Lovebuds Anonymous

So um........ it's late and Dee just left and we were chatting and now I feel like talking. How do you go about dealing with highly embarrassing and sensitive topics? I'm not sure exactly but I am figuring that I'm going to end up feeling like a dumbass anyways so to just go for it. lol. I'm going to write a book, sorry in advance... but this is my therapy and so I'm going to cut loose.

I was cleaning my room today and found a bunch of old stuff. In the old letters and cards from friends I found an old notebook that I had been writing a book in when I was about 12 or 13 years old. It was a romance book, and I can remember even as I started writing it that I found it embarrassing. I have always been the dark brooding one, writing poems about blood and darkness and death. To be emotional and well, "sappy" was just so damn cheesy and pathetic. But more than that, although I didn't know it then, was that I really don't feel like I will ever be able to have a romantic relationship like normal people. I have known so many people, and have quite a few friends who are large..... some of them even as big or bigger than me, who have had relationships and marraiges and even children. I can't, for the life of me though, imagine anything like that at this point in my life. The though of having someone touch my huge grossly oversized body makes me want to hurl. It's not that I am against the idea of sex; I just can't stand the thought of someone doing something so disgusting. Do I find myself disgusting? Hell yes. I know that it's purely a personal thing, and some people actually are attracted sexually to bigger people. But to me, nothing is more embarrassing or more disgusting than thinking of some romantic partner touching something like me. I can close my eyes and imagine some wierd sort of flapping, slapping thunderish flesh mash between Jabba the Hut and Fat Bastard from Austin Powers and it horrifies me.

So here I am, 26 years old and still stuck. I've had crushes, I've been in what I guess is love, and I've seen things come and go. I still wonder if I truly know what love is; after all, how can you know what love is when you've never experienced loving yourself? When the core of you is a writhering mass of hatrid and gloom.... is it even possible to truly feel love? It's a hard question, because in all honesty I don't know. Maybe I've thought that I knew what love was but what if, in truth, it's just been a candy-coated attempt to accept myself through someone else. Who knows, I suspect I'll never be sure. And it's sad and hurtful to think about, both for myself and for others that may have been involved. Let me dig a little deeper.

Without a doubt, I am a firm believer that any love is good; as long as both parties are agreeable and are adult. I think it is perfectly normal and healthy for someone to look at and find certain people of both sexes attractive. We all have both male and female aspects in our nature, so it's only natural that we find certain people attractive whether male or female. I don't think it makes you a freak; nor do I think you're going to be damned for feeling this way. I hate terms in the sense of relationships. I have friends who are termed straight, gay, bisexual, and various combinations of these labels. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I have always found males and females attractive. I think everyone does it, even if it isn't in a sexual way. All I know, is that when I dream, I dream of finding a great man, getting married, having children. The typical dream I guess.

When I was a teenager and first started hitting puberty and dealing with sexual thoughts, everything was confusing just as it was for everyone else. Everyone else though, did common things to deal with these new feelings. My friends all laughed and giggled and dated each other. Being 'teenyboppers' it was all innocent fun for the most part. We all dreamt about rockstar lovers (not sure of what lovers were at that time) or having some super awesome person make everyone jealous. That was where the difference came in though. While they were all dating and holding hands innocently, I was always left alone. As if it isn't hard enough to watch your friends go through dozens of relationships, there's always that moment when they friend whom you've fallen for comes to you to ask advice or tell you about their new love. Nothing is harder in life than telling someone whom you secretly care about how to keep their relationship together or even fixing them up with someone. But you know there's no chance for you and them, and you want them happy... so you do what you can to see love in their lives. Love goes on all around you and yet you can have nothing to do with it. God forbid if anyone ever finds out that you do care about someone, especially in school. You're taunted incessantily, and I remember all too well the boys daring each other to tell me that so and so liked me. I never fell for it, but even so it tore me up when they fell back snickering and making jokes. Riding the school bus was hell, and I can't count the times I stared out the window biting back tears and praying that I would fall dead before I had to step on that bus again.

Maybe it was those experiences that forced me to build a wall around myself, I don't know. I never played spin the bottle. I never kissed a boy. I never was invited to the parties or danced. I never went to a dance or a prom. I never got a Valentine or a 'check yes or no' note. Things were confusing enough... no not confusing. I knew exactly what was wrong; I was a freak. But just the same, things were confusing. I didn't know why I was this way, why I was being punished. In middle school I made some good friends, who all happened to be older than I was. Where I was in the 6th grade, they were in the 10th grade. I had always been around older people. Anyways, there was a small group of us....all girls. There was Betsy, Jackie, Sheila, Stacy, April, and me. To briefly describe each of us it went like this:

Betsy was super skinny and to be honest, not attractive. I remember thinking she had the most knobbiest knees I'd ever seen. She came from a VERY conservative religious family and was your normal 10 person country private school girl (pretty innocent). She had that sort of innocent giggle smile that aggravated the shit out of you. Not to be mean, but she really was a tease. She flirted relentlessly with the guys and always let them think that she was going to do things with them but she always just teased them and then when things got heavy she had us around to fall back on.

Jackie was an interesting character. We called her Butch, because she acted so manly about some things. She was about the same size as me, infact we often swapped clothes. I have never figured Jackie out. She wasn't attractive either, but she had sex all the time, mainly with this guy she went to school with. Everyone told me that the guys messed with her only because they knew she was easy, and looking back I guess that was the truth. But she had this self-confidence that I always envied. She was large and in charge, and she let you know it first thing. She would call herself a fatass and not have a second thought. You never saw her get teary eyed because someone was laughing at her gut. She just honestly didn't care. I still don't know how she did that, but I always wished that I had been able to have that same attitude. She had this habit of burping... like killer belches. Another reason we called her Butch. She had no modesty or wasn't embarrassed about anything at all. She came from a really messed up family who was very low income. Her grandparents raised her and her brother.

Sheila was also a big girl. She wasn't as big as Jackie or I, but she was still pretty hefty. She was also not that attractive, but once again..... she was always having sex. She was another one who the guys knew was really easy. We even caught her having sex on the hood of some car in the mall parking lot. haha. Sheila came from a wealthy family and pretty much got anything she wanted. She was spoiled, and she was pissed when she wasn't getting attention. I got along great with Sheila until an illfated trip to the beach one night where things went bad. But that's another story.

Stacy was shy. I really didn't know her well, she was a friend of Betsy's from school. She was a fun girl and all, but we really didn't hang out much. Still, she brought along a friend of hers from school whom I become best friends with.

April was my best friend for a long time. She was also a big girl, not nearly as big as me. But in all honesty, I always thought that April was a very pretty girl. She still is in my opinion. There was nothing about April that was bitchy. She was just down to earth and we got along great. She didn't hang out with us all that much though. Usually it was just the four of us; Betsy, Jackie, Sheila and I.

Why am I telling all this? Well, that was the time in my life when I was introduced seriously to a lot of things. I became an alcoholic. I became a pillpopper. I also had a few... encounters. After growing up watching my friends at school dating, watching my 'uptown' friends dating was even stranger. Here were a few people who, like me, were fat. And yet here they were going out and getting laid while I always was left behind. It's not that I wanted to have sex at that age, but the offer might have been nice. But no one ever really looked at me like that. The guys always talked to me like one of the guys but always ended up going after one of the other girls. I could never rigure that out. Somewhere along the way I think that I just finally figure out that yeah, there was something seriously wrong, and yeah..... it was with me. For some reason I was just so disgusting that a guy would rather make out with a redneck belching fat girl who takes her teeth out and spits like she's sucking on tobacco wads. It sounds so bad to admit but I was an alcoholic by the time I was in the 7th grade. For three years I did the same thing over and over. Go uptown with the girls, get drunk, party, come home. There were a few times where I was felt up by some drunk guy until he realized who I was. Once, while riding with some people along with a friend I ended up in the back seat with a guy who I didn't know. I remember buying a half gallon of OJ that night. We poured out enough of the orange juice and poured in a bottle of vodka and I drunk nearly that entire half gallon myself. I remember riding around that night, it was the only time I had gotten so drunk that I don't remember everything. There are actual black spots in my mind. At the time I knew what was going on, but I couldn't do anything to stop it. The guy of course took advantage and needless to say that scared me out of drinking for a little while.

Not much else to tell. Over time I stopped hanging out with those friends. That was the only one time where I really had a sexual encounter with a guy though. And it was a fuzzy memory that I was NOT proud of. By the time I had stopped with that crowd I was well into the 9th grade. It didn't take long before I started drinking again. But my main thing then was pills. Any kind of pills; it didn't matter. I didn't have any friends anymore outside of school and I was alone.

Somewhere in around the end of my 9th year I ran back into a guy I used to have been friends with somewhat from middle school. His name was Jamie, and he was obviously very different from anyone else. He was gay. I'd always gotten along ok with him though, and to be honest I was in a black pit and desperate for anyone to talk to and hang out with. So we started talking and I found a "like soul". He had always been picked on and was an outcast too. He was another 'freak' that I could associate with and we fast became friends. I hadn't known a gay person before, but it didn't bother me. I met his family. His mother was also gay, and strangely enough her girlfriend lived with them and his father. Don't ask me, it was a wierd situation. I got along well with his mother and her girlfriend and I spent a lot of time with them. This is sort of where things get complicated to me. When I went into the 10th grade I made friends with an absolutely awesome girl named Letitia. Not to sound goofy, but she was the prettiest person I had ever met. She was also a very sweet person and I was shocked that she was friends with me (we had one class together and that's the only time we saw each other). I had a crush on her, but not in a sexual way. Looking back on it, I think she was special simply because I had never had a 'beautiful' person befriend me. Even now, I love her just as much as I do any friend that I have now. I don't know where she is or what happened to her, but she will always be a good friend whether she realized it or not. I often wondered if maybe she was the 'dream' that I had of who I wanted myself to become and that's why I found myself so attached to her. In another way sometimes you meet someone and have that instant connection, almost like you knew them in another lifetime. That's what it felt like. But being friends with Jamie and Sarah (a girl we went to school with who was gay and also an outcast) people just assumed that maybe I was gay too. I really don't know why I let them keep assuming, because I always fantasized about men. Sure I found some women attractive too, but I think that's normal. To be honest I think that I never really considered myself anything because I really didn't have a sexual identity to myself. In my mind, I was the untouchable.

We had a lot of good times and a load of bad times, but eventually I lost touch with them as well, of my own choice. Still, though, I'm grateful for being able to spend time with them and their crowd; even if people did think things about me. Who cares? It taught me to not judge someone based on who they are attracted to, but to get to know the person and judge them on character. I'm not sure if I would have been so accepting of the friends that I have now, if it hadn't been for this time in my life. And I would have truly missed out on some absolutely fabulous people who I wouldn't trade anything for.

Through all of the wonderful friends and experiences I've had though, I've never been able to shake the feeling of worthlessness and desperation that have been with me all my life. All of this because of my fat ass. I still don't understand what the difference is between me and other fat people who are in relationships or have at least had one. Why am I so different? Why is it that they can move on and have meaningful families and live life, even if they are still unhappy with themselves.... they still have life and are holding onto it. I hear the stories from these men and women who are struggling with themselves and their weight and they say they feel so alone. And I just wonder...... I know they are being honest. I'm sure they do feel alone. But how can they know the depths of what I feel when I say that I'm alone? Compared to them, I am utterly depressingly alone in every way. Never knowing love, never having been loved. There is no relationship, no marriage, no children for me. When I die there is no one left to carry on my genes, my blood. I am it. All there is. I'll go having never known what it was like to be comfortable holding someone's hand and knowing the emotional state of true love. So what am I to think? Even though I know that they are sincere, how do I hold what they say in comparison? And will I ever get to the point where I can look at myself or even think about looking at myself without tears coming from knowing that I have such self hatrid as to destroy the world. I don't want to lose weight to find that true love with a man, even though it plays a big part. I want to, just for once, look at myself and think that I can do anything and not be ashamed. I want to walk in public and blend into the background. I want to be in a crown and be just another person. I want to travel and not worry about whether there is a bathroom that I can use or if I will fit on the plane/bus/car/train. I know everyone wonders why I have such an obsession with my weight. Even Dee has told me repeatedly that I'm obsessed and I know, she has even said, that she's tired of hearing about it. I just don't know how to do anything else. It's who I am, what I am. It's like I'm not a person. I'm just weight, fat. Until it's gone a real person isn't going to exist. My life is just the giant flush of the toilet and damnit I'm tired of just spinning in limbo; I'm ready for the flush to just either overflow or go on down the drain.

Do you understand what I'm trying to say Dee? I guess it is better to blog because I can just type and type and get it out while it's one long stringy thought. Do you think I'm crazy or wrong or just sick? You know me, perhaps better than most ever have. And while I hate to just keep spitting the same things up over and over I guess it helps to get it out even if I have to repeat myself. I warned you that this was my therapy haha. Well it's late and time for bed, I should've been there hours ago. Time flies when you're not having fun as well..........

- posted by Loki's Concubine @ 1:14 AM