a jeep he'd bought for himself to give me as a car. I spent my 21st birthday with my friends, and I was looking forward to spending my first Thanksgiving in years with my parents by splitting up the day between the two of them. I called my mom on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and said, ok, the jeep is still being worked on, can you come get me in the AM and then I'll have my dad pick me up in the afternoon from wherever you're spending Thanksgiving? My mom was silent for a long time, and then she said, "Uh, I assumed you were going to be with your dad for Thanksgiving. We're up in Apopka with Terry and Julie." I said, "Oh, ok, no big deal, I guess, happy thanksgiving!" and hung up. Because it wasn't a big deal.
Yet.
I called my dad next and said, "So, can you pick me up tomorrow in the AM? My mom is up at Terry and Julie's, so I'll just spend the entire day with you." My dad scoffed at me in the way that my dad does and says, "Drea, I uh, I don't know how to tell you this, but I thought you'd be spending the day at your mom's tomorrow. We're up in Longwood with Kevin and Melissa. The whole family is here! Sorry, princess, I just thought you'd be with your mom."
It was a problem now.
I suppose some of the blame can be laid at my feet. I didn't think ahead to make sure their thanksgiving plans included me, and in my arrogance, I assumed they were both so excited at the prospect of spending a Thanksgiving with me because they hadn't in years that I didn't bother to cement plans with either of them until the day before. I will accept culpability there. But it's much more fun to drag my parents through the mud for having an O. Henry kind of moment, but in a way that's cruel instead of heaartbreakingly kind. They assumed I'd be spending the day with the other without bothering to ask each other or, more importantly, me, to spend the day with either of them. I cried for a little bit, then walked over to Publix and bought myself some fancy (in a microwaveable way) ravioli, some bagels, and some lunch meat, and a few other odds and ends to snack on, and then I headed to the liquor store and bought a big fucking bottle of Cruzan mango coconut rum, because if I was going to spend the holiday on my own, I was going to get fucking BLITZED. And boy, did I fucking EVER. As I was walking into my apartment with my heavyweight contender for "world's saddest holiday groceries", my upstairs neighbor said, "that stuff isn't for tomorrow, is it?" I joked it off and said of course it wasn't, har har har! My neighbor asked me what I'd be doing, and I said spending a quiet day at home, since my roommates had left town to be with family the prior Friday. He wished me a happy holiday, I went inside, and I pictured scenario after scenario where I made my mom and dad feel foolish and left out, and I may or may not have broken into my cruzan rum early. I woke up the next day and started drinking fairly immediately, I drunkenly cooked myself some kind of disgusting breakfast of eggs and lunchmeat, and watched Maury Povich. By the time lunch rolled around, I was halfway done with my rum, I was calling Allen, who was busy with his own family, and otherwise feeling pretty shit about my life. Then I turned on my music and decided to dance. I danced and danced and had a fucking blast. I was listening to music so loudly and dancing drunkenly with so much fervor that I almost didn't hear my doorbell going off like crazy. I stopped my music, opened up my door, and there was my neighbor, holding a gorgeous plate of food, and smiling at me. When he handed the plate over, he said, "if you don't want to be alone, we're right upstairs. But if you do, I want you to eat something better than lunchmeat." I mean, rude, because those fancy raviolis were delicious, and my choice in lunchmeat was impeccable. But I was so grateful that someone had thought of me on a day where I felt so unloved and ignored that I gave him the biggest hug in the world. But only in drunk world. In sober world, I lunged at my neighbor, bottle of cruzan in hand, grabbing on to his shoulder and toppling some of the food off of the plate, yelling something about gratitude incoherently. Honest to god, I don't really remember much else of that encounter. I wasn't black out drunk, but I'm almost positive that I deleted the rest of it from my memory because it couldn't have made me look good. I remember plenty from the rest of the day. I ate my food that he brought down, I drunkenly called both of my parents, though neither of them answered, and I talked to Allen later that night about the shit day I'd had. Whether that was coherent or not, I'll never fully know. Allen says it was, but I think he's just being generous. I was pretty fucking sloppy drunk. I woke up the next morning with one of only two hangovers I've ever had in my life, and it was the closest to vomiting from alcohol that I've ever been EVER. I definitely did down an entire bottle of rum in one day, and I definitely did NOT drink any water. I stayed in bed all day and watched Kenneth Branagh movies and swore that one day, my parents would know how badly I felt my first Thanksgiving away from my daughter, where neither of them had the presence of mind to make sure I'd be ok on a holiday that would be hard for anybody going through a really difficult separation.
This is my year, mother fuckers.
My mom will be here tomorrow for two things: the first Thanksgiving she's ever spent with her grandson, and the first Thanksgiving she's spent with me since I was 14. I didn't invite my dad because I knew he couldn't come, but when I mentioned to him that my mom would be here, he shot me an indignant, :And you didn't ask your old man?" I responded with, "Oh, sorry, daddy, I assumed you'd be with Caryn." Which he will be, but he was still hurt he didn't get an invite. I feel vindicated on that level.
As for my mother, well....I certainly didn't go out and buy an entire bottle of Cruzan coconut for my own health.
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
I don't know where to hide now that the sky is falling
To be completely simplistic, I think all relationships can boil down to two moments, tops:
This is why I love this person
Why the fuck do I love this person
Sometimes, you only get one of those moments. I was thinking about this last night. For hours.
I didn't have any "why the fuck do I love this person" or "this is why I love this person" moments with my daughter's dad. I told him I loved him, but I never did. I just wanted to have someone love me, and Chris did a really good job at pretending he did sometimes. Enough to sway my better judgment into thinking it wasn't weird for a 24 year old to be fucking around with a 17 year old, and for sure, we should be together, and for even more sure, we should have a baby together even though I didn't want to have children. The birth of my daughter, and the year and a half I got to spend with her almost made me love Chris, because I loved her so much. I wanted, for a fleeting moment, to be a family. The pesky thing was, I didn't want Chris. I despised him, and god damn, did he make me fucking miserable. He managed to be everything wrong with my life, and I loathed him. Hearing him breathe made me fucking ANGRY, and I legitimately contemplated strangling him in his sleep on more than one occasion. I wish I could say it was my daughter that kept me from doing it, or some higher calling to behave morally. It wasn't...it was logistics. Chris was a huge dude, and I'm not sure my hands and unnaturally weak arms would have done anything but worn myself out without even waking Chris up. It's hard to have either of those moments in a relationship if you don't love the person. I didn't love Chris. I didn't even really pretend to try. I paid the word lip service, but we both did. And we were both terrible at it.
Allen was different. I loved Allen so much, and it was all consuming. And he loved me back. He made me laugh, he was smart, he engaged me, he wanted me to love him, and I did. Allen was, to be a cliche, an addiction. There was one exceptionally rainy day where Allen and I just played outside in the rain, splashed around in the puddles, and after an hour of running around with each other, we kissed each other in the rain, and it's the most honest display of raw affection I think I'll ever experience. It was young, it was honest, it wasn't the least bit jaded, and I looked into his face and thought to myself, "this is why I love this person". My relationship with Allen is fucking littered with those kinds of moments. One night, we were making dinner, and we listened to Head Automatica's Beating Hearts Baby over and over and over, and we danced around in our underwear and laughed and sweated and had bagels smashed full of cold cuts because we were poor as fuck and in our early twenties and what the fuck did we know about a good meal? I just knew that this feeling was why I loved Allen. When we were on the hard streets of Vegas together, when we didn't know where our next dollar was coming from, or how we were going to eat, Allen's parents offered to bail him out and send him back to Colorado if he left me behind. He said no. We were together, end of story, and we didn't go anywhere without each other. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me. That was why I loved Allen. Allen and I were together for five years. Four and a half years in, I was trying to get Allen to watch a movie with me so I could put my hands on his man parts and do things with them, and he wasn't listening to me, he was playing his xbox. So I went into the room, put on lacey panties and a flimsy, see through shirt, and went back into the living room. I put on some music and started dancing in the living room, and when Allen told me I was getting in his way, I angrily wondered, "why the FUCK do I love this person". Maybe that sounds superficial, and that may be because it was, but it was the beginning of the end. The next six months were at least one episode of wondering why the fuck I loved him a day, and those knitted together furiously. I credit Allen with showing me what it feels like to be loved, though. It wasn't jaded, it wasn't overly optimistic. It was just love, and that was all I wanted it to be.
I didn't have any this is why I love this person moments with Dan. I had two years of "why the fuck do I love this person" moments that made me feel ashamed of myself, because I was suffering all of these abuses (for lack of a better word), and I couldn't vocalize my feelings (of love, or of anger at feeling so fucking trodden over), and I was allowing myself to get walked all over by some guy that didn't have the sack to either tell me he couldn't stomach being with me like a human, or that he loved me. I think about my relationship with Dan, and it plays like a Bukowski poem in my head. It looks dingy and used, and large and small at the same time. I see Dan the way I think Dan saw Dan...bigger than me, better than me, the powerhouse of our imbalanced relationship, and I'm exceptionally mousy, and chasing the crumbs Dan threw down to me when he could be bothered. Dan was going on a trip about three months into our relationship, and I remember sitting on his lap in his living room, and looking down at his face when he said, "Are you going to miss me?" And it felt like such a delicious trap. I could answer yes and look foolish and alone, I could answer no and be a guarded cunt, or I could say what I said, which was, "are you going to miss me?" Smooth. He said he didn't know, with a very wry smile and an obnoxiously smug twinkle in his eyes, and I remember having two thoughts, both of them equally mortifying. I'm not sure which came first, because they kind of collided into my ears simultaneously:
Fuck. I love him
Why the fuck do I love him.
Two months later, when I sent a very veiled email to Dan about being in love with him and getting no response back, I stared at my computer and wondered why the fuck I loved him, and then lied to myself and told myself he'd say it when he got back from California.
When Dan had a wedding and I didn't get to go with him but I helped him buy his outfit for it, I remember telling him how handsome he looked and wondering inside why the fuck did I love someone who hurt me in new and inventive ways every single fucking day.
When Dan told his mom on Christmas Eve that he was alone because everybody was out of town, despite the fact that we had been together for over a year AND I was sitting right there, I stood outside in a blizzard, calling my girlfriend Anali and bawling, "why the fuck do I love him? I'm going home." And if Anali hadn't talked sense into me to stay until the blizzard was over, I would have been. I had had it that night, because Dan managed to make me feel alone in the universe, and I'd never felt so abandoned and pathetic and unloved in my life. And I couldn't do it anymore. But Anali was right, it was white out conditions and freezing and I was crying so hard I was damn near blind and I probably would have died on the way home. So I stayed, and gave Dan the "I don't understand why I love you" speech without actually using the words I love you because it's embarrassing to say that to someone who'll never ever ever in their life verbalize that nebulous idea to you. And the next morning, on Christmas, I had morning tea with Dan, we fucked, and I cried in the bathroom because I didn't understand why I loved him and why I stayed.
I could go on that way for hours. I loved Dan so much, and it was so different from Allen and Chris, because it was love, but it wasn't as real or as honest as Allen's, it was a cover up. I loved Dan privately because that's all he'd let me do, and I wanted it to work because that's how dumb some people are when they love someone.
I have simultaneous moments like this with Derek. I love my husband more than I ever loved Allen, but in a reserved way, because Dan is the reason I can't have nice things. I love Derek as much as I am fucking capable of, and I love him hard and I'm not ashamed of it. I love my husband so much it makes me angry. He makes me angry. I wake up almost every day and I know why I love him, but at some point during every day, I will have a moment where I growl inside and yell into my own brain about why the fuck do I love him. It's different, though. It's not the same as before. When I wondered why I loved Allen, I was digging myself out of the hole we'd buried ourselves in. I wondered because I was trying to remind myself, and the reminders never came, and I was sad and miserable and I hated and resented my situation. With Dan, I wondered because, while he gave me everything I vocalized wanting, and he spoiled me in ways I didn't deserve, I knew every day that he was fucking heartless and cruel enough to string along a person who was obviously too fucking weak and scared to let go of the robot that didn't love her back. I wondered why to try and make myself understand so maybe I could leave.
But with Derek, I don't wonder for any of those reasons. I wonder because he says he loves me so much, but when I'm not looking, he does a complete 180. Derek and I just had our two year anniversary, and the first year of our marriage was pretty good, but the second year has been awful. Derek has had issue after issue with flirting with other women, and breaking promises to me regarding other women. Derek swears he's not flirting, and these women mean nothing. And he'll eventually get to a place where he wants to soothe his crying wife and tell her that he never thought of it from my point of view, and I am so beautiful and he loves me more than anything, and he's searched for me for 40 years, why would he fuck it up? And he gets to this place only after he continues talking to women he promised me he wouldn't talk to. Or confided in other women after he promised me he'd stop, because it felt to me like a betrayal of our marriage. Or waxes rhapsodic about how things could have been SO different to a woman he didn't really get the opportunity to date after finding one of her letters in his closet. Or chatting up women on a seemingly harmless app like Words with Friends and telling them they're beautiful, and then inviting them to snapchat and saving their beautiful and adorable snaps to his phone. Or saving beautiful snaps of your beautiful best friend that you've ALWAYS felt like second fiddle to in his phone, with the added bonus of wondering how the fuck someone with such inside information about your insecurities and marital problems can send your husband selfies of her looking beautiful. An extra twist of the knife there. Or after telling someone that they are so nice and so beautiful, and he would love to get to know them better. Or after all of this, promising to give up all social media platforms and then taking two days to actually go through with deleting only one. After posting on facebook that it's time to delete facebook because there are too many distractions for his impulsive mind, and then twelve hours later, posting a complete and total lie so he could get away with posting a tasteful nude photo he took of himself to his Korean adoptee page. His post reads:
I've always had a low self esteem and self image issue due to being teased as a kid for not looking caucasian. My photographer wife finally talked me into a photoshoot even though I don't have an "ideal" body. It is taking a great amount of courage for me to post this, but in the name of positive body image and self-esteem, here it is.
Let me explain why this post is bullshit. It's very probably my husband was teased for being Korean when he was younger. In fact, he's DEFINITELY mentioned to me that he was teased a fuckload. So that part is verifiable in as much as he's told me this story before. Now, his photographer wife said this, as we just had a huge weekend of doing boudoir/maternity/milk bath shoots: should we take photos of ourselves to put up on the website, as well? To which he replied, well, yeah! And he was SO fucking into it. He bought props to prepare for this shoot. He bought cigars to prepare for his shoot. He made a few comments about his tummy not being as cut as it used to be, but other than that, he was really raring to do this shoot, knowing full well that there would be nudes involved. When it came time to do my shoot, I had an absolute breakdown about my body and threw a fit about having more photos done, and I shut down. I woke up to Derek taking his own gallery of artistic nudes, having a fucking BLAST doing it, and I commented on his comfort and bravery a day or two later, and he responded with, "well, I know I look fucking good." One of two things is going on here. Either he's lying to me about his struggles with self image, which...why, when I can relate so wholly and maybe we can help each other? Or he's lying to a page full of Korean adoptees just like him because he just fucking craves validation and doesn't get enough of it at home. He's been really nagging me about throwing that photo up on his instagram and on his facebook page. He REALLY wanted to share it. I kept asking him why, because in my head, he wanted to post it for specific people to see. I never told him he couldn't, I'd just ask him why and when he responded with "because" and nothing more, I'd tell him to do what he wanted to do. It looks like he did. He even went so far as letting me get all of the credit for taking the photo, which I did not, because I'm pretty fucking sure he knows it would look like a fresh pile of shit to tell everyone he took the photos himself while stringing along his low self esteem story. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that I am not enough for my husband, and my attention is not enough for my husband, and that he cannot be fucking honest about how and why I'm not enough so maybe I can fix it, or maybe we can part ways so he doesn't keep breaking my heart all the fucking time. And if all of this shit isn't enough, knowing that, when one of the females I've had a problem with in the past asks my husband why he's deleting his facebook, his response is, "Oh, Drea thinks I flirt too much, apparently." A 40 year old man cannot even take a tablespoon of responsibility for his actions. If we pretend for just a moment that saying, "mmmm, imaging you going HAM on something is tempting" to another woman isn't flirting, and it's completely harmless, my finding a problem with it and asking for that kind of behavior to stop should be enough. Even if it's me being wildly jealous and crazy, promising to stop something and then not doing it is a conscious choice that devastates people for far less than issues of fidelity. Hell, I get fucking twisted when a commercial promises me lustrous, luscious locks and all I get are hay bales for hair. It's been a year of all of this behavior, and of all the gaslighting by Derek to make every issue I have with him my fault instead of having anything to do with him, and I'm so fucking exhausted of waking up every day and going, "why the fuck do I love him?"
The other, new, problem I run into with Derek is not understanding why he "loves" me. And it makes me sad and miserable and unhappy and I ask myself every day why he loves me, and I look at myself and I think about how he could nail someone prettier, and I remember Dan telling me, in another "why the fuck do I love this person" moment, that I was holding him back from everything, but chasing skirts in particular, and I wonder if I'm doing that to Derek. If I'm just a placeholder. I feel that way all the time; like an ugly placeholder that he really suckered into believing he was different, and he thought I was special. That he feels smug about making someone who looks like me believe that they were beautiful and amazing and unique and just so....so NEEDED in his life. And I fell for it. I fell for it, despite having reservations and telling Allen that I didn't believe him, and I thought this was just his MO. That I was just the next girl in line. Allen told me that I would be a fucking fool for dropping Derek, because he was obviously so different than everybody else thus far, and he was obviously so available to me and so wrapped in adoration, and maybe I needed to try something different. So I listened to my best friend. And I ended up with someone just like everybody else. Just like Dan, who I was so anxious to escape a repeat performance of. I wonder constantly about what I have going for me, and the list is small. I'm creative, and I'm smart, and I'm brash in a way that can be kinda fun, some of the time. But none of those things will ever trump being thin and pretty, and I'm not those things, and I won't ever BE those things, because they aren't in my wheelhouse. And with every knife dig of a new woman that I have to deal with and try and find the internal strength to forgive my husband for, I see more and more of the small bit of self-assuredness I have chip away. And it's left me how I am now. I am terrified to be naked around my own husband, because I know there are women with better bodies that he's shown keen interest in putting above his wife, and I feel embarrassed to be in my own skin now. When I have sex with my husband, four times out of ten I get blasted out of the moment because I'll feel my hips jiggle, or I'll feel my stomach move, or I'l notice how my breasts aren't perfect and I'll have a panic attack about how he's got to be judging me and resenting me for not being any other woman that's prettier and thinner. I don't greet him at the door anymore when he gets home, because I don't see the point. when he tells me he loves me, I don't reciprocate, I just stare at him for awhile and then respond with, "why?" because I don't like saying I love you to someone who doesn't act like they love me when it matters. It's easy to be a fair weather friend when all eyes are on you, and Derek excels at that. He fails at being a good husband when I'm not looking, and his slip ups recently have brought me to the conclusion that he just doesn't care.
And the hardest thing to admit is, I can't blame him. And I don't know if it's because he has completely eroded away my self worth, or if I can just logically see it from his point of view, but I really fucking understand. And I think that's why I'm so exhausted. Because asking myself, "why do I love him" has a lot of answers. He's so fucking handsome it's practically a crime, he's smart, he's clever, he has this laugh that sticks to my ribs like comfort food, and I think about it when I'm by myself and need a pick me up. He's engaging, and knowledgeable, and friendly, and can always chat with people and make them feel completely at ease. He's smooth and self aware and confident. All the marks of someone that is an irresistible, sought after presence. He's electric. I'm not those things. When I ask myself why he loves me, I come up empty. Especially now. Whether it's all his fault or not, I am quite the shell of who I used to be when we first met. I'm not confident, I'm not interesting, I'm not beautiful, I'm not friendly and boisterous and vivacious. I'm barely present, and I'm sad, and I'm unsure and I'm heartbroken. And none of those things are desirable. Nobody wants to be with a sad sack. People like Derek need other people like them. It's so painful that I understand why he looks for things outside of me, and it's changed the way I yell at him and approach him when I find some new and hurtful thing to be upset about. I barely cry anymore, and I just go through the anger motions because I feel like I have to. But in my head, I am so caught up in "I AM SO SORRY. I am so sorry that I'm who you tethered yourself too, and that I am not enough because I don't know how to be. And I am so fucking sorry that you can't be honest with me about it, because this all hurts me, too. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. I know it's all my fault. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to tell you I'm sorry without it sounding like I'm having a pity party. I understand you. I know you need this and I'm sorry that I cannot move the fuck on and let you find what you need, and I'm so sorry that I keep asking you to stay with someone you obviously do not fucking love or want." I apologize profusely to him in my head, because I know. I get it. And I can't anymore. I'm so tired of apologizing for who I am to the imaginary husband in my head. I know why he doesn't love me. I don't need to ask myself.
This is why I love this person
Why the fuck do I love this person
Sometimes, you only get one of those moments. I was thinking about this last night. For hours.
I didn't have any "why the fuck do I love this person" or "this is why I love this person" moments with my daughter's dad. I told him I loved him, but I never did. I just wanted to have someone love me, and Chris did a really good job at pretending he did sometimes. Enough to sway my better judgment into thinking it wasn't weird for a 24 year old to be fucking around with a 17 year old, and for sure, we should be together, and for even more sure, we should have a baby together even though I didn't want to have children. The birth of my daughter, and the year and a half I got to spend with her almost made me love Chris, because I loved her so much. I wanted, for a fleeting moment, to be a family. The pesky thing was, I didn't want Chris. I despised him, and god damn, did he make me fucking miserable. He managed to be everything wrong with my life, and I loathed him. Hearing him breathe made me fucking ANGRY, and I legitimately contemplated strangling him in his sleep on more than one occasion. I wish I could say it was my daughter that kept me from doing it, or some higher calling to behave morally. It wasn't...it was logistics. Chris was a huge dude, and I'm not sure my hands and unnaturally weak arms would have done anything but worn myself out without even waking Chris up. It's hard to have either of those moments in a relationship if you don't love the person. I didn't love Chris. I didn't even really pretend to try. I paid the word lip service, but we both did. And we were both terrible at it.
Allen was different. I loved Allen so much, and it was all consuming. And he loved me back. He made me laugh, he was smart, he engaged me, he wanted me to love him, and I did. Allen was, to be a cliche, an addiction. There was one exceptionally rainy day where Allen and I just played outside in the rain, splashed around in the puddles, and after an hour of running around with each other, we kissed each other in the rain, and it's the most honest display of raw affection I think I'll ever experience. It was young, it was honest, it wasn't the least bit jaded, and I looked into his face and thought to myself, "this is why I love this person". My relationship with Allen is fucking littered with those kinds of moments. One night, we were making dinner, and we listened to Head Automatica's Beating Hearts Baby over and over and over, and we danced around in our underwear and laughed and sweated and had bagels smashed full of cold cuts because we were poor as fuck and in our early twenties and what the fuck did we know about a good meal? I just knew that this feeling was why I loved Allen. When we were on the hard streets of Vegas together, when we didn't know where our next dollar was coming from, or how we were going to eat, Allen's parents offered to bail him out and send him back to Colorado if he left me behind. He said no. We were together, end of story, and we didn't go anywhere without each other. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me. That was why I loved Allen. Allen and I were together for five years. Four and a half years in, I was trying to get Allen to watch a movie with me so I could put my hands on his man parts and do things with them, and he wasn't listening to me, he was playing his xbox. So I went into the room, put on lacey panties and a flimsy, see through shirt, and went back into the living room. I put on some music and started dancing in the living room, and when Allen told me I was getting in his way, I angrily wondered, "why the FUCK do I love this person". Maybe that sounds superficial, and that may be because it was, but it was the beginning of the end. The next six months were at least one episode of wondering why the fuck I loved him a day, and those knitted together furiously. I credit Allen with showing me what it feels like to be loved, though. It wasn't jaded, it wasn't overly optimistic. It was just love, and that was all I wanted it to be.
I didn't have any this is why I love this person moments with Dan. I had two years of "why the fuck do I love this person" moments that made me feel ashamed of myself, because I was suffering all of these abuses (for lack of a better word), and I couldn't vocalize my feelings (of love, or of anger at feeling so fucking trodden over), and I was allowing myself to get walked all over by some guy that didn't have the sack to either tell me he couldn't stomach being with me like a human, or that he loved me. I think about my relationship with Dan, and it plays like a Bukowski poem in my head. It looks dingy and used, and large and small at the same time. I see Dan the way I think Dan saw Dan...bigger than me, better than me, the powerhouse of our imbalanced relationship, and I'm exceptionally mousy, and chasing the crumbs Dan threw down to me when he could be bothered. Dan was going on a trip about three months into our relationship, and I remember sitting on his lap in his living room, and looking down at his face when he said, "Are you going to miss me?" And it felt like such a delicious trap. I could answer yes and look foolish and alone, I could answer no and be a guarded cunt, or I could say what I said, which was, "are you going to miss me?" Smooth. He said he didn't know, with a very wry smile and an obnoxiously smug twinkle in his eyes, and I remember having two thoughts, both of them equally mortifying. I'm not sure which came first, because they kind of collided into my ears simultaneously:
Fuck. I love him
Why the fuck do I love him.
Two months later, when I sent a very veiled email to Dan about being in love with him and getting no response back, I stared at my computer and wondered why the fuck I loved him, and then lied to myself and told myself he'd say it when he got back from California.
When Dan had a wedding and I didn't get to go with him but I helped him buy his outfit for it, I remember telling him how handsome he looked and wondering inside why the fuck did I love someone who hurt me in new and inventive ways every single fucking day.
When Dan told his mom on Christmas Eve that he was alone because everybody was out of town, despite the fact that we had been together for over a year AND I was sitting right there, I stood outside in a blizzard, calling my girlfriend Anali and bawling, "why the fuck do I love him? I'm going home." And if Anali hadn't talked sense into me to stay until the blizzard was over, I would have been. I had had it that night, because Dan managed to make me feel alone in the universe, and I'd never felt so abandoned and pathetic and unloved in my life. And I couldn't do it anymore. But Anali was right, it was white out conditions and freezing and I was crying so hard I was damn near blind and I probably would have died on the way home. So I stayed, and gave Dan the "I don't understand why I love you" speech without actually using the words I love you because it's embarrassing to say that to someone who'll never ever ever in their life verbalize that nebulous idea to you. And the next morning, on Christmas, I had morning tea with Dan, we fucked, and I cried in the bathroom because I didn't understand why I loved him and why I stayed.
I could go on that way for hours. I loved Dan so much, and it was so different from Allen and Chris, because it was love, but it wasn't as real or as honest as Allen's, it was a cover up. I loved Dan privately because that's all he'd let me do, and I wanted it to work because that's how dumb some people are when they love someone.
I have simultaneous moments like this with Derek. I love my husband more than I ever loved Allen, but in a reserved way, because Dan is the reason I can't have nice things. I love Derek as much as I am fucking capable of, and I love him hard and I'm not ashamed of it. I love my husband so much it makes me angry. He makes me angry. I wake up almost every day and I know why I love him, but at some point during every day, I will have a moment where I growl inside and yell into my own brain about why the fuck do I love him. It's different, though. It's not the same as before. When I wondered why I loved Allen, I was digging myself out of the hole we'd buried ourselves in. I wondered because I was trying to remind myself, and the reminders never came, and I was sad and miserable and I hated and resented my situation. With Dan, I wondered because, while he gave me everything I vocalized wanting, and he spoiled me in ways I didn't deserve, I knew every day that he was fucking heartless and cruel enough to string along a person who was obviously too fucking weak and scared to let go of the robot that didn't love her back. I wondered why to try and make myself understand so maybe I could leave.
But with Derek, I don't wonder for any of those reasons. I wonder because he says he loves me so much, but when I'm not looking, he does a complete 180. Derek and I just had our two year anniversary, and the first year of our marriage was pretty good, but the second year has been awful. Derek has had issue after issue with flirting with other women, and breaking promises to me regarding other women. Derek swears he's not flirting, and these women mean nothing. And he'll eventually get to a place where he wants to soothe his crying wife and tell her that he never thought of it from my point of view, and I am so beautiful and he loves me more than anything, and he's searched for me for 40 years, why would he fuck it up? And he gets to this place only after he continues talking to women he promised me he wouldn't talk to. Or confided in other women after he promised me he'd stop, because it felt to me like a betrayal of our marriage. Or waxes rhapsodic about how things could have been SO different to a woman he didn't really get the opportunity to date after finding one of her letters in his closet. Or chatting up women on a seemingly harmless app like Words with Friends and telling them they're beautiful, and then inviting them to snapchat and saving their beautiful and adorable snaps to his phone. Or saving beautiful snaps of your beautiful best friend that you've ALWAYS felt like second fiddle to in his phone, with the added bonus of wondering how the fuck someone with such inside information about your insecurities and marital problems can send your husband selfies of her looking beautiful. An extra twist of the knife there. Or after telling someone that they are so nice and so beautiful, and he would love to get to know them better. Or after all of this, promising to give up all social media platforms and then taking two days to actually go through with deleting only one. After posting on facebook that it's time to delete facebook because there are too many distractions for his impulsive mind, and then twelve hours later, posting a complete and total lie so he could get away with posting a tasteful nude photo he took of himself to his Korean adoptee page. His post reads:
I've always had a low self esteem and self image issue due to being teased as a kid for not looking caucasian. My photographer wife finally talked me into a photoshoot even though I don't have an "ideal" body. It is taking a great amount of courage for me to post this, but in the name of positive body image and self-esteem, here it is.
Let me explain why this post is bullshit. It's very probably my husband was teased for being Korean when he was younger. In fact, he's DEFINITELY mentioned to me that he was teased a fuckload. So that part is verifiable in as much as he's told me this story before. Now, his photographer wife said this, as we just had a huge weekend of doing boudoir/maternity/milk bath shoots: should we take photos of ourselves to put up on the website, as well? To which he replied, well, yeah! And he was SO fucking into it. He bought props to prepare for this shoot. He bought cigars to prepare for his shoot. He made a few comments about his tummy not being as cut as it used to be, but other than that, he was really raring to do this shoot, knowing full well that there would be nudes involved. When it came time to do my shoot, I had an absolute breakdown about my body and threw a fit about having more photos done, and I shut down. I woke up to Derek taking his own gallery of artistic nudes, having a fucking BLAST doing it, and I commented on his comfort and bravery a day or two later, and he responded with, "well, I know I look fucking good." One of two things is going on here. Either he's lying to me about his struggles with self image, which...why, when I can relate so wholly and maybe we can help each other? Or he's lying to a page full of Korean adoptees just like him because he just fucking craves validation and doesn't get enough of it at home. He's been really nagging me about throwing that photo up on his instagram and on his facebook page. He REALLY wanted to share it. I kept asking him why, because in my head, he wanted to post it for specific people to see. I never told him he couldn't, I'd just ask him why and when he responded with "because" and nothing more, I'd tell him to do what he wanted to do. It looks like he did. He even went so far as letting me get all of the credit for taking the photo, which I did not, because I'm pretty fucking sure he knows it would look like a fresh pile of shit to tell everyone he took the photos himself while stringing along his low self esteem story. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that I am not enough for my husband, and my attention is not enough for my husband, and that he cannot be fucking honest about how and why I'm not enough so maybe I can fix it, or maybe we can part ways so he doesn't keep breaking my heart all the fucking time. And if all of this shit isn't enough, knowing that, when one of the females I've had a problem with in the past asks my husband why he's deleting his facebook, his response is, "Oh, Drea thinks I flirt too much, apparently." A 40 year old man cannot even take a tablespoon of responsibility for his actions. If we pretend for just a moment that saying, "mmmm, imaging you going HAM on something is tempting" to another woman isn't flirting, and it's completely harmless, my finding a problem with it and asking for that kind of behavior to stop should be enough. Even if it's me being wildly jealous and crazy, promising to stop something and then not doing it is a conscious choice that devastates people for far less than issues of fidelity. Hell, I get fucking twisted when a commercial promises me lustrous, luscious locks and all I get are hay bales for hair. It's been a year of all of this behavior, and of all the gaslighting by Derek to make every issue I have with him my fault instead of having anything to do with him, and I'm so fucking exhausted of waking up every day and going, "why the fuck do I love him?"
The other, new, problem I run into with Derek is not understanding why he "loves" me. And it makes me sad and miserable and unhappy and I ask myself every day why he loves me, and I look at myself and I think about how he could nail someone prettier, and I remember Dan telling me, in another "why the fuck do I love this person" moment, that I was holding him back from everything, but chasing skirts in particular, and I wonder if I'm doing that to Derek. If I'm just a placeholder. I feel that way all the time; like an ugly placeholder that he really suckered into believing he was different, and he thought I was special. That he feels smug about making someone who looks like me believe that they were beautiful and amazing and unique and just so....so NEEDED in his life. And I fell for it. I fell for it, despite having reservations and telling Allen that I didn't believe him, and I thought this was just his MO. That I was just the next girl in line. Allen told me that I would be a fucking fool for dropping Derek, because he was obviously so different than everybody else thus far, and he was obviously so available to me and so wrapped in adoration, and maybe I needed to try something different. So I listened to my best friend. And I ended up with someone just like everybody else. Just like Dan, who I was so anxious to escape a repeat performance of. I wonder constantly about what I have going for me, and the list is small. I'm creative, and I'm smart, and I'm brash in a way that can be kinda fun, some of the time. But none of those things will ever trump being thin and pretty, and I'm not those things, and I won't ever BE those things, because they aren't in my wheelhouse. And with every knife dig of a new woman that I have to deal with and try and find the internal strength to forgive my husband for, I see more and more of the small bit of self-assuredness I have chip away. And it's left me how I am now. I am terrified to be naked around my own husband, because I know there are women with better bodies that he's shown keen interest in putting above his wife, and I feel embarrassed to be in my own skin now. When I have sex with my husband, four times out of ten I get blasted out of the moment because I'll feel my hips jiggle, or I'll feel my stomach move, or I'l notice how my breasts aren't perfect and I'll have a panic attack about how he's got to be judging me and resenting me for not being any other woman that's prettier and thinner. I don't greet him at the door anymore when he gets home, because I don't see the point. when he tells me he loves me, I don't reciprocate, I just stare at him for awhile and then respond with, "why?" because I don't like saying I love you to someone who doesn't act like they love me when it matters. It's easy to be a fair weather friend when all eyes are on you, and Derek excels at that. He fails at being a good husband when I'm not looking, and his slip ups recently have brought me to the conclusion that he just doesn't care.
And the hardest thing to admit is, I can't blame him. And I don't know if it's because he has completely eroded away my self worth, or if I can just logically see it from his point of view, but I really fucking understand. And I think that's why I'm so exhausted. Because asking myself, "why do I love him" has a lot of answers. He's so fucking handsome it's practically a crime, he's smart, he's clever, he has this laugh that sticks to my ribs like comfort food, and I think about it when I'm by myself and need a pick me up. He's engaging, and knowledgeable, and friendly, and can always chat with people and make them feel completely at ease. He's smooth and self aware and confident. All the marks of someone that is an irresistible, sought after presence. He's electric. I'm not those things. When I ask myself why he loves me, I come up empty. Especially now. Whether it's all his fault or not, I am quite the shell of who I used to be when we first met. I'm not confident, I'm not interesting, I'm not beautiful, I'm not friendly and boisterous and vivacious. I'm barely present, and I'm sad, and I'm unsure and I'm heartbroken. And none of those things are desirable. Nobody wants to be with a sad sack. People like Derek need other people like them. It's so painful that I understand why he looks for things outside of me, and it's changed the way I yell at him and approach him when I find some new and hurtful thing to be upset about. I barely cry anymore, and I just go through the anger motions because I feel like I have to. But in my head, I am so caught up in "I AM SO SORRY. I am so sorry that I'm who you tethered yourself too, and that I am not enough because I don't know how to be. And I am so fucking sorry that you can't be honest with me about it, because this all hurts me, too. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. I know it's all my fault. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to tell you I'm sorry without it sounding like I'm having a pity party. I understand you. I know you need this and I'm sorry that I cannot move the fuck on and let you find what you need, and I'm so sorry that I keep asking you to stay with someone you obviously do not fucking love or want." I apologize profusely to him in my head, because I know. I get it. And I can't anymore. I'm so tired of apologizing for who I am to the imaginary husband in my head. I know why he doesn't love me. I don't need to ask myself.
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