No, this is my front...

So, I've been gone for a while...

I won't go into reasons for abandoning Scrawlspace. I'm not even sure I know completely why. But here's why I'm back:

I am, for the first time in my adult life, pretty much alone. That's not to say that there is nobody in the world who loves me. My family love me, I have a few select friends who love me. But I have just closed the door on the only meaningful relationship I had here in Bentonville.  So I stand before you a free, if somewhat lonely, woman.

This time, I've promised myself... this time I won't go running out frantically searching for some man to fill that silence. This time, for the first time, I think I need to just be with myself, and listen to what that says to me.

See, I've never really dealt with my divorce. I was telling myself I was over it before it was even finalized. In truth, I was (and am) anything but.  If anyone out there is going through a divorce and thinks you can just fill the hurt with busy-ness or sex or work or booze... you're wrong.  Those demons will come home to roost.

So I've decided to let myself Deal With It. Frankly, I have no idea what that means. What I feel about it now is quite different from what I felt about it then.  And yet, in some ways it's painfully the same. I'm still angry at being told I was unattractive. It still hurts.  It has a nice little extra tang of bitterness now that I've achieved middle age and its famous 20-pound spread.

And yet... and yet... there's a sort of relief in releasing myself from the need to look good in the eyes of men. In just saying "This is what I look like right now. It has no bearing on who I am."

Though I'm not 100% sure that it doesn't.  All I do know for sure is that all my life, whether I weighed 116 pounds (as I did when I was 16) or 160 pounds (as I--horrifically--do now), I have never thought I was thin enough, toned enough, or the right shape.  When I eventually starved myself down to about 112 pounds, I had almost no breasts, and so I thought my body was unattractive. When I gained breasts at around 150 pounds (voila! B-cups!) I can't stop obsessing about the inches gained in my tummy and thighs. What little perspective I've gained tells me I'm always going to conflate what I look like with how valuable I am... and by valuable I mean valuable to men... a certain class of man, meaning those like my ex-husband.

And I apply this dysfunctional thinking to every encounter I have.  I'm in the grocery store: I look at every woman in line and wonder if her physical shape looks better than, worse than, or about the same as mine. I wonder if somebody loves her in spite of her (or because of her) shape.  I wonder if I am more lovable or less lovable than her.

I'm shopping for clothes (a form of psychological masochism I try to avoid these days) and I'm shocked and appalled yet again at the Me I see in the mirror. My body doesn't look like mine. Whose body is that? How should I react to it?  Should I accept it and love myself as I am? Should I despise myself and shroud my body in shapeless, self-abnegating clothing? Or should I reject this softer, rounder self and kick myself into a new fitness and diet regimen to try to she the pounds and regain the body I more readily think of as "mine?" And  in that last case, which body would that be?  115-pound me?  125-pound me? or maybe 136-pound me (my old panic weight)?

I meet a plus-sized, well-dressed, self-assured woman and I am conflicted:   I admire her attractive, pulled-together look, despite her size. Why can't I do that?   If she's happily married, I feel  jealous that she has a loving husband and a secure life:  things I don't have, despite my (relatively) small size. I say to myself:   Someone loves her: what's wrong with you?  I wish I could accept my physical self the way she seems to have acccepted, even embraced, hers.  I hear a (nasty little) voice think "well, it could be worse."

All of that piles up in my head, positive and negative.