Mirrors Reflection.

This is a very lengthy entry. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Music: The album “Voyageur” and the album “Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!” by Enigma.
Mood: Pensive, Honest, Open, loquacious, fond of large words and superfluous writing.

I used to be beautiful.

Or I should say, that I used to think I was beautiful. Now... I’m not so certain.

That’s the thing about us humans, unless we’ve been told we’re ugly day in and day out, and have had it beaten into our psyche, it’s pretty common that most people have a better mental image of ourselves than what we actually look like.

Comparatively, it’s like looking into the mirrors at an amusement park, where the fat man stands in front of the mirror that makes him look taller and thinner, and consequently sees himself that way in everyday life in his mind. This explains the abundance of men and women wearing very unflattering bathing suits at the beach during summertime. It’s those fucking lying concave mirrors at Walmart. (This is true, by the way.)

I despise how I look now, and nothing except my own laziness is stopping me from getting to be close to what I want to look like. Oh, I’ll admit that I’m remarkably lazy. I overindulge, and don’t push myself as hard as I could. I’m weak, in mind and body.

I know that the human body is a remarkable thing, and that it changes and adapts to however it’s treated and trained. I know this. I don’t need people to tell me, or remind me. I go to the gym with my coworker Carlene after work, I enjoy walking, I do yoga and meditation, I take metabolism boosters, I play tennis in the late spring, throughout the summer, and through most of autumn with Crystal. I swim like a fish whenever I get the chance, and dance like an idiot in my living room when no one is home (and occasionally when someone is home, I don’t care). Other than chocolate, coffee and the occasional burger, I eat relatively healthy foods.

I also bury myself in blankets reading books a lot, sleep in until disgustingly late on my days off, and spend hours designing whatever strikes my fancy or whatever I’m commissioned to do, and writing. Occasionally I smoke a joint, and get incredibly introspective, delving into the parts of my brain that I usually don’t pay attention to. Though, tonight isn’t one of those nights.

Tonight, I stumbled across a picture lurking on my hard drive, from someone that was once an online “male admirer” and is now simply a friend named Alex, who I talk to once a week or so. He is a very talented artist, and he had done a drawing of me a few years ago... I suppose it’s partially due to the fact that two dimensional reference pictures are very misleading to people that have never met you in person, but honestly, there’s nothing realistic about the drawing other than my face, and even that has been perfected into something I’ll never be.

But damn, I wish I looked that fine. *sighs*

I sat there, and stared at it, and pictures of myself when I was about 23, when I started dating Erik, and I was the thinnest I’ve ever been. I stared at these pictures for almost an hour. The way I felt when I looked at them was a mixture of wishful thinking, sadness, and disgust over my current appearance.

I looked at it, and told myself, “Self; this bombshell, this goddess of an image, is what you’ll never be. Your skin will never be that perfect, and you’ll always have stretch marks and cellulite...Your muscles will never be that defined, your breasts will never be that large or perfect, and your hair will never look perfectly porn-star tousled. Why even bother? You’ll never be her.”

And I despaired a little, because I really do want to look like her. I’ll admit, I even cried and I haven’t cried over anything personal in a couple of months, because I’ve felt numb. It’s a hard thing when you have to face reality head on, and you’re not in the right frame of mind. It’s kind of like getting whacked in the face with a 2 x 4.

Of course... I haven’t been in the right frame of mind, for quite some time.
I’ve never been fit. I’ve never been slender. Or at least I haven’t been slender since Grade one. That’s almost 20 years ago.

I’m five feet, nine inches tall, and approximately 210 pounds. I honestly don’t know my measurements, and I don’t care to know them. And I hate myself. It takes large amounts of maintenance to look “attractive” in today’s standards, where celebrities and social programming have made anyone over a size 12 “fat”, airbrushing imagery has made skin flawless, and where stores have changed sizes of clothing from Small to XL, to XXXXS - XXXXL. I mean... Who the fuck is actually a size zero?

I spend an hour and a half a week just removing various body hair, including shaving my legs, and plucking my eyebrows. It takes me an hour to do a decent job on my makeup, that I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on for brushes and various types of products. It’s more complicated than some would think, if you know how to do it “right”, and you’re doing a full out job of it.
I dye my hair every month and a half (and even then, to keep regular maintenance, it should be done once every three weeks.).

I spend 45 minutes to an hour, every two weeks to do a pedicure, and I’m self-conscious about my hands and fingers, because I bite my nails, and I’ve scuffed them across sharp objects from years of working in a bakery and now in retail, and it’s “not attractive” for women to have short fingernails and scars on their hands. Often when attending events, I’ll pay money to put on false nails, because it makes me feel “pretty”.

I’ve had men reject me outright because of my physical appearance, and I’ve had men use me for sexual activity and then disregard my feelings/satisfaction or ignore me as soon as they were satisfied, because all they wanted was pussy.

Let me clarify please. I’m not categorizing all men in this area. It just makes me sad, angry and a little hurt. I might have been bitter once, but I don’t think it’s really in me anymore to hold a grudge. I’m just cautious now and very picky as to whom I’ll allow in my bed, and even moreso who I’ll let into my heart. It’s going to have to be someone pretty-fucking-spectacular, to win me over.

Then again, what “pretty-fucking-spectacular” person, would settle for me? I’m the sort of person that as soon as the word “relationship” gets attached to someone with me, I get jealous when I’m threatened. It’s not healthy, and it’s not because I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the people around them. I end up loving them SO much, that I get terrified of losing them, and that’s what makes them leave.

Devin pushed me beyond all emotional capabilities, and I think he ‘broke’ me. Not on his own, mind you, but our relationship crashing and burning somewhere along the way after my trip to Dallas was pretty brutal on me. It was a little girl’s dreams of romance, a “soul mate”, and “true love” that got shattered. I don’t believe in “soul mates” anymore. I don’t believe in a lot of things, anymore.

And love? Yes, I do believe in love. I see it all around me all the time, I see enough people in love. I love enough people still, in the recesses of my heart when I probably shouldn’t anymore, and openly enough to tell it to their faces, to still believe in it.

So, that’s life, and I accept it. I’m picking up those shattered pieces, putting them back together, and tossing out the bits that weren’t benefitting me as a person, and damaging relationships I have had. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, but it still stung like fury.
I was talking with my newest room-mate, a friend and coworker, Scott, on a walk back from his girlfriend’s house at around midnight last night. I talked to him about my mindset at the moment and he told me that I’m a fantastic person.

He told me that I’m generous, caring, well humoured and intelligent, and in the five months he’s been working with me, he’s developed a friendship with me that eventually led to me arranging and inviting him into my house when he was on the down and outs in his life, without expecting anything of him, and only to help him find a solution to his problems.

He told me that I needed to “stop looking” for that other half of my soul; to stop searching the reflection. He said I’ll find them someday, The yin to my yang, the person I was meant to be with, because I deserved it. That I’d find someone that appreciated me for who I am, and what I looked like, and I’d know it when it happened, but not until it happened. And then he smiled his cats smile at me and gave me a big hug in the middle of Surrey at midnight. I’m sure someone, somewhere, watching, thought I was a hooker.

Of course, he’s newly in love with his girlfriend, and it always looks sunshine and roses for those people, doesn’t it? All right. Maybe I am a little bitter. But only a little.

Some people jump into the pond with both feet, not knowing how deep it is or what lurks inside5 because they can’t see beyond the reflection on the surface. I’m skirting the edges and gingerly dipping my toes in, because I’ve dived in too many times, and there might be piranhas in the water again, waiting to rip apart and devour the bits that I just glued back together. Yeah. I’m terrified, and I’m more than willing to hold back and wait. I’m only twenty-six this May, and I don’t have to rush anything. Though I miss the touch of another person more often than I care to admit.

What people don’t understand, is that I’m not looking. I’m avoiding anything like that, because I’m not myself. I don’t even know who “myself” is, anymore. I’m still sorting through that jumbled rubbish that used to be me. I’m still picking up the bits that are valuable and intact, and finding new spots in the frame where they will fit. It’s not just failed relationships that crushed some of those bits of silvered glass to powder.

I also feel like I made the worst mistake of my life going to school. Which people have repeatedly told me is nonsense, because I gained skills I didn’t have before. To an extent, I agree with them. Somewhat. I could have learned this all on my own, but it would have taken longer.

But in the long run, I failed, didn’t I? Yeah. I know I did. I remind myself one way or another that I have all the time. I can acknowledge it. It was my fuck up. So why the hell do other people deny it when I mention it? At least my parents are honest enough to tell me that I’ve made a mistake, and still forgive me for it regardless of what route it’s taken me along.
I sabotaged myself somehow and somewhere along the way. If I’d never gone to school, I certainly wouldn’t be up to my eyeballs in debt, from so many different sources it makes it nearly impossible to sleep some nights.

It’s all about the choices I made, and the ones I’ve still to make. And there’s so many more to make.

Do I worry as much as I used to? No... Not really. It’s almost remarkable that I don’t, considering the amount of stuff on my plate. I mean, I still worry about the day to day stuff, but the big things, the ones that used to overwhelm me to the point of no return... I guess I finally learned to take it one day at a time, and it took the life that I was accustomed to heaped in shards around me to figure it out. That’s a hard way to learn, and I don’t really recommend it to anyone. I’m trying to stick to my New Years Resolution, to “relax”. That’s when meditation and Yoga came into play in my life, and it’s helped me.

Or maybe it’s the fact that somewhere in my brain, something clicked, and I really don’t care to worry as much anymore. It wasn’t doing me any good, and I can’t be bothered when I’ve got so much stuff cluttering up my head already. I’m too busy reinventing myself. I’m too busy finding the peace inside me.

There’s people that balance me in my life. Some I’ve met, and some I haven’t. Some are just words on the screen, with people far away writing them, Some are letters I get in the mail from friends that have moved away, or friends that I chat with online... And some are just memories of people I loved, or people that made some sort of impact on me in life... Though I try to not linger too often in the past, it doesn’t do me much good in the present to miss the individuals I haven’t had success in finding again thus far. There are people that support me endlessly, and in this state of my life, if I didn’t have them, I’d probably be lying, bleeding across that heap of shards.

Some of the things that keep me going are characters in books that I’ve read, oddly enough. There are stories that replay in my mind, over and over again, from books that I’ve read dozens of times over.

I haven’t been “myself” since over six months ago, and I wonder where I went. Sean called it my “angsty phase”. Fuck. I thought I got over that when I turned 19.

Christmas was the pinnacle of absurdity, where I made a colossal ass out of myself in front of my family, and spent most of the day crying... About what, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was the fact that everyone was asking me about school. Maybe it was the fact that I was mostly forgotten by family members. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t around anonymous customers, and around the people that know me, that know what I’ve done, (or heard it through the grapevine), or ones that have known me since I was born. It was thoroughly unpleasant. The only reason why I stayed, was because my mom and dad asked me to. I’d do just about anything for my parents.

My writing has suffered, and I’ve resorted to filling my blog with crap Meme’s, because I don’t have things to write about. It gets boring whining about how shitty I’m feeling and random garbage happening at work. There are enough Emo wannabe’s in the world, without my addition to that particular aspect of society, so I either refrain from doing entries, or fill it with fluff, which isn’t really fair to myself or the people that read my blog. My creativity feels stifled, and I have very little passion regarding things, unless they really strike my interest. My emotions are jumping all over the place, ranging from numb to ecstatic, to despairing. It’s so confusing. It’s so complicated.

But when I stare at the reflection of myself in my mirror, after I’ve spent my time plucking my eyebrows, or putting on makeup, or styling my hair that needs a dye job... And I still don’t know who’s staring back at me... Only that it’s supposed to be me.