I have a tentative relationship with my body at best.

It took years of being abused, getting fatter, getting thinner, getting healthy, getting unhealthy, being everywhere in between, and finally dealing to get me to this point.  A point where I thought I was happy and invented some universal truths to help me accept things.

The truth as I saw it was that I would never be stick thin for prolonged periods of time and not either be dead or very close to it, potentially with parasites, cancer, plague, and/or AIDS.  Men would accept and even love my body, as long as I wasn’t stick thin.  Men don’t really look at tummy flab, or loose arm skin, less than toned calves, or cellulite.  Straight men are too busy looking at your tits or ass.  The moment a breast pokes out or and ass cheek makes an appearance, all bets are off on anything else earning attention, it’s all about distraction, good angles, and good lighting.  Happiness was a matter then of focusing on the same, the things that were good about my body and fuck the bad as shit I couldn’t change.  The truth was a scale would only bring pain and suffering, and happiness lied in how I felt.  The truth was I wanted to have a better relationship with food and that I felt better about eating what I wanted than chastising myself about cutting calories.

And it worked for me.  I didn’t check the scale.  I frequently ate fatty foods.  I walked a bunch and occasionally worked out.  My body didn’t hate me and I didn’t hate my body.  And with my acceptance came the small perk of some more confidence backing my semi-feigned hyper-confidence with men that I already boasted.

And then I met my boyfriend, and early on I went on my merry way of showing the goods hiding the bad and being happy.  And despite his personal lifestyle of eating healthy and working out regularly, I thought he was happy too.  As well, the thing is, when you are in a romantic relationship with someone and you see them a lot, eventually it gets to the point where they become well acquainted and familiar with your body.  ALL OF IT.  But despite him mom saying that he complained about my eating habits, and his adamant behavior in trying to get me to eat some of his healthy snacks, I took it at face value when he said he loved my body.  All of it.  And I got comfortable in that, and decided he might be the exception.  Unlike what I knew that men get distracted and that’s why they like your body, he wasn’t distracted and just legitimately liked it.

Nope.  Not the case.

One thing led to another and he let it slip that my fatty body despite the traditionally acceptably rotund parts is not appealing and that I need to work on it.  He let it slip out of “honesty and love”.  And then when I was obviously turned off, he backpedaled and took it all back saying his sorries and that he didn’t mean it.  UM, honesty means you did mean it, unless you don’t quite understand honesty.  And apologizing for telling the truth and then saying sorry as a lie… well…  Blah blah blah, LIES.  I hate lies.  I seriously fucking hate lies.  End of story, someone who eats that much kale and does that many push-ups is monitoring what you’re putting in your mouth, no matter what they say.  They are watching what you eat either because they’re living vicariously though you, they are jealous of you, they are worried for you, or they are disgusted by you.  When they say they don’t care, they are lying to you.

And I am obviously frustrated.  In spite of all he says I don’t know how much you can love or miss someone if you’re dead set on changing them.  At that point, you’re not so much missing that person at all as much as you’re waiting on a different version of them to appear.  And part of me doesn’t know if I should stick with this knowing the truth.  And I can bet he wishes he had a time machine to backpedal without me remembering the transcript of the past, but it’s done and now I know.  And I feel a bit guilty because immediately after my brain went, “Fine!  There are literally dozens and maybe hundreds of other men who don’t think that I’m a whale.” and considered breaking up.

But the thing is, I’ve been working at us for a while.  And through the fights and the distance, I’ve tried to make it work, and it may be a sunk cost, but I don’t want my time and struggle to go in vain because he secretly has thought I am fat this whole time.  And it’s not like I never noticed this.  I love him, completely, everything.  I like his personality and his humor, I think he’s smart and handsome and sexy.  And I’ve already been guilted with the distinct discrepancy between how he treats his body and how I treat mine, and I’ve had to move past thoughts that it’s unfair that he’s stuck with me when I’m treated with him, for my own sanity and happiness.  And I’ll forgive him this time and let it go, but I know it’s never going to feel the same now because I know.  I’m always going to hesitate when his fingers touch my skin because of what he may be feeling and what he really thinks but doesn’t want to say.  And I don’t know if either of us deserve that.

I don’t know why I’m getting caught up in this idea that I should be excited for a job, and if I’m not, then it’s hard for me to get past writing a cover letter…

So I’m stalling.

And the truth is all that I really need right now is to build experience, any of it, and references who will say I’m a good little worker bee so I can move forward.  I’m not looking forward to menial labor or retail, but even shitty writing jobs aren’t exactly feeding my desires.  And I’m spoiled, I know.  I think that suffering through college for the last four years should guarantee me something that I shouldn’t get miserable about, but the truth is, I don’t live in that world.  The truth is, my B.A. means so very little to so many even though I graduated on time from a top school with a decent GPA and some nice extracurriculars.  It’s upsetting that I was led on to believe that it would be enough.  It’s upsetting that I quelled myself to sleep at night when I decided to not apply to law school, with the fact that I was graduating from UCLA.  Because law school is being proven to be a waste of time and money anyways, right?  I don’t know.

If I ever have children I’m going to set them straight.  There is no fairytale.  Nothing in life is guaranteed, and nothing you do is going to secure anything for you.  You can increase the odds that bad things don’t happen, but you can’t make it ever infallible.  Horrible things happen to good people.  Amazing things sometimes happen to pond scum.  Babies get cancer, pedophiles get off scot-free.  I’m having a difficult time finding a basic job, because I ride this fine line of over-educated and underqualified.  I feel like it’s going to be weird when I inevitably return to community college to get certificates so I can claim what I already know; that I’m capable.

I’m frustrated and I’m tired.  I’m hoping future employers don’t read this.  Unless I’m applying for a writing job, and then maybe, so they know that I can write outside of a cover letter.  I sometimes wish resumes and cover letters came with technical exams, so I could show what I did, and I’d feel better about getting rejected, because then they would have said no after seeing what I could do rather than making a guess based on my school record.

I don’t know anymore.  I’m just going to keep trying though.

I have decided that I really don’t like the snark that goes down on a lot of the lady sites I read.

Mostly because they tend to have a feminist streak.

I don’t want snarky bitches telling me that I can’t say bitch or cunt because it brings me and “my gender” down, but in the same breath that I can’t shame someone for being a slut.  And in all honesty, if you’re gonna be a slut then run with that and take pride in it regardless of what I say.  And if what I say is taking you down a peg, maybe it’s actually time to reevaluate your actions isn’t it?  I’m not down with nasty bitches shaming me for reading an issue of cosmo when I’m not shaming them for stockpiling backissues of bust.

I don’t even much subscribe to being a woman as far as gender goes.  Biologically, I have two X sex chromosomes, a fully functioning vagina, semi-impaired ovaries, and happily full B-small C sized breasts which may or may not be functional.  Sexually, I find myself attracted to men who are heterosexual and have the markings of a stereotypical red-blooded manly man.  But besides that, I’d rather not lump myself with “woman-kind” as I definitely do not feel that this label has really defined me, besides my stereotypical love of cosmetics, clothes, accessories, and craft hobbies.  I have found I have more in common with flamboyant gay men than most women.

I was considering trying to explain to the bevy of annoying trolls on one of the sites today why a woman may actually want to be a “sexy”/slutty costume on Halloween and why they shouldn’t be outright attacking anyone who just didn’t agree with them.  But then I realized it was a lost cause and I would just be derided for being some sort of “gender traitor” who was sending women everywhere back to the dark ages one tea cozy at a time.

The truth is, Halloween in its commercial incarnation of the present time, is the one time of the year that it is supposedly safe to live out your innermost dreams and not be horribly attacked.  Ask any child about how intrinsically important this day is and it will soon be clear (as for any adult who can remember that sad Halloween they didn’t get to be what they wanted), that your costume is as close as you can get sometimes to a wish.  You can be ANYTHING.  For me when I was six this meant I was a jellyfish, which was truly impossible any other time, as I could not grow up to be a moon jelly.  For others, this marks little kids being astronauts, fairy princesses, trucks, crayons, candy, and the like.  For a lot of older females, this means being sexy.

When costumes are suddenly attacked for being “hilariously slutty”, there is actually a deeper concept at hand about why they even exist.  Are the costumes bringing down our society into this vortex of trash culture?  No.  Rather we live in a society that stresses value on sex.  Is that wrong?  Maybe.  And so many people want to be sexy.  As the third wave feminists these women claim to be would state, that everyone has a right to feel sexy.  If not in their own skin then, why not the skin of a costume.  Why are people supposedly entitled to have that right, but when they take advantage of it on one night out of the entire year, they are put down?

It is this backwards logic that I find so incredibly infuriating with the side of snark.

If something makes someone feel good and it’s not hurting you or anyone else, why attack them for it?  Because you are little.  And I hate little people, not speaking about those with dwarfism…

I’m sitting thinking about what I’m going to say the next time I see my boyfriend.

He’s in Yellowstone, which I now have memorized to be in Montana, which I used to confuse with Yosemite which is in California, and he’ll be back Saturday, if not Sunday, if not never because he’s decided to go into the wild.  And I don’t know if he still reads these, but I kinda hope not because it’s weird the way he looks at me just afterwards, like I’ve said something really great to him.  But the thing is I always say these things to him.

I try to verbalize how much I like him and what he means to me all the time.  Because I’ve fucked that whole part up before.  But he ignores when I just say it to him.  He forgets all the times that I tell him that I really love his personality.  I love how thoughtful he is and how he remembers the little things that are important to me which I didn’t think that he noticed.  I love how caring and sweet he is and how he treats his friends, and his family, especially his mom.  I love that he is affectionate, and perpetually wants to shower me in love and hugs and kisses and cuddle me, even though off guard when I’m sleeping revs up my gag reflex and makes me almost instinctively vomit.  And these things make him a big closet mush, which he doesn’t like me to call out because he likes to be Mr. Stereotypical-Strong-Manly-Man, which I like too, because I’m sooo into stereotypical manly-men (no sarcasm), but also because it lets me know that he is comfortable enough with me that he wants to go home and cuddle before he passes out at ten pm.  I love that he’s smart, and every time I tell him that he passes me off as being condescending and usually retorts that I’m smarter.  I wouldn’t like him if he wasn’t smart.  I like being conversational.  And most of the things I converse about are either things that piss me off or academia.  Or geekery.  Which kinda overlaps…  And he teaches me lots, all of the time.  He’s driven and passionate about his interests.  Which is probably the adult in me finally being attracted to someone who isn’t directionless and has goals rather than some aimless loser.  And then he’s attractive.  And I’m shallow so yes, this is rather important to me, but contrary to some of his workings, this is not what matters most to me.  He’s not particularly a pretty sight to see when he’s horrifically beardy, and still I adore him.  Even when I am positive that the beard was giving me a hivey rash.

I love him to death.

And I think when I see him again I’ll respond that I missed him.  But I’m thinking I’m going to be doing a lot more missing him soon.  I’m leaving for home soon, and home is the Bay.  Home is over three hundred miles away from him.  And we’re not breaking up because it would break me in two.  Nay, shatter me.  The mere thought of it was having me sobbing for days, and the notion that we will work through the distance gives me the solace to stay together despite leaving.

I just want to savor every moment.  I want to figure out how I’m going to get back to the place where I’m at.  This place where I’m happy, with him.  And I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I’ll get back here soon…

My boyfriend asked me once over dinner how I could manage to be friends with my exes.

I said it varies, but it wasn’t descriptive enough of an answer for him.  I paused and thought.  I’ve had relationships of all sorts with quite a few guys.  I’ve had crushes and fleeting “romances”.  On and off again problems.  Long-term issues.  Short term flings.  Long distance bullshit.  Blind dates that went horribly.  Group dates that I feigned illness.  Group dates where I was set up blind to be with a bunch of my friends’ friend whom they kept saying we were great together and I kept standing the fuck away from and ignored while I chastised my friends for being assholes and trampling on my awesome singleness…

In short, I’ve covered a lot of bases in my twenty-two years of life.  Of the ones who haven’t simply “forgotten” me, or consider me the successor to Satan, we might talk. One of them I love purely like a brother now, which is an incredibly odd and difficult thing to deal with in my brain when I remember how I used to think of him in a physical and totally incestuous manner.  The other I would consider myself fairly “close” with is my most recent actual ex.  And that was precisely the one my boyfriend was trying to get at; how I could remain friends with him.

Truthfully, some days I don’t know myself.  I think it only somewhat works because we initially got together when I was about freshly eighteen, and he immediately friend-zoned me.  He only wanted to be my friend because, in his eyes and the eyes of virtually everyone else that he knew, I was a baby.  Well, it really didn’t take me long to change his mind on that perspective.  He got to know me, because he tried to be my friend.  I never really got the same chance because I really only wanted one thing.  The entire relationship was ultimately this unbalanced mess where he really wanted me on this deep emotional and spiritual connection and wanted to marry me and settle down, and I was, “wait I’m nineteen/twenty, I don’t want to get married!!!  I WANT TO LIVE!!!”

The way it ended was messy as well.  Me “living” meant I moved to Los Angeles to pursue school.  And I wanted a fresh start as long as I was going to be down there for two years.  I wanted to be my own person.  I wanted to be a fucking adult.  And I definitely didn’t want to be tied down and have to report to some stage four clinger of a man who desperately wanted to live a picket fence life with me.  I simply told him that I was going, that I had made up my mind, I’d be back in two years, and there was nothing to be done about it.  He dropped the bombshell that he could just move down to LA with his job to be close to me.  No dice.  I told him not to follow me.  That I didn’t want to be in a relationship.  And that was that.

At first he was retaliative, as he was always and quickly tried to secure some relationship to prove he was over me.  Well, that didn’t last long, and it wasn’t too much after that until I got a random odd phonecall about how she could never be me and that he was so stupid for thinking she could and blah, blahblah, blahblah.  When I got into a relationship (against my life plan and better judgement [it worked out]), he got jealous and slightly lost his damn mind.  But now we’re in this tenuous but agreeable place where we are friends and he attempts to deny our real past mostly because it brings up too many issues he doesn’t quite want to deal with.  And I’m super okay with that.

Most recently we ended up talking because our mutual friend just got engaged.  It surprising and amazing considering how she is personality-wise.  When we were together, she was having an affair with some married airport executive.  And now… she’s engaged to someone I can only best describe as the world’s best case of non-fatal progeria…  I asked if he was gonna be her Maid of Honor, or if he was going to have to duke it out with our other mutual friend, as all three have been best friends since high school, or if one of her younger sisters are going to lay down the smackdown for the title.  He thinks it will be him.  But really in fact hopes it will be him over their other friend, and realizes that he is terrified that he won’t get to be a traditionally female-held title.  (I shudder to think who he will tackle to catch the bouquet…)  But then said he had an all important question for me…

What kind of girl would you see me with?

I honestly didn’t know.  I thought for a second, and almost choked out about how at one time I thought I saw him with me, but I thought it was in everyone’s best interests to not tear at anyone’s old wounds.  So much has changed.  All I want with him, honestly is to just be friends and I don’t know how much I’m asking with that.  For the brief and fleeting time that we were in fact friends it was good and fun and we had a nice time until I pushed it.  Time was of the essence though and I just responded that I didn’t know and quickly redirected to why he was even asking me.  He said that he just wanted my two cents on the matter and quickly said that it was now time for him to go to sleep.  I bid him goodnight and thought.

How do you stay friends with someone who is still in love with you?

How do you stay friends with someone, after all the tumult and bullshit, all the screaming matches and fights and lies, after all the history and dust has finally settled, how do you go back to them and shake hands when they only want to kick shit up all over again?  I think this is what my boyfriend wanted to know.  How I can be friends, when it is so obvious to everyone else that we’re not.  How I can lie to myself and fake this.  I don’t know.  I think it’s because it’s less hard to feign ignorance and pretend he’s over me, than to cut off all ties.  The truth is, it always has been, and it always will be easier to have him on my side.  Even when he was driving me crazy and making me miserable.  Even when there was this chunk of hurt in my heart from him doing something mean.  Despite all the downsides life was easier if he gave a shit about me.  Maybe I’m friends because I’m selfish.

I don’t know.  I could wring my brain about it, but it’s hard to really look at when I’m this close to the system.  But for now, things are staying with us as being just friends.

Although I quit doing this almost forever ago, my boyfriend took to reading these and asked me to finish doing them.  I don’t know why I listen…

Most of my internet friends have become real life friends from visiting me, and a lot of my real life friends have become a sort of internet friend from me being so damn far away, cue Facebook.  Oh, the awesome/horrible/addictive/boring/entertaining connector of millions of people across the globe.  Synthetic friendship and communication.  Because of Facebook, my very first internet friend ever was able to find me, and thus allow me to prove to my parents once and for all that, I was not the twelve-year-old retard sending pictures of myself to a forty-year-old greasy fatman pedophile that I met in a Yahoo!Games chatroom.  THAT’S RIGHT PARENTS!!!  BB WAS A REAL GIRL!!!  Without much more ado…

Dear BeLinda,

I don’t remember exactly which game we met on, but I remember where we met.  I remember playing Doodle for hours with you in Y!im and sharing you with my best friend Monica and cousins.  I remember talking to you about being weird and fitting in and how bad being 12-13 in junior high school sucked.  But you always said I had it better because I lived in California and you were stuck in Ohio.  I remember our old hilariously crappy and embarrassing screen names even…  Holy fuck I do not want to invoke the names BBdancergirl and cybunnybabyprincess1990.  I remember being so excited to ditch my regular lunch crowd sometimes and cryptically tell my friends I was going to “hang out with BB” and sneak away to chat with you at some random computer at school that I could proxy.  I remember sending a photo of myself to you, which was badly taken with my dad’s shitty digital camera at the time and had such crap image resolution that I was able to actually edit it pixel by pixel in MS Paint (Ohhh 2002), and I fucking did.  I took out like one zit and some blurry fly aways and make my lip gloss less whorish, and now feels like a lie, but I remember it was because you sent a photo of your school dance team picture, and you were thin and pretty and a redhead rocking a serious pixie cut that other girls made fun of you for and called you a dyke, and I still wished I was you.

I had a penpal before when I was in the third grade.  I think her name was Michelle and she was assigned to me and she was in New Jersey at some public school where they made you wear these hideous school uniforms.  I was only required to write her one letter, but they gave us supplies to write more.  I never did.  She was not that pretty or interesting and we had nothing in common.  She was also a year older than me and wrote to me like I was a child so I felt pretty, fuck you towards her for that too.  You, however, were vastly different.  We had the same music tastes (and now fb stalking you shows yours has evolved more towards stuff my boyfriend had to introduce me to…), liked the same kinds of shows, felt the same problems, and were interested in writing.  We told each other stories and complained to each other and wrote each other email-letters all the time.

You were the first person to make me feel like my world was so much bigger than just being thirteen at Centerville in Fremont.  Your dreams of coming out to California and being in a place that was a little more accepting of the way you thought and open-minded made me know how relatively good I had it.  And even when I was fighting with all of my friends or they were just being bitchy, gossipy, thirteen-year-old girls you always heard me out.  And you even let me plague you with Hello Kitty emoticons to boot.  I am so sorry for the day I had to delete my sn and stopped talking to you.  I was so mad at my parents and scared that they were right all along.  They told me how stupid I was for trusting someone I could never know and that of course you were the same as me, because you could easily look up everything I liked on the internet and spit it right back.  That pedophiles specialize in getting stupid little girls like me to trust them.  How freaking jazzed I was when you private messaged me on Facebook asking if I remembered you?  And seeing that you were real, and how awesome we’ve both grown up in these years?  And you BeLinda, no longer BB (even if I am still Lyss), still so funny and cool, and maybe even more desperate to get out of Ohio once and for all.  But instead of talking about boys and Deathcab, we’re discussing apartment rent rates and where it’s nicest to live in California and how one day I might have to live in Ohio instead because it’s so fucking expensive.

My how we’ve changed!?!  And we still get along?!!?!?

We just need to figure out how to hang out in person now.

Always,

Lyss