This is how you should kiss him

So, that shit that they teach you about waiting for him to make the first move? Fuck that. Turn around on the dance floor and catch both sides of his face in your palms. Accept your too expensive drink order from him and lean over the counter like you’re exchanging secrets. Walk towards the door like you aren’t coming back then turn around and catch him.

Press him to the wall, bite his lip, control his mouth with yours.

Kiss him after you’ve finished your second cup of coffee and your hair is is still a mess from last night and the bitter aftertaste of coffee still stings your lips. Kiss him before your third glass of wine. Kiss him after you’ve finished preparing for that meeting you have in the morning. Shut your laptop, turn off your phone, look up and see him engrossed in a book, completely lost to the world that surrounds him. Kiss him before he finishes the chapter. Kiss him when he finishes the book and searches for the next one. Kiss him as you lay in bed together in the early hours of the morning, tangled in the sheets and each other as the sunlight slowly begins to lighten your bedroom. Kiss him when you're still wet from a shower, nothing but his arms and a towel wrapped around you.

Dot his collar bone with lip imprints, like when you were young and you would sneak into your mother’s bathroom to play with her makeup bag. You would put on the reddest of the lipstick and you would take a sheet of paper to showcase your latest beauty statement. Like this, but gentle. Invisible. For him only. Kiss everything but his lips. Touch his eyelashes, his earlobes, his right shoulder, his freckles, the scar he sometimes tries to hide. Brush his cheek with your lips when you're both focused on the game that plays before you as you sit in an arena watching hockey.

Don’t kiss him after the movies, when you’re standing in a parking lot on a Tuesday night where there is not enough light to see his face. Don’t kiss him in the rain. Don't kiss him because it’s the end of the night and he drove you home so it’s the least you could do. Don’t kiss him because he’s expecting it. Don’t kiss him because he pulled you away from the party and tells you that you look beautiful. Don’t kiss him when he calls you at 12:18 am and asks you to come over, only to push you out of the bed at 8 am the next morning.

Throw out your kisses to multiples or keep them in a box tucked on a high shelf in your childhood room. Kiss because you’re young, because you want to, because you can, because you love him, because you don’t.

What happens when you fall but they don't?

The problem with growing up in a conservative society is that it’s kind of a given that you’re going to confuse lust with love at some point. That you’ll tell yourself it’s love, because love is what you’re supposed to want. That lust isn’t something you should settle for. That love should be your only motivation.

When they kiss you, you think about the first kiss at the end of a rom-com. You think of the final scene to show the viewers that this is the start of your happy ending.

When you take your shirt off in front of them, the walls you have built up around yourself start to crumble, little by little. You think that you could love them. They could love you.

When their hands run across your body, you think about how much they care. You think about how they will be there for you. Forever, you think. Forever, you hope.

You stare into their eyes, you see desire. You see them wanting you. You fall in love.

And you fall in love every night. You fall further and further in love. Until one day, they stop.

They stop calling. They never respond to texts. You never bump into them in common places anymore. For whatever reason, they stop. They have no problem stopping while you’re left wondering what happened to your forever. And you realize, maybe this wasn’t love.

It happens, you know. It’s easy to conflate the two. After all, we live in a society that values one over the other. But really, each have their place. Each are crucial for us to survive. Ideally, you’ll just have a little bit of both. It’s about finding that balance.

So when you’re broken-hearted in your room crying, you don’t have pictures of café dates to delete from Facebook, you have photos of them sleepy-eyed on your bed to delete from your phone. You don’t have tales of romantic Valentine’s Day dinners to share, you have the memory of their body against yours to forget. You don’t have an ex to cry over, you learnt a lesson that everyone else learnt years before you did; that sex and love are not, in any way, synonymous.

Sometimes we fall in love

Sometimes we get lost.

Sometimes we put all our hopes and dreams into one person before we learn you should really keep some parts of your heart and soul for yourself. We all struggle with indecision, with insecurity. We’re all fighting the good fight, looking for that spark or connection in a world generally filled with indifference and negativity. Often, we don’t know what we’re looking for, or how to find it. It’s hard to understand romantic love, if you’ve never truly felt it. It’s often hard to understand the difference between apathy and emotional investment. Separating lust and a true spiritual connection can be equally difficult and time consuming when we’re still trying to sort ourselves out.

Sometimes we fall in love and we get it wrong.

We fall in love with the idea of a person, of all the things we glimpse in small, rapid moments, and cling to those flashes with a desperation that can carry us on for years. Believing in and holding onto something that was never really there at all. We’re told love is hard, but the lines of ‘how hard should it be?’ are blurred and often undefined. Are they just shy? Are they merely struggling to find themselves? How long should I wait? Should I just let go? There isn’t one, decisive answer to any of these questions. No love is the same and no heartache can be matched. We all experience love in our own, often painful way.

Sometimes we don’t know when to let love go.

We stay because we’re driven by an emotion than can often prove stronger than fear or uncertainty - hope. Because maybe we have built up this idea of what we think love should be and we attach it to someone who seems to fit the ‘rules.’ We throw caution to the wind because that’s what you do, you put all the battered bits of your soul out there for another, often unsuspecting, person to review and judge. We forget that sometimes the things we want from people are not the same as the things we need. We might want praise and adulation, but we often need criticism and brutal reality.

Sometimes we are forced to realize that love can’t be enough.

Maybe the timing is wrong, maybe we’re not ready or open enough, maybe the world itself seems to be between us. Those are the ones that hurt the most. The ones that linger decades later, to be reviewed over a sunset with a steaming mug in hand and a quiet house we’ve built with someone else nestled comfortably behind us. They remain unanswered questions bitterly thrown out into the emptiness of the universe, never to be understood, never to find fruition. We just carry them with us, another piece of our hearts we no longer own.

Sometimes we learn.

We build ourselves through love. Through the euphoria, the quiet comfort, the arguments, the laugher and the pain.  We slowly come to terms with who we are and what we need as we grow from, and sometimes through, other people.

Sometimes we get it right.

Occasionally this can happen immediately, but only if we're lucky. For many, it takes years of trial and error, of loneliness and perseverance. But eventually most of us find the perfect balance in ourselves. We find the ever-elusive understanding that love is not a red, heart shaped card once a year, or a grand, lavish ceremony; love is in the small moments. It is in the silence between two people, face-to-face, souls bared and vulnerable, where we find it. The meaning to ourselves, the reflection of all those things we were looking for that we never quite understood until that moment, when our breaths synch and our hearts tremble.

Love is every day. Love is a battle, a quest, a lifetime endeavor. Love is finding ourselves and then, miraculously, finding someone else there waiting.

Sometimes I want to remember all the times I got it wrong.

Reminisce about the good times, and recall the bad. I want to appreciate the lessons learned, the truths discovered and the bridges built and burned.

Sometimes I want to remember all the times I got it wrong so I can understand why I finally got it right

Dallas Comic Con 2014

This weekend, I went to my first ever Comic Con with a good friend of mine. It was an absolutely amazing experience and I met some amazing people. Neither Matt nor I had ever been, so we weren't exactly sure what to expect. I think this will definitely be something that we return to in the future. Instead of boring you all with details, I'll just let the pictures speak for the weekend. 

When do you really recover?

I know recovery isn't an end place, it is a destination. I just wish I wouldn't have days where I felt like I have fallen so far back into that same place. I hate that these "bad days" are really more like "bad weeks" that I have to struggle through. I hate that I can love my body and love the progress I've made to have it all completely shattered.

I hate that this feeling doesn't just last the day. I hate that I feel like a failure. I hate that I don't even want to look at myself when I feel like this. I can't bring myself to eat anything more than I absolutely have to because I just can't bear the thought of getting fatter than I already feel like I am.

I hate that every time I’m on the treadmill my thoughts are flooded with “5 more minutes and you’ll be skinny; 5 more minutes and maybe boys will look at you at the bar.” I should be running for me. Every time my foot pounds on the seemingly never-ending platform I view it as one step closer for me to achieve beauty. Instead of a step towards health I am working to achieve acceptance.

I hate that I don't enjoy something I love. Walking into my dance studio causes me more stress and anxiety because I know everyone else sees how fat I am in my leotard and tights. I want to feel light and pretty and graceful as I pirouette across the floor but I feel like an elephant in a tutu pretending to dance. I shouldn't leave class at night and want to cry because I was too worried about what other people were thinking about me instead of dancing.

I hate that I’m supposed to be an advocate for positive body image and I can’t look at my naked body in the mirror. I talk up everyone around me: “eat that cupcake, you don’t need outside approval, who you are as a person is important,” yet every time I look down I grab my stomach rolls in disgust. I hate that I'm supposed to be recovered and be able to talk to other people about recovery when I can't look at myself with nothing but disgust.

I hate that I don’t understand how to love myself. I don’t know how to be happy about who I am. I want to look at myself beyond my not-so-flat stomach and thighs that seem closer than I am with my family. Why do I seek so much outside approval?

My body isn’t everything – in fact it isn’t anything. It is a vessel I use to achieve my goals. My love handles do not define me. And as acutely aware as I am of this fact I cannot help but cry when I look down from that hideous angle in the shower. The frustration I feel when getting ready to go out never fails to dampen my mood.

Knowing and feeling are completely unrelated emotions. I know I am more than my body and yet I feel as if a perfecting it is the answer to all of my problems. Rational thought, as prevalent as it may be in my head, cannot hold a candle to the prison of my self-hatred. It does not do much to my self-esteem when I am at a bar surrounded by men who do not give me a second look. It doesn’t do much to see “real” models in a magazine when I can barely button my jeans.

But I will slap on a smile, feed the words I myself cannot absorb to my fragile friends, and continue on in my path to bring light to the darkness of others. I have to smile and pretend like nothing is wrong. Because I'm recovered, I shouldn't have weeks where I am in the same place I claim to be getting away from.

I can only hope that maybe a time will come where I don't have these weeks any more. Maybe one day I will learn to accept myself.