Any minute now... You'll be you.

You function “like a normal person.” You take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and make it out the door in less than an hour. It used to take you the whole morning. And two to three cups of coffee. And a handful of songs that glistened on your ears. (If you made it out at all.) You used to lose time looking out the window because everything was beautiful, and everything in every season had a hazy glow attached to it. In the summer you’d go out to see what the plants looked like after the heavy sky left drops of rain on the leaves. In the winter the fresh snow would cover everything and fill your mind with soft corners.

But now, none of that. There are only dirty sidewalks and messy gardens and more fucking sun and more fucking humidity. The world is a place you are forced walk across to get to work or school or home. At work you answer emails and make phone calls and tie up loose ends and find solutions to problems. Under fluorescent lights you go to meetings and cross things off your to-do list. Your hair is combed, your tights don’t have runs in them, and your boss praises you. You smile because you have forgotten that this is not You.

No, the You you’ve known all your life would not feel good about completing a purchase order or remembering which folder a document is in. The You before the medication had dreams about doing more than this. It was always Which city am I going to next? And now it’s When is the microwave in the breakroom free? The You before medication was always What can I create tonight? Now You are more What if I spill paint on the carpet? That won't come out and I'll lose my deposit. During the day this doesn’t seem like a big deal because you are focused and productive. You see clear goals and paths carved out to get you there. You are medicated, and everything is linear.

But when have you ever been a fan of straight lines? At night you remember how you used to love the twisted ones best. How much time did you spend just wandering, even if it meant not getting where you were supposed to go? You would always find something better, or at the very least you’d see/touch/taste/feel something amazing on the way there. The world was not something you were forced to be in; you wanted to be in it, badly, and wanted it in you. You wanted to put your hands on it and breathe it in. What was that like, again?

It’s too hard to remember because every morning you wake up and swallow a blue capsule that pushes all that out of sight. It gives you tunnel vision, and during the half hour it takes to kick in you can feel the narrowing like waves crashing over you. Soon this part will be over, though. Soon you won’t be reaching out to grab the hand of the person you used to be while the tide pulls her under. You’ll forget her and you’ll forget the way the sun hit the streets just right this morning and how the breeze brushed past you whispering “Follow” as it disappeared around the corner. You’ll be fine, and you won’t dream.

It’s ok because this is what the doctor says is “fine.” This is what your parents and teachers and bosses say is “fine.” But you know this is not fine because fine is having space for your thoughts to breathe. It is thanking the stars or the lord or the Smiths that you are not like the others. It is what you were before you were medicated. It can be yours again, and you know it, and each day it’s harder and harder to hold your breath and go underwater.

One day you won’t do it. You’ll just stop, and you’ll live again.

You’ll stop, and you’ll see and feel and be in love with the world again.

Any minute now.

Where do I go from here?

Anyone who has battled an eating disorder will tell you there is a line drawn through life. It’s not huge or obvious or obnoxious. In fact, it’s quite small and almost always invisible to others. Staying on the right side of the line is a war won not through the end result but the daily battles.

You see, this fine, fine line is occasionally overstepped. Maybe a toe sneaks over the line or a whole step is taken but, whatever it is, you’ll always catch yourself at the edge, back up slowly and resume living on the right side.

But sometimes, when fate decides to come and play, you don’t just take a step or two over the line. The control you thought you had begins to slip away. Slowly, at first, and then like a tornado it rips through your reality, destroying everything in its path. And before you know it, you find yourself falling head first into that bottomless pit.

After several years on the road to recovery, I finally felt okay. Okay to eat a slice of pizza now and then. Okay to indulge in a full fat latte once a week. I was okay.

Fast-forward four months and I have begun to cross that tempting line again. At first it was a missed meal, then a harsh thought after looking in the mirror, followed by an extra mile on the treadmill.

But I reassured myself I was fine. Having an eating disorder isn’t a one-time thing. It can be a struggle to stay afloat. So I had picked up some old habits. It wasn’t as bad as it had been before. I was still better. I wasn't that  bad. Right?

This was different. The carefully balanced scale reached the tipping point.

Eating disorders are disorders based in shame, and I felt a whole additional level of shame. Without even realizing it, I had gone five days without eating. I wish I could have stopped myself, but at that point, it was too late. The dark side had consumed me as I gained ultimate control again. Control over my body, what I chose to put in my mouth and what I chose to refuse.

It was exhilarating. Like the feeling of whiskey running through my veins, I felt alive.

If this path of self-destruction and self-deprecation is familiar to you then you also know that the high doesn’t last long. The hunger pains slowly increase. A permanent winter takes refuge in your bones and won’t shake no matter how many blankets you wrap around yourself. And a glance in the mirror reveals that the days of shiny, full hair are long gone.

But I had crossed the line, that fine, fine line running through your life. Oh darling, I had fallen into the deep end and, once you’re in that deep, the swim back to shore seems impossible. You're out there all alone and no one can see you. No one can throw you a life raft.

What do you do when you’ve gone too far? What do you do when you don’t recognize the face staring back at you? Where do you go from here?

I will not wait

I will not wait for the text message to come. The one that will say that you miss me, that you want to see me. The one that says that you need me. Just precisely at the moment when I started to smile on my own.

I will not wait to see you. To spot that look in your eye when you remember. Your hand with the drink in it will dip, just enough for me to notice. You’ll spill a little on your expensive leather shoes, but it’ll be regret that drowns you.

I will not wait for you to show up at my door. Begging and pleading for a chance whose count I cannot remember. How many times did you not accept the same misbegotten plea when I was the one trying so hard to keep you?

I will not wait for you to let it sink in. To let in teem and flood your mind that it was a mistake to let me go so easily. To let it melt your heart until you realize that you are empty without me.

I will not wait for the moment that you are lonely. When you need not just any comfort, but the comfort of the one that got away. The one that you pushed when you should have pulled. The one who knew how to connect the freckles on your skin better than you do.

I will not wait for the phone call that comes at 3am. The one that makes wine do it. The one that pulls bland apologies for the sordid mistakes that you’ve made before out of a tainted voice. When the bottom of the glass finally makes you look at your reflection.

I will not wait for day that the sun will rise above you, but you still feel gray and drab inside. The day that you grasp that there will always be something missing. I gamble on knowing just what that will be.

I will not wait for the afterthought when someone else didn’t meet your expectations. When you realize that what you had, you could not get from somewhere else. I will not wait for your appreciation out of the utter lack of someone else’s arms.

I will not wait for you. I will not wait another moment, another second, or another breath. I will go on and rise from unrequited love’s ashes as the brightest flame that shall repel any darkness.

I will not wait for you. I will find love for myself before I find it in someone else. I will prove to the world that I deserve exactly what I gave you. That someone out there will hold my heart as tightly and gently as I held yours.

I will not wait for you. I will succeed. I will prevail. I will leave a legacy, one of happiness and hope that could only begin after being broken, and a story to inspire even the most desperate of heartbreaks.

I will not wait for you. I will conquer my dreams. I will explore the world outside my previously feverish door. I will find myself in places I didn’t know to look. I will battle with my fears and I will win. I will discover new strengths in the most unlikely of spaces.

I will move with jaunty poise. I will live with veracity and grace. I will dream with risk right by my side. I will fall asleep with happiness on my pillow. I will live, sincerely. But mostly, I will love again.

But I will not wait for you

Virginity isn't real

Virginity is not a thing. Not really. It is a social construct meant to make people, especially women, feel badly about their sexuality and sexual experience. It is a way of policing other people’s bodies and passing judgment on how they use them. It is, at its very core, a way of controlling and subjugating women.

One problem with the idea of virginity is that there’s no hard and fast way of deciding who’s a virgin and who isn’t. Many people would define loss of virginity in a very heteronormative sense – a sexual act where the penis penetrates the vagina. But does that mean, then, that a queer woman who has only ever been with other women is a virgin? Is a gay man, who has only ever had anal sex, a virgin? Most people, when pressed, would agree that no, those folks aren’t really virgins, even if they’ve never had penis-in-vagina-style intercourse. The flip side of this is that many rape victims don’t feel as if they have lost their virginity even if they’ve had penetrative intercourse forced on them. They consider themselves to be virgins because they don’t consider what happened to them to be sex. So taking all of that into consideration, how do we then define virginity?

Some people have said that performing any sexual act constitutes losing one’s virginity, but that seems like much too broad of a definition. Kids start experimenting with sexual play and experimentation at a fairly young age, so does it then follow that anyone who’s kissed someone of the opposite sex or shown them their genitals has de facto lost their virginity? I’m not sure that this idea makes any more sense than saying that virginity can only be lost through one very specific sexual act.

Another problem is that there is literally no way of knowing if someone is a virgin or not. Oh, people will tell you that you can check if a woman’s hymen is broken, but that’s not a reliable indicator at all. A hymen can be broken without any kind of sexual intercourse, through sports or through some kind of injury. Not all women are born with hymens. Not all hymens tear during penetrative sex. And yet we’ve all been sold this idea of torn flesh and blood on sheets as some kind of definite rite of passage for women. This idea – that you can somehow tell if a woman has been sexually active – has contributed to the oppression and subjugation of women for pretty much all of recorded history. It’s given men a way to control women, to make them ashamed of their bodies their sexuality. It’s led to a double standard where it’s fine – even encouraged – for boys to gain sexual experience, but women who are sexually active before marriage or have sex with too many people are considered to be slutty or damaged goods.

Finally, why is virginity so damn important to us? We don’t have nouns for who or what we were before we hit any other life milestones – there’s no term to refer to a person before they can walk or talk or read and write – all of which I would argue are more important achievements than getting laid – and yet it’s the sex that we focus on. Why do we put so much more weight on this one small facet of human life than we do on any of the others? Why are we still making a big deal out of who is a virgin and who isn’t?

This is the discussion that we should be having – not about whether women are lying or delusional about their virginity, but about why we still use this damaging term. We need to talk about why the idea of virginity continues to hold such sway over our cultural consciousness, and why so-called feminist websites a perpetuating the thought that virginity is a tangible, definable thing. Most of all, we need to figure out a better way to talk to kids about their bodies and their sexuality, because the way that we’re doing it now clearly isn’t working

Date a girl who dances

Date a girl who dances. Date a girl devoted to doing the unnatural every day, who stands on her toes and speaks without words. Date a girl whose eyes get glassy when assaulted by new music because she can’t help choreographing, casting, living and dying in her mind.

Find a girl who dances. You’ll know that she does because she will seem to move endlessly. She will sway to the sounds of the city, fidget every few minutes, crack her knuckles and her neck, roll each wrist and cross the other leg just so she feels even. She will forget herself and where she is, the length of her skirt and the strangeness of what she’s about to do when something falls from her lovely, articulate hands to the floor. She will not bend at the knees because she does not have to, folding instead at the waist to execute the kill. That’s the dancer. When she straightens, she will laugh at herself, and her collarbone will beg you waltz with her.

She’s the girl with vast and unvocalized dreams strewn across the heavens and a bloodline dating back to French royalty, but whose natural inclination is to collapse to the earth, flop to the floor. There’s more room to stretch there, you see. Sit with her. She might giggle, ramble on a bit about nervous energy. Such proximity to a pedestrian has reawakened an awareness of her abnormality; she had nearly forgotten, again, that not everyone needs a tutu to feel alive. She will try very hard to stay very still so as not to give herself away. Don’t mention it. Ask her what she thinks about when she dances.

Let her move.

Tell her what you really think of the Nutcracker. See if she cries when she doesn’t make the cut, and learn to anticipate what she needs before and after that audition. Remember what needs massaging, and when. Understand that it is a rare treat indeed for her to really be at rest, to have a day off from running to and from rehearsals, and to take a break from being beautiful. Relish in whatever she decides to do that day, whether it be sleeping in or saving the world, marathoning a show she always misses or mulling over the feasibility of moving to Mars. Wonder aloud which she was truly born to perform: The white swan, or the black swan. Listen to her reasons why. Indulge her identity, which dances, too. She creates and discovers herself, decides and destroys herself, rehearsing both what she is and what she wants to be. She will perform herself passionately and full-out, shifting entirely with the slightest costume change. Try to keep up. She may speak oddly, percussively, orchestrally, a tango of tangled words. Assume she means to. Her intensity stems from a trained commitment. Technically, she was never trained to talk. She was trained to listen. Let her speak when she finds her voice. Do not ask her to make sense.

It’s easy to date a girl who dances. Give her ibuprofen in bulk for her birthday, sweatshirts and leg warmers for Christmas, cut-off tees and new soft shoes for anniversaries. Give her the gift of touch, the closeness in your eyelashes on her face and the silent applause in an embrace. Give her Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Yann Tiersen, original scores to your kisses. Make her feel the way she feels backstage, in the wings. Let her know that you, too, have noticed all the different configurations your bodies make to lock into one another. Understand that she’s not asking you to be a dancer when she asks you to dance.

Look at her. Stare.

Because she’s unreal. The human equivalent of a black cat, with that same mesmerizing and vaguely alarming quality in the way she slinks toward you. You’re crossing paths with the supernatural, love. You’ve every right to be suspicious. She is at once a string of omens, not just misfortune to many but good luck to plenty. She is bizarre, comfortable, and just maybe the next step in evolution. You may not know what to do with her, even years after the fact. All you know for certain is that her purring is the midsummer night, her happiness, hypnotic. Sharing her company suggests that you are either mental, or extraordinarily lucky.

Because when a dancer falls in love with you, she falls in love with the music you make. She will fall into step with you when you walk together because she knows what corps means, what a greater and grander cause costs. She will assume your motions and mannerisms are as deliberate and meaningful as her own. She will soundlessly observe and absorb you, assigning sensational motivation to your every stir. Your imperfections are artistic, and rewarded. She will recognize you by your cantor, your carriage, and most of all your asymmetry. She fancies the idea of completing each other because your smile pulls to the right, and her smile pulls to the left. It’s all in her head, of course, but what does it matter. She always did like dramatic lighting. She values your very presence in a way you’ve never known. Your cadence compels her. Your pas de deux delights her because it cannot be replicated. She will respect your insanity. It moves her.

Date a girl who dances because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who adores everything you do, every little thing about you. It won’t just be your face or your words or what you two have in common, and it certainly won’t be because you’re convenient. This is a woman who rehearses for weeks on end for maybe one minute onstage — do you think she does anything because it is easy? You want a girl who bites off more than she can chew because she is the most flexible, most sensitive, most ambitious, most big-hearted of the bunch. She will hold ridiculous ideals and outrageous expectations, and she is hardest on herself. She finds solace in rehearsal, because scratching the sublime is only a matter of time. You deserve a girl who knows that a good show requires thick skin and endless practice, a girl who isn’t daunted by any of it. You want a girl who stretches. That is the girl who is unafraid of instability, who understands it and commands it everyday. She’s the one who drills straight through valleys and mountains, persevering through highs and lows because she knows the deeper the plié, the higher the leap. You deserve a girl who doesn’t break easy, a girl who’s prepared for a bit of pain for the sake of of beauty.

She’ll be abysmal with budgeting, you ought to know, but she’ll be pretty resourceful when it comes to diplomacy and improvisation. And she’ll be terrible at scheduling and double-booking because the stage skews her sense of time. She’ll embody the ebb and flow of that tide between well-established vanity and soul-crushing insecurity, of course, but she’ll look glamorous and shy and tough and femme between layered sweats and stage make-up. And yes, darling, she’ll want everything — but she wants you.

You deserve a girl who gives you goosebumps when she says goodnight, who finds the minute and mundane phenomenal, who reveres balance as the desirable eye of a storm. If you can only give her half of your heart, you’re better off alone. If you want to race through a world more stunning than you’ve ever dared to see it, date a girl who dances.