Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

A photo of me circa 1995.  Taken within a year of my return from STL back to Tennessee.  I always liked this picture my buddy Rob took of me.  There were few pictures I liked of myself.  I think I liked the sepia tone.  Seemed to hide a lot.

It wasn’t just a country hit by Johnny Lee in the early 80’s aptly covered by Buckwheat on SNL.  It can become a way of life for someone who can’t determine her own self-worth.  And so it goes for probably 1000’s of young girls every year who enter college each fall: out there on their own for the first time; a little homesick; a little lot more freedom; and looking to fill a void caused by all of those conditions in addition to an engrained inferiority complex (be it self-inflicted or otherwise).  There’s an easy way to make all of that go away and inflate your self-worth temporarily on a Friday night after several beers and just the right college co-ed applying just the right kind of attention at just the right time.

So often times it goes back to a generally universally accepted difference between the sexes.  Females equate sex and emotion.  Men do not.  Is this true for ALL women and men?  No of course it is not.  However, for women with low-esteem and/or any kind of daddy issue whatsoever, they simply can’t fathom that a man who wants to have sex with them would possibly want to do so if he didn’t A.) find her completely attractive and B.) have some kind of feelings for her.  And that’s the rub cause it just ain’t always so.  Men, especially the young inebriated college kind, will have sex with women they A.) don’t find completely attractive and B.) have no feelings for.  So, her Friday night validation turns into Saturday’s gossip, Sunday’s shame, and an addition to a lifetime of self-loathing and mistakes.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.  Ad nauseum.  Yes, we can be that dumb many times over.  Women who look for love in all the wrong places never seem to figure it out quickly enough.

So, college life didn’t do much for my self-esteem either.  I was one of the 1000’s who was homesick with more freedom than she knew what to do with and trying to fill a void.  Guarantee you that did little nothing for my self-esteem issues.  I arrived a solid size eight and jumped to a 12 within two years.  Any hope that furthering my education would expand and/or change the critical view I took of myself, well, that hope was dashed.  The rigors and stress of attending classes full-time and working full-time took a toll on me mentally and physically.  My health was sorely lacking as a priority in my life and really took a dip during my sophomore year.

I began my sophomore year in college in August of 1993.  By the end of the school year, I would have my dorm room broken into and all of my jewelry stolen; my bank account cleaned out by a less than choice selection in dating material; a complete black out on a final exam; and bouts with bronchitis, strep throat, and scarletina.  To say it was not a good year would be an understatement, and, believe me, those were just a few of the highlights.  The year left me drained, exhausted, and humiliated.  Par for the course in my mind, I just couldn’t measure up once again to where I felt I should have gotten.  The fact that I managed to skate through the second year with a cumulative GPA around a 3.5 after taking classes full-time and slinging burgers at the local McDonald’s 40 hours a week didn’t impress me.  All I could see was each and every failure or thing that went wrong.  I particularly couldn’t wrap my brain around why I couldn’t seem to find Mr. Right.

After two years in St. Louis, I tucked my tail between my legs, and headed back home to Tennessee for good.  Surely, once I got back home things would look up.  Maybe I could get to work on my health, get my mind straight, re-focus, and maybe even find Mr. Right.  I did, after all, have a timeline to adhere to in my quest for the perfect life for the imperfect girl.  I just needed to settle in back home, and get myself squared away.  Things would work themselves out.  That’s how it works, right?  You just will it in your mind to go just how you pictured it should.

If I thought the last two years had been rough on my already damaged ego, I had no idea what was about to hit me right between my eyes.  My quest for validation and my need for life to move along at its proper pace was really going to take me on a roller coaster.  My motion sickness meter would be on full throttle without a Dramamine in sight.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.  Ad nauseum.  Remember?

Youth: We all know it's wasted on the young.

Please disregard the hair and shoes.

Okay the whole outfit!

It was the 80's after all.

Even so, that waistline would be awesome to have today!

It did not help my imagined fear I was fat at all when well-meaning persons would say things to me about my weight.  Inadvertently, two of the men in my life who should have been the most supportive of me also became the most destructive to my self-esteem.  Things were said to me growing up that perpetuated my belief I was fat.  I know they thought they were being helpful at the time, but they were not.  If I was eating a candy bar, for example, one would say, “Should you really be eating that?”  (Oh, and if you think that was a matter of him being helpful because he wanted me to make better eating choices based on his own, um, yeah, no.  Not so much.) On more than one occasion, I was asked by the other if I knew how beautiful I would be if I just “lost five pounds”.  At the time these things were “helpfully” and “lovingly” being said to me, I weighed somewhere in the high 120’s; was around 5’1” tall; and wore generally between the sizes of six and eight.  Man.  I wish I was “that fat” now.

I suppose it helped even less my two best friends in high school were, in my humble opinion, absolutely gorgeous.  They both had slender frames inches taller than mine.  Regardless of any other factors, I always felt inferior even though I loved them and I knew they loved me.  I could even fit into many of their clothes, but I never felt comfortable with the way their clothes framed my body.  They just never seemed to look as good on me as they did on them.  With the constant internal comparisons and the constant inadvertent external degradation, I was doomed.  The neurosis (that often borders psychosis) in the teen female mind consumed so much more energy than it ever should have.  I had lots of good times as a teenager don't get me wrong.  I didn't walk around as a solemn Goth girl who was moody and miserable with life.  On the outside, I was generally a pretty happy teen with a nice smile.  But on the inside, I hated almost everything about myself.  Wasted emotions.  Wasted energy.  Wasted time.  Why did I waste so much being so self critical?

So, I had an imperfect body.  There must have been something good about me/my life.  Right?  Well, let’s run through a list of a few things:

·         I was an A/B student who graduated with honors and a 3.6 GPA in high school.  (This at a time when honors courses and AP courses were just coming into regular use in high schools.  When I transferred to my high school, many of my fellow students had already had the opportunity to begin taking high school courses in the 8^th grade.  I was not given this option at the school I previously attended.)

·         I was involved in many extracurricular activities through school including my prized appointment as an editor two years in a row for the school paper.

·         I performed community service frequently through my church youth group often working with the homeless and the poor.

·         I began babysitting at age 11 for numerous families, and was the youngest ever camp counselor at our church’s camp.  I also watched nursery in the church for several years.

·         I began a “real” job at age 15.  (Since the age of 15, I have only been “unemployed” for about two and a half years in the last 23.  Over two years of that by choice after the birth of my first child and the adoption of our last two children.)

·         I always had an amazing group of friends.  (To this day, I’m still friends with many of the friends I made in high school.  I love them like sisters and they’ve been with me through so much across the years and across the miles.  I’m fortunate to have kept these wonderful long-term relationships for almost 25 years; a couple of similar long-term relationships from college for over 20 years; and some long-term friendships from my current career that have spanned over the last decade.)

·         Then there were the boys.  I almost always had a boyfriend.  Some were good choices, and then there were those that weren’t so good.  I never seemed to lack options for dating.  Although I generally wound up being the broken hearted one, I broke a few hearts back in the day, too.

·         Family.  Dysfunctional as it was on the whole, my family has always been extremely important to me.  I always had a large extended family surrounding me.  Regardless of divorce, 99.9% of the time I knew I was loved.

As I lay it out like that, it seems like a pretty impressive list.  I look at it now and I think, “Wow, she was one well rounded kid with a lot going on.”  Sad that back then none of those things, singly or combined, could squelch the overwhelming belief that I was less than others.  The most obvious derivative for the abyss of my teenage self-loathing?  Ah, must be the old tried and true parents divorcing gig.  That was cause for a lot of pain to be sure.  Honestly though, more so than any other issue in my life, a negative self-image and distorted view of my body led me to more unhappiness than anything else during my teenage years.  And more drunken nights and bad choices in college stemmed from my broken self than I care to admit.  

But I will.

Tomorrow.

Bullying When Bullying Was PC

Cute, but not me.  -->

 

 

In about the fourth grade, just when I hit the initial frenzy that is the pre-pubescent tween girl, the changes I noticed in my body were not changes I liked.  When it first began, I couldn't understand why my body seemed to be expanding in ways I did not like.  That might have been because we didn’t get the “girls to the library boys to the cafeteria talk” until fifth grade, but I digress.  It wasn't that I was embarrassed to start budding breasts, I just felt as though everything else was expanding as well and it just wasn't cool.  In reality, although things were expanding, they were “normal” expansions and nothing that one might consider “of note”.

I will never forget the first day of sixth grade.  Sitting in the school auditorium with my hair fixed “special” and wearing my best new outfit, I was ready to knock them dead at my new school.  I didn't know a soul.  I was terrified.  Rather than find that special new friend right away who would make my transition smooth and positive, the school “bully” claimed a new victim right off the bat.  In a flash, my journey to the bowels of self-esteem hell began when a little boy I had never seen before looked at me and said, "You're fat."  At that precise moment, I literally prayed for the ground to open up beneath me and swallow me whole.  That seemed a much better option than walking around my brand new school as the new fat girl.

To this day, I am really unclear on why this little boy, we'll call him Jack, said this me.  Jack didn't know me.  I didn't know Jack.  (Okay, maybe a name other than Jack would have been a better choice.  Oh, well, we’ll go with it.)  I had never seen Jack a day before in my life.  Truth is, I wasn’t fat either.  Not then.  And, Jack, well, he wasn’t fat either just in the same pre-pubescent hell that I was in with that little bit of left-over “baby fat”.  Had I not been so shy, so terrified, so utterly shocked, I might have told him what I thought about his statement, but I did not.  Because I was all of those things and more - except fat. 

So, why did I let Jack's statement, that one little comment, follow me these last 27 years?  I wish I knew the answer to that question.  Sadly, I don't.  But it does nothing to change the fact that, for whatever reason, I was utterly convinced I was fat before I ever got to that point in the actual sense of pounds.

We hear it every day.  Literally, day in and day out we are reminded of the power of our words.  Yet, I hear people say things all the time to and about each other that lack sensitivity.  It’s amazing really.  No matter how many things positive and great I have managed to do in my life, those two words from 27 years ago still have a bite.  Unbelievable really but it’s just the way it is.

No lesson here really that we don’t already know.  Just another step in the evolution of yet another insecure woman who learned at a rather young age to judge herself on things that did not matter and didn’t even really exist anyway.  Come back tomorrow for the nightmare that is the neurotic insecurity of a teenage girl.  Lord help us all.

That.

That.  She didn't have health issues.  She didn't know what it was to be exhausted all the time. She didn't know what it was to bounce between a primary care physician, a rheumatologist, a nephrologist, and a chiropractor.  She didn't know what it meant to be fat.  She was a "normal" little girl.  Then it all changed one day.  Well, to say it was one day might be on oversimplification.  Either way, it changed.  And it wasn't for the better.

I don't expect to recapture the youth captured in that picture.  I do, however, hope I will continue moving toward a healthier me; a happier me; and a more inspiring me.  I've been at it for six months already.  I've had my ups and downs over the last several months to be sure.  Happily, there have been more ups than downs.

If you have been following my progress over the last several months, I hope you'll feel compelled to continue.  If you have stumbled across this blog on accident, I hope you decide to revisit.  Either way, my biggest hope is that you will find something here that you can take with you.