Okay. Can I whisper this to you, dear Hoping? No one is listening but you, me, and the ducks. The real-deal truth is, I’m not so sure I was really ready for a boyfriend. I wanted things out of life. Things that were about me first. It’s just that I had absorbed so many messages about what I was “supposed” to want versus what I actually wanted, that I didn’t quite trust myself on this score. While my friends talked about getting boys’ attention, going on dates, love, and sex, I nodded along while thinking, “Yeahhh, I want it, but that sounds like … a lot of work?” My secret fear was that a boyfriend would require a lot of care and feeding when I was already trying to learn how to take care of myself. I wanted out of my small, dead-end-feeling town. I wanted to have grand adventures, see far-off places, meet new people. I had one foot out the door. I didn’t know this on a conscious level. It was something that lurked in the deep of me, like an electric eel, slithering about in the dark unconscious where such things swim. I wanted more. Maybe you do, too.
Also, for what it’s worth? Being nineteen is damn hard. At nineteen, you’re crossing over into real adulthood—a whole new decade—and it’s fraught with saying goodbye to adolescence while still having no idea what to expect next. It’s like you’re the protagonist in a vaguely dystopian, somewhat comic novel in which you also pay rent. Honestly, it gets better. I promise. Nineteen is just … Oh, man. Here, have some more popcorn. Have some M&Ms, too.
Now. Dear Hoping, let’s talk about what it is to go through this world feeling as if there is something about you that keeps you alone. You say, “I have a disease that I feel has really hindered my chances of finding any type of romantic love.” That was the line in your letter that pierced me to the heart. Again, I make no presumptions about the particulars of your struggle, but I do know this awful feeling, this fear, all too well, my sweet. I often wondered if the reason I didn’t date like all of my friends was because I had a messed-up face with a wonky eye that didn’t move. I spent years feeling ugly and weird and different. Not “normal.” Whatever the hell that means. And I assumed I would never find love because of it. My secret refrain was, “What’s wrong with me?” I wish I could spare you the unnecessary pain of this feeling, which is such a lie. If I could have a wish for you, my sweet Hoping for a Chance, it’s that instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” you might instead think about all that is right with you and nurture it.
You deserve more. Trust me on this.
I was twenty-one when I had my first true love. We dated for a year, and then that summer, we were separated. He went home to Arizona to work with his father, and I went home to have a big surgery, one of the many I endured after my accident. This one was a bone graft in which they removed a rib plus cartilage from my ears in order to make me a new eye socket, cheekbone, and nose. What nobody told me beforehand was that this surgery isn’t exact. Bone shrinks over time, so they kind of have to guess and overshoot to start, which meant that my face was swollen and asymmetrical for nearly a year afterward. Some of the bone was uneven (it still is), and my fake eye looked stranger than usual. I was horribly self-conscious and worried: What if, when I saw my boyfriend at the end of the summer, he didn’t like the way I looked? What if he thought I was ugly?
Dear Hoping, the day I went to pick him up at the airport, carrying flowers in my arms, a scarf artfully wrapped around my head to hide the lateral scar and missing strip of hair across the top of my skull, I was so nervous. And then the worst happened. He was distant. Odd. Unromantic. A week later, he broke up with me. He wanted to date other girls, he said. The pain from the breakup was searing. It felt as if I were carrying around a raw burn where my heart should be. Worst of all, I was convinced it was due to my “differentness.” I was convinced that I was not enough to keep him. Not smart enough, clever enough, sexy enough, pretty enough, “normal” enough. I was ugly. Not just ugly—freaky ugly. I built a prison for myself in which every possible door out led to this brick wall of an answer.
With many years of hindsight, I can see that we were simply very young and not well suited to be love partners. We would have made—and did make for many years—better friends. It’s a syllogism I think about sometimes: If love conquers all, and all is timing, then why doesn’t love conquer timing? But it doesn’t always.
Now, if I were a less honest person, I would tell you that having a chronic illness/only one eye/being disfigured doesn’t matter. I would spout that Hallmark-card bullshit about how “True beauty comes from within.” But I suspect that you know this is not true, just as I discovered it is not true. The somewhat painful reality is that it does matter—to some people. Those particular people will not be able to see past our physicality in order to open up the awesome Cracker Jack prize inside. They will judge us on what makes us a little different and translate different as “less than.” You know what? Fuck ’em. Okay. That’s not very nice of me. What I meant to say was—no, seriously, fuck ’em. That is exactly what I meant to say. Move on. Just as you were smart enough to recognize the toxic nature of that girl who kept ditching you for other people, recognize that these people are not worth your time, energy, and your big, beautiful heart, dear Hoping. Theirs is a pretty limited view, and it’s not your job or my job to try to make them feel comfortable about being so superficial. We are on the bus to better days, and that bus is painted in bright, rainbow colors and spattered with joy-glitter.
But there’s something else at play here, too, dear Hoping. Something insidious that should be mentioned: As women, we are not taught to feel okay about ourselves just being ourselves. Ever gone to a drugstore and compared the women’s products to the men’s? Even the language is coded to make us feel bad. They use words like correcting and defying and repairing. As if who we are has to be fixed constantly. We receive these messages Every. Single. Day. Over a lifetime, it’s corrosive. It eats away at us in ways we don’t always register. Learning to dismantle this self-doubt apparatus and replace it with some self-kindness and self-love has been a lifelong journey.
Women are constantly fed the idea that we are not okay uncoupled. That we only exist or are defined by our relationships to other people, especially in regard to romance with men. I am definitely not trying to say that your desire for love and romance isn’t important. It’s wonderful that you want that and I want you to have that. I’m just saying that these messages exist and we do battle with them. You know what isn’t talked about enough? The joys of male-female friendships. Which is why I’m thrilled to hear that you have this loving, close relationship with your best guy friend. Some of my most formative friendships were with awesome guys. Friendships that have endured to this day. Friendships that gave me perspective on an experience that I didn’t have and that showed me what I ultimately wanted someday in a romantic relationship: love, mutual respect, laughs, honesty, openness. Somebody who would play light-saber wars in Spencer’s Gifts. Somebody who would say, “You’ve got this. I believe in you.”
As for your parents’ love story, I can understand the heavy expectations that raises for you. Hey, it’s wonderful that they met so young and have enjoyed so many years together. But that is just one love story out of eleventy-two billion love stories out there. (Those numbers are approximate, dear Hoping. I don’t do math.) Some of my friends who married young are on their third marriages. They are different people now and make different choices. It’s hard to fathom at nineteen how much change happens over the years, my sweet, but it does. One of my friends married the first boy who proposed to her because she thought she was supposed to say yes. That marriage made it a year. Another friend got married and we took bets on how many months their marriage would last. They just celebrated thirty years together. One of my best friends, she who was the most beautiful and sought-after of us all, the one who seemed like she would breeze through that whole love/dating/marriage thing, somehow managed to date every boy who stomped on her heart. She didn’t get married until she was well into her thirties, when she found her true love at last, a
man who was every bit as soulful and XL weird as she is. She is very happy.
Me? I got married at twenty-nine, long after many of my friends were coupled. I pursued my husband, not the other way around. I realized that if I wanted him to know that I liked him, maybe I should just cut out the sighing-by-the-telephone routine and call and ask him to a movie. So I did. He said no. HE. SAID. NO. Say what? (We finally ended up going on a date. I’m just saying, our love story doesn’t start with hearts and roses but with comic gold.) He had no idea I liked him. None. Because he’s an idiot. But this goes to show, dear Hoping, that there are worlds going on inside other people’s brains, too, and sometimes, many times, actually, it has nothing to do with us, per se.
Often, those people are fighting their own internal battles. They, too, fear rejection. Or they’re trying to live up to unrealistic standards of perfection. They want to impress a certain crowd and adopt everything about that crowd in order to fit in. They want to belong, too, and don’t know how and they stare up at the moon alone in their rooms at night and wonder if they will ever find love. Humaning is hard. I’ve found over the years that my mind can rush to fill a vacuum. I can assume the worst. I’ll worry that I’ve been too open, too honest, too messy, too much. They all hate you, my brain tells me at these moments. They hate you because there’s something seriously wrong with you. They are having a party RIGHT NOW and you are not invited. Because you suck. (Sometimes, my brain is the WORST. FRIEND. EVER.) Usually, the truth is that the people I’m imagining hating me are thinking about themselves. They’ve got a deadline at work or they’re worried about money or their skin broke out in a rash and they’ve been hiding away in a basement with some ointment. It’s not about me at all. Learning to separate our shit from other people’s shit is a skill that we develop over time as we become more conscious. Which is why I’m going to tell you one of the things that helped me the most was finding a really good therapist. In therapy, I learned the tools for figuring out what was my own stuff and what was somebody else’s. I was better able to understand myself and to know what made me happy. I only know that the more I began to live my life for me, strangely, the more I began to find the sort of companionship I wanted.
This popcorn is really good. I’m glad we decided on butter.
Finally, my dear Hoping, you ask: “Is it okay to wear your heart on your sleeve all the time or should you close yourself off? How much of yourself should you let show when meeting someone you might like the first time?”
Oh, my sweet, this is a question that also speaks straight to my soul. I am far from nineteen, with many years behind me, but I still struggle with this question from time to time. I can only say that it is a constant negotiation. I think we get smarter about figuring out who we can be our true selves with, warts and all, and who we can’t. We find our people eventually.
I’m still on the side of taking risks. If we closed ourselves off all the time, we’d miss out on so much of life’s accidental wonder. Life would be painted in gray and beige. It would be like living inside an IKEA catalog. (No offense to IKEA, but, dude, it’s … pretty boring. Now I’ve done it. I will be pelted with lingonberries at every event.) You want what we all want: You want to know you’re on the right path because you believe that if you’re on the right path, everything will work out and you will not get hurt. The money-back guarantee. There is no such thing, my sweet. Pain, mistakes, failure, heart-stompingness, embarrassment, rejection, frustration, anger, loneliness, and occasionally feeling alienated are all part of the ride and are every bit as important as love, laughter, joy, excitement, success, romance, hope, accomplishment, and trust.
Often, things are much more malleable than they seem. Problems can be worked through. Hurt feelings can be discussed. Painful feelings are ephemeral and we have to hold fast to a piece of furniture and wait for them to pass through us like a violent storm. What we make peace with, my dear Hoping, is acceptance. Acceptance of our flaws. Acceptance of other people’s flaws. The truth is, we are never really finished. We never really “arrive” at ourselves. We keep changing and growing. We dust ourselves off when something doesn’t work. We learn to love ourselves when it feels as if no one else does (which is usually not true and is just us projecting our own feelings of loneliness onto the world at large.)
The bottom line, sugar, is that we have to be who we are. Who else can we possibly be? There is no one-size-fits-all and no amount of trying to shove ourselves into a premade Person Box is going to work out. You will burst through as yourself eventually, so it’s easier and less painful to just be yourself. (Yourself sounds kind of awesome, frankly.) If you are an open-hearted person, how wonderful! Be that. But also, you will perhaps need to be selective about the people to whom you choose to give your great big, open, loving, free heart. I have learned from hard experience that if being around a person or persons makes me feel bad about myself, my gut is initiating its early-warning system. It is sounding the alarm that maybe that’s somebody I need to keep at a polite arm’s distance.
It’s hard to expose our tiny, green inside selves to the outside world for fear that a giant’s foot will come down and trample our fragile leaves reaching toward the light. We do not want to be broken. But sometimes, we will be broken. I think about unconditional love a lot. Sometimes I wonder if there is any such thing because we humans get all human-y with our resentments and pettiness. I believe there is workable love. I believe we can continue to grow larger on the inside, like the Tardis. I believe that life can surprise us with the sheer force of its gobstopping beauty and the tenderness of two people deciding to connect. And I believe in you, dear Hoping for a Chance.
I’m sure that if you wanted a boyfriend, any old boyfriend, you could have one tomorrow. But it sounds like you have specific wants for a boyfriend, as you should. Maybe that boy will show up tomorrow. Maybe he will show up five years from now. Maybe he won’t be anything at all like what you imagined. I can’t see into the Magic 8 Ball of the future and neither can you. All you can do is take a deep breath, commit to being yourself, and step into the world with that gorgeous open heart of yours.
What I’m mostly hoping, dear Hoping, is that you will give yourself a chance to love yourself first. And everybody else can get in line.
Thanks for the popcorn. And for trusting me with your question. I am so rooting for you.
xo,
P.S. Seriously, though—stay away from the ducks. Those fuckers are mean.
I was drawn to him, like a moth to a flame—only in it for the burn.
—Blood and Salt, Kim Liggett
Dear Heartbreak,
I was sixteen. I thought I was in love. I had this boyfriend who treated me so well and was so nice to me. I felt really lucky that someone that nice could like me. After about six months of being his girlfriend, things started going downhill. It was like once he got comfortable with me, he started to show who he really was. He would tell me who I could hang out with and tell me what I was allowed to do. He would make a mistake and make me believe that I was the one to blame. He would look at me and you could just tell that he was judging everything about me. He made me feel so bad about myself. I’m still not sure why I didn’t leave him then.
After about fourteen months of being together, he started demanding sex from me. I told him firmly that I didn’t want to. He didn’t care. He would bug me about it every day. He always had new arguments that he would use to try to persuade me. I wanted to leave him, but I was scared. He said such awful things to me that I was scared to leave him. This bugging went on for about six months until he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere with me. So instead he took me out to dinner and sexually assaulted me in his truck. He called me the next day and acted like I had consented. He didn’t even think what he did was wrong.
I can’t even begin to describe to you what it is like to be violated like that. I trusted him with everything I had, and all I got in return was betrayal. I tried to convince myself that I was fine and noth
ing was wrong. I was afraid to talk to my parents or the police. I kept everything inside. One day I told a close friend of mine what had happened. He laughed and said it was my fault. He asked what I was wearing and if I acted like I wanted it. I knew things about him that no one else knew, but still he sided with my boyfriend. A month later I finally had the courage to leave my boyfriend. He wasn’t okay with me leaving him. He even tried to convince me he had cancer to get me to stay. He called me over and over until finally I had to block him. That same friend from before told my ex that I had cheated on him. My ex became angry. He would contact me on every social media known to man. I had to block him on everything just to get away. He would create fake accounts just to see what I was up to. I had to delete my accounts. He called me from other people’s phones and I became afraid to answer an unknown call, just in case it was him.
After he realized that didn’t work, he started going through my friends to get to me. He threatened to go after my friends and even threatened to kill them because of me. Soon after he started doing that, my friends stopped talking to me. Eventually I lost them all. Before the start of my senior year I finally broke down and told my parents what had happened. My parents were extremely upset and my dad (of course) wanted to kill him (he didn’t). We agreed to send me to counseling. At that point in my life I couldn’t even have another person touch me without getting flashbacks. My one request was that I didn’t want to press charges. I relive the assault every day and I didn’t want to have to do it in front of a jury. My counselor at the time called the police on me. And again I was betrayed by someone I thought I trusted. I had to make a statement and talk to the officer that came to my house. Surprisingly, he told me that it wasn’t my fault and it didn’t matter what I was wearing. He said that I was not responsible for his actions, I was only responsible for my own. He was the first person (besides my parents) who told me those things. Instead of pressing charges, the officer went to my ex’s house and told him to stay away from me. I haven’t heard from the ex again.
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