Exes

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 6 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My  “Secret Subject” is: You’re grocery shopping & run into your “first love”. What do you do? What do you say?

It was submitted by: https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

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Here's the thing about relationships: I don't do them often.

 I am commitment phobic, independent to a fault, and I have high expectations in a partner. Not too many people understand that and can jive with it, and I can't stand most people, so my relationships have been few and far between. I don't have many exes at all, and those I do have I don't have some weird bad blood with. There is only one person from my early high school days with whom I will never speak again, but that had more to do with things he had done before we met over anything that happened between us while we "dated"...and I mean, does high school even count anyway? Either way, my first actual love came a few years after, but either way I just don't have a lot of hate or anger when it comes to the few people I tried the commitment thing with...

 Here's the thing about first loves: I don't think I was able to have one in the same way a lot of people do.

 Being sexually assaulted at 13 changed me forever. Even my first really serious relationship wasn't uncomplicated and without baggage. I held back, grew depressed, and was a large factor in why it ended. I absolutely couldn't be happy, and I couldn't be confident or feel safe. I had entirely too much anger and resentment, and I couldn't relinquish any little bit of control. A lot of that stemmed from trauma, and in so many ways everything from the moment that trauma occured has been shaped by this sliver of time in which every part of me was violated and rebuilt into someone wholly different. I died for someone's 2 minutes of pleasure and became someone who had REALLY BIG ISSUES to work through. Love was always and will always be a very complex topic that needs a lot of navigation for me, and since it happened so young, I didn't get a chance to explore love and relationships without that stain of trauma. 

Here's the thing about MY first love: A part of me still loves him. And always will.

 There's no anger or resentment that he couldn't handle me as a mess. I'm not angry that he, too, was a mess. He's probably still a mess to be honest. He was (is?) a beautiful, dorky soul. We didn't remain friends, and honestly, sometimes I miss that friendship. It got me through dark times in high school before we dated after graduating. We were friends first, dated for a bit, got our first apartment ever together. It was freeing but chaotic and stressful. Between always hurting for money and the messes we both were, we destroyed what we had. So what I ultimately mean is that there's no reason for it to be tense and weird because we dated. We made good memories and really loved one another...it just wasnt the time and place in our lives for things to work.

 Here's the thing about social standards: fuck 'em.

 I know it's supposed to be weird and taboo to run into someone who saw you naked a bunch, but I just don't operate that way. I'm still friends with several people who have seen me in all kinds of states of nudity, who I have shared myself with just once or plenty of times. It's really not all that odd for me, and it wouldn't be a factor in how I reacted to seeing this person.

Finally, here's the thing about unexpected social interaction: I avoid it like my dog avoids me anytime she hears the word "tub."

 If I saw him anywhere, I might duck and run like I do when I see anyone I know because I hate social interaction, but if we happened to wind up in the same checkout line, I'd speak and treat him like anyone else I feel forced to socialize with--like I'm the most awkward human being in the world or perhaps an alien just getting used to posing as a human for the first time. I might respond to questions like "how've you been" with "thanks, you too" and turn 15 shades of red in a record .2 milliseconds. Rest assured, though, that's how I am with anyone not just someone i gave my battered heart to nearly a couple decades ago.

So. If I ran into my first love...it'd be just another thing.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2019/01/team-summer-secret-subject-swap.html?fbclid=IwAR1JVZUKpAytvUQ-5UEHGTRvgi85AZ20ZNIyX_siCSUSlpFri4P1SizPD6Q

Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

Cognitive Script https://cognitivescript.blogspot.com/2019/01/jasper-jan-2019-sss.html?fbclid=IwAR2w-WszcjXApy401KzHhZhiO_E9GvMHEF6wgs-GbOREe1UA0e7EYy34UXg

Southern Belle Charm https://www.southernbellecharm.com

The Bergham Chronicles https://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com/

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch       

That One Track

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 13 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My subject is: How would you rewrite one chapter of your childhood? Not your whole childhood - just one chapter.

It was submitted by: http://batteredhope.blogspot.com

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I’ve never really thought of my life in divided chapters. I’m more the kind of person who has a chronological life soundtrack—a list of songs meant to be played back to back preferably on vinyl or cassette tape that tell, at least to me, my life story. Said soundtrack would mostly certainly be the score to a film about my life and definitely has a few songs I am completely embarrassed to admit ever listening to. What life would be complete without a few *ahem* or maybe a multitude of embarrassments, guilty pleasures, bad choices, and lessons learned?

After so long thinking about life in the songs that accompany the times, it’s really rather difficult to consider my childhood or my life at all as chapters in a larger story, and it becomes more difficult still to divide my childhood up at all. It’s a blur of mostly negative flashbacks, fuzzy images that really fail to tell the entire story because, for complex reasons, my brain felt it best to forget most of it. Can that sort of memory-blur be divided into distinctive patches that combine to make the whole quilt? It seems impossible.

But can I pick out a moment, a song perhaps, to cut away, to delete, or rewrite without disrupting the flow of the soundtrack itself? Can I remove a moment, an event, or make a change without altering who I am? For the longest time, I would have said it’s impossible to take away anything I’ve gone through and still end up with the me that I know today as the final product, and as someone who is pretty fucking ecstatic about who I am, the idea that I wouldn’t be me at all anymore has always given me pause about making a change. I realize we aren’t defined by what has happened to us, but those events alter how we see the world, how we cope, our reactions and politics. So much of who we are depends on how we perceive and deal with what we have gone through and how we eventually cope or don’t with those things.

But…

In the last few years, I have really started to wonder when posed this sort of question how I might fare without ever having been raped at 13. I have written about my thoughts on rape and rape culture extensively, and I know that, for the most part, I have dealt with the whole of it really well, but who would I be if I could just take that one thing back? My virginity was literally stolen from me by someone I called a friend. I lost my innocence on the dingy carpet in my own house. My own fucking house. The person I would have been without that betrayal died that night, and I can’t help wondering who that girl would have been. Could she have been better at relationships? Could she trust people? Let the walls down? Could she be anxiety free? Would she be able to answer the door when she’s home alone without having a panic attack? Would she be more social and able to leave home without feeling overwhelmed, clammy, and on edge?

I have never been able to know what it’s like to love innocently, to be able to be with another human being without the shadow of knowing what it’s like to have my own body stolen from me. For all of my teens and entire adulthood, I’ve lived with the weight of guilt and shame, with the anger and anxiety that comes from being a rape victim. So much of my time and energy has been spent on battling those demons, on coping and dealing and overcoming. Such a huge part of who I am has been molded by that one night, by just a few unforgettable, life-changing moments.

So, yeah, I love the person I am now even with the baggage, the scars, and the anxiety, but if I could reach into the past and just rip that night right out like so much garbage, like a bonus track that never really fit into the soundtrack anyway, I think I might like to know the woman who would have lived without it, the version of me that wasn’t killed that night. I’m sure she’d be pretty damn rad.  

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Here are the links to the other contributions this month:

Baking In A Tornado http://www.bakinginatornado.com/2016/08/secret-subject-swap-no-glinda-here.html

The Bergham Chronicles http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com/2016/08/location-location-location.html
Spatulas on Parade http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

Dinosaur Superhero Mommy http://dinoheromommy.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

Confessions of a part time working mom http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2016/08/august-secret-subject-swap-pets.html
Sparkly Poetic Weirdo http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/

The Lieber Family Blog http://thelieberfamily.com

Never Ever Give Up Hope http://batteredhope.blogspot.com

When I Grow Up http://kimberlyyavorski.com/whenigrowup/working-on-the-bucket-list/

Evil Joy Speaks http://www.eviljoyspeaks.wordpress.com

What Regrets?

Someone asked me not that long ago whether or not I would go back and do the whole marriage thing over again (if Evan were completely out of the mix…I’d still have the kiddo but not the divorce).

I thought long and hard about that. The whole key to a life well-lived is that on our deathbed we don’t look back with regrets, right? That’s what they say anyway, isn’t it? That when you reach that point where life meets death, you shouldn’t have to think about all the things that you could have done but didn’t and all the things you did do that were a bit on the fucked up side. So, I had to ask myself is that really how I see life? A life well-lived is one without regret? Do I have regrets?

They seem like such simple questions, but in reality, they’re anything but…

Looking back over my life, there are certainly some questionable choices. If I hadn’t, for example, let that kid in my house when I was 13, I never would have been raped. If I hadn’t moved back in with my dad, I never would have been alone in the first place. If I had chosen to go to Georgia State University when I was accepted at 17, I would have gotten out of Small Town, U.S.A. If I had chosen that path, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up getting my heart broken at 21. If I hadn’t had my heart broken, I wouldn’t have taken my first pharmacy job. I wouldn’t have met my ex-husband. I wouldn’t be sitting right where I am right now typing these words.

So, that begs the question…

Do I regret where I am right now, who I am?

I’m supposed to say “no” here right?

      HA. The answer truly is a no, but it’s more complicated than some heart-felt, meme-worthy inspirational

jumble of Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra quotes about living in the present and embracing the now and all that cosmic universal bullshit that makes me roll my eyes so hard I swear they’re going to fall right out of my skull and continue rolling across the ground until they come to firm stop at my cat’s feet.

Truthfully, the whole thing of it is, we are, in part, a collection of our past experiences. When it comes to coping with a fucked up past, people like to tell you that you, as a person, aren’t the sum of your past. You aren’t what happened to you. You’re more than where you’ve been. And, in a way, I suppose, that’s true. The entirety of your being isn’t based on your personal history. But, I can tell you from quite a lot of personal experience in my arguably short 33 (in September) years , that the events of the past, all those questionable decisions and even the parts of my life that I had no deciding power over (like the parents I was born to, the area I was born in) have all shaped the me that I am right now sitting here pondering the concept of regret. As much horror as was involved in some of the darkest memories of my childhood, in that memory of being tackled on dirty brown carpet and pleading “no,” as much pain and sorrow as has pervaded my life at times, I can’t say I regret the way things have gone. I don’t even know that I would go back and change anything if I could.

I suppose from the outside looking in that might seem a bit on the insane side, but each of those events made me stronger, made me a fighter, gave me a voice and a passion to make change and work for social justice. I look back and sometimes I’m amazed at myself. So, I think, perhaps, a life well-lived is one full of lessons that could, from some angles resemble regret if you’re in a pissy mood. And, when you’re on your deathbed, I assume you look back at that life and all the things you learned about yourself along the way and you think maybe it wasn’t perfect but damn was it one hell of a run.

Would I go back and do the whole marriage thing over again knowing the way it ended and the way I lost myself in those years? You bet your fucking ass I would. I learned a lot about myself after it was all said and done—about how strong I really was to make it as a single mom on my own. I learned more about who I want to be, what I want from life, from a partner. It may not have been a fairytale romance, but it certainly gave me a new respect for myself that I wouldn’t trade for anything honestly.

When the time come, I’m pretty sure the last thoughts in my head are going to be full of love…for everything that was.

This has been another edition of Sunday Confessions. As you may have guessed, the prompt was "regret." I hope you'll check out More Than Cheese and Beer for the rest of the link ups and her Facebook page for anonymous confessions. 

A Captive of My Own Memories

Fatty.

Fatass.

Lardass.

Crisco.

Fatty, fatty two by four can’t get through the bathroom door…

Don’t you think you need to go on a diet?

You need to eat some more. Have some more dumplings.

Fat, stupid

Fat, lazy

Fatfatfatfat

It all seemed to run together eventually—the hateful, hurtful comments about my younger body. I was maybe 8 years old when they started. I was a normal-sized child going through hormonal changes that made my belly rounder just like any other girl my age. A girl who needed love and affirmation just like any other as well but who didn’t get it. Instead, the name-calling, the commentary, the diet comments, the hurt were an everyday occurrence that caused self-doubt and self-hatred so strong I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror for any length of time.

That became my identity—a lazy, stupid fatass—even though it was quite far from the truth now that I know better. At the time, it couldn’t be helped. At the time, I only knew how other people saw me and the people around me who were supposed to care about me most, who were supposed to love me unconditionally thought that I was a lazy stupid fatass. So that’s who I was.

In many ways, that’s who I still am.

That self-image kept me captive throughout my teens and early adulthood and still comes back to haunt me on bad days, in weak moments, when I feel especially vulnerable. No matter how hard I work on self-love, I will always be that little girl with tears spilling down her cheeks over the word-daggers thrown her way time and time again, bound to those early experiences, a prisoner of that pain no matter how hard I push forward. I’ve worked hard to develop an identity that is the sum of who I am and not based on those hurtful names. I have a healthy (healthier) self-image these days and have worked on accepting myself as I am and understanding that I don’t have to fit in a size 2 jeans to be “normal.”

but still

When I look in the mirror, it happens like a movie montage of the past circulating hurtful comments around my brain pushing a flood of auditory memories into my train of thought toppling over everything rational and positive in the way, and I turn away. When I get a compliment, I doubt its sincerity. I hide. I withdraw. I stay home. I look down and avoid eye contact. I put on my best resting bitch face and rejoice in never having to talk to people.

And I regret.

I’m tired of regretting, of being captive to the memories of people whose opinions stopped mattering to me years ago. I promise myself over and over again that it’s going to end, and I’ll see myself clearly instead of through this painful, carnival-mirror lens. But the promises are always broken.

One day. Maybe one day I’ll be completely free.

Check out the rest of the confessions today over at More than Cheese and Beer. This has been part of the host prompt she does every Sunday inviting other bloggers to join up based on that day's topic. Check out her Facebook page every Wednesday for the prompts and link up with us (via her page) on Sundays. 

And as always...thanks for reading my deepest thoughts without judgment.