Dear Douchebag, Thank You.

Dear Douchebag,

I could sit here and make a list of every single reason I hate you and why you should be unable to reproduce…but being bitter is no fun. Instead, I will say thank you for all you made me suffer through because I am so much better for it.

First of all, thank you for making me feel worthless. Without your hurtful comments or all the times you ignored me, I may have never seen the value in compliments or appreciate someone taking the time to pay close attention to me. I may have never felt the compassion of someone who tries to understand me and all the crazy things that I do. I may never have learned to love my own quirks instead of trying to hide them.

Thank you for making me cry. Without that pain, I may not have known the comfort that best friends can bring in times of heartbreak. I may have never learned how valuable these friendships were and possibly taken their constant love and support for granted. As they say, we can't appreciate the rainbow without a bit of rain. Thank you for being the thunderstorm.

Thank you for playing games with my heart. Without your wishy-washy, fickle attitude regarding our relationship, I may not have recognized genuine love when it presented self in my life. I may have set aside those who really cared and instead settled for someone who just considered me another level of some game. I may never have learned how deep the love of friends and family really runs. Without you, I would never have learned how important it is to love those around and to learn how to be truly loved. Not lusted after.

Thank you for disrespecting my body. Without your objectification and infatuation with “going as far as you could” with me, I may not have ever felt the respect of someone who understood my beliefs on waiting until I was ready. I may not have seen myself as the beautiful person that I am, and instead felt hollow and empty. I may have only seen myself as a pretty face, but only after putting a lot of time and effort into hiding behind a mask. Thank you for helping me realize that there is more to me than surface appearances. I am a deep, complex individual that I may not have known without your lack of respect.

And finally, thank you, thank you , thank you for walking out my door and never coming back. Without your abandonment, I may  have never felt the love and happiness that comes with a relationship that can withstand anything. I may never have learned all of this about myself. I may never have come to appreciate the good, the bad, and the ugly in life.

I wish you all the sweet nothings of the world.

Sincerely,

A valuable, strong, happy, beautiful woman

Why must we romanticize depression?

My sadness was never beautiful. My depression was not poetic. It was swallowing pills and and laughing to convince everyone that I was fine.

Depression is not Lana Del Rey music, with smeared black eyeliner and tears running down your face. It is not a blood-stained tub, or the blade sitting across from you. It is not being rocked back and forth by a boy as he kisses your head and whispers “I love you,” repeatedly in your ear.

Depression is not the dread you feel when the person you love the most doesn’t text you back. Depression is disgusting. It is low and filthy and dirty and it eats you away, bit by bit. Depression is the stale smell of your room and your clothes, because you have no energy to clean anything. It is sitting in the bathtub for hours as you feel that dirty type of clean, letting the hot water run down your body in no aims to stand up and turn it off. It is the hunch in your back and the the defeated slouch in your shoulders, the kind that your parents always try to fix, exclaiming “Sit up straight,” but what good does that ever do. Depression is the hours spent lying in your bed, trying desperately to fall asleep but never being able to. It is your eyes being so heavy-lidded and the circles under them that don’t fade, even after a good nights sleep.

Depression is the sinking feeling you get when you enter school and your mind is already set - why would you care about your grades when you don’t even care about your life? It is the darkest kind of dark, the kind that intoxicates your brain and turns your best friends to enemies, your family to people you simply push away so they don’t have to hurt just because you do. It is the raw feeling of emptiness, the kind that gnaws at your very insides and leaves you nothing more than a walking skeleton, incapacitated and incapable of feeling anything but sorrow and sadness for nobody but yourself. Depression is the deepest hole you could ever think of, the only one you could ever think of because you dug it yourself. It is being not only unable, but unwilling to pull yourself up, having the darkness swallow you whole.

Depression is not rain. It is being unable to see the sun, even after the rain has passed.

The fear of falling in love

Falling in love.

It seems a foreign concept to me. While I know very well what love is, for I have loved and am loved, I have yet to find out how it is to be IN love. I’ve had the butterflies, I’ve felt the tingling, my heart racing and I’ve had breathtaking moments that accompanied these sensations. But somehow, I’ve never allowed myself to go beyond the mere attraction, the primary stages of curiosity and affection. For so many years I saw examples of long-lasting relationships, happy marriages as well as those less successful partnerships, and for some reason I’ve decided to assume that the latter would be my fate. Truth be told, perhaps it’s the in-built feeling of being unworthy of love, undeserving of someone who would devote themselves to me, resulting out of fear that I will let them down. So, afraid of disappointing my potential, significant other, I assume that they will do the same to me, and what would be classed as rejection, makes me fear the idea of neglect, so I reject them first. Crazy? Yes. Unjustified? No.

I have a similar issue with travelling. I not only fear that I may be late for my plane, but I am scared of the idea of fearing that I might miss my plane; this consequently leaves me in panic, stressed about being stressed over failing to be early enough in order not to be stressed that I might miss my plane. I suppose that, colloquially, we’d call this a classic case of paranoia.

Not to say I don’t simultaneously enjoy the thrill of travelling and the adrenaline rush that comes when everything is down to the last minute. I guess it’s a love/hate relationship I have with risk. Don’t we all.

I’ve digressed, but allow me to get back on track and link the two cases.

The potential of love, for me, is like a plane. I have a ticket, I’m at the right gate (at least most of the time), but despite all signs pointing me to that one plane, I still need reassuring that it is the right one. I need to know for a fact, that once I get on, I won’t find out that it’s indeed, the wrong one, taking me in the opposite direction, somewhere, where I don’t know anyone, where I’m vulnerable and unarmed. So, I stand there, at the gate, checking my ticket, staring at the departure board, then checking the ticket again, checking, checking, checking…and then the plane takes off, slowly gaining air.

And I’m there. Still standing – both disappointed in myself for not having the courage to get on, and relieved because, well, I’m still me, untouched, in one piece, undamaged, unmoved. The only damage done is that I’ve deprived myself of happiness... but, I’d rather blame myself for slowly taking myself apart, than be torn into pieces in one tear by someone I trust. So I guess I’m the kind of person who would choose a slow and painful death, than a quick beheading. In spite of it all, I get to half-enjoy the pleasures life has to offer: I get to experience lust, desire, friendship and the dream of something more, but that’s as far as I can go. A dream.

Anorexia was supposed to make me strong and beautiful

I could have sworn I wasn’t human anymore. I had just finished a high-intensity ballet workout with an empty stomach, but with all this energy running through me, I still felt stronger and more powerful than ever. Perhaps I was developing some kind of superpower.

Whenever I was having a bad day — or a “fat day”, which was the term I used — I only had to close my eyes and slide my hands up and down my torso. I smiled almost every time, because I could feel every single one of my ribs. Mirrors were the enemy, though; my eyes kept telling me that my waist wasn’t small enough and that my thighs were still too big.

Needless to say, I kept going. However, I was scared to death. It might not make much sense — then again, none of these issues really do — but I wanted to go as far as I could, for as long as I could, without dying.

I used to live by this Kate Moss quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Well, skinny hurts. A lot. Skinny made my skin pale and dry, it caused my hair to fall incessantly and my cheeks too become hollow. Skinny gave me the body of a 10 year-old, my butt was barely there and my boobs were nowhere to be found — but hey, at least I had a thigh gap, right?

Anorexia — or any sort of eating disorder for that matter — is not glamorous. It is not something anyone should want and it is not a diet we choose to follow, for the desire to be thin is not the disease, but only a symptom of it. An eating disorder is a severe mental illness that should in no way be diminished or taken lightly.

In other words, no, we can’t “just get over it”. Nevertheless, recovery is possible. It’s probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, because the only thing more terrifying than getting rid of my anorexia was the thought of having to live with it for the rest of my life.

I used to think I was so tough, with an outstanding self-discipline that allowed me to starve myself. I was wrong. I had never known real strength until I chose to recover. That same willpower that was killing me was the one that saved me. This might be a life-long battle, and I still struggle with these demons, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, for I am tired of merely existing. I want to live.

And by the way, a lot of things taste better than skinny feels.

When does love happen?

Is love the result of the first night spent in the same bed? Or maybe that night is a result of the love. Perhaps it happens the first time you meet their parents – maybe you fall in love with them first, sort of as a prerequisite to falling in love with the one you’re really with.

I guess one could argue that it happens all at once, in one moment. That maybe you go to bed after a night of binge watching Marvel movies and wake up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this feeling. And there was no exchange of words or sex or cupcakes to explain this sudden, extreme change of heart. Maybe it was just a really good night’s rest. Maybe it happens during your late-night X-Men session. When their eyes are glued to the screen with their mouth open slightly and they reach to grab a handful of popcorn, and it takes three tries until their hand finally finds the bowl and not your pant leg. Maybe this is the moment that the lightning strikes.

Maybe there is no lightning, but a steady flow of sunbeams that have always been present. Maybe there are only triggers, and that overwhelming feeling, that panic attack-esque feeling of being in love for the first time, is really us just realizing we’ve been in love all along. Maybe there is no one moment we fall in love, or we just don’t feel it anyway, but we feel the moment that we realize we’ve been feeling the way we have because we’re in love.

I tend to believe that love is similar to grief, and happens in stages without our knowledge. And it happens at different paces for different people – for some it may only take a few days, for some, weeks or months, in some rare cases it may even take years.

Maybe the stages are the same as grief; maybe in the beginning we are in total and complete denial that we are in love, and we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe it’s denial because this feeling is too great, and this person really knows how to tell a story, and they clean up too nice, and their hair is too perfect, and they’re too kind to others, and they are asking you too many questions about your job, and your major, and your feelings, and your family, and your passions for you to actually be in love with, let alone for them to actually be in love with you.

Maybe by the end, we do really learn acceptance – maybe in the sense that we accept them for the little things; leaving the volume on the TV a little too high, the occasional hair on the soap bar, the fact that they don’t wait until the commercials to start telling you about their day, and by the time the commercials do come on, the story is over, it was anti-climactic, and now you have no idea who the true monsters turned out to be or how the Doctor managed to save the day.

But maybe we learn acceptance on an even deeper level. Maybe they’re not the ones we really need to accept. Yeah, they do clean up nice. But that bow tie wasn’t straight when he first put it on. And maybe they are a really captivating storyteller. But it’s charming the way you take a year to tell a story, needing to tell every detail, stuttering and tripping over words, getting so animated, and ultimately forgetting where you’re even going with it, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve either lost everyone or they’re completely underwhelmed and it wasn’t really worth the effort it took to tell, or listen to. Maybe he knows how to entertain an entire room of people while I sit in the corner and talk with one or two of his friends and manage to win them over but fail when faced with the crowd. Maybe he can run a 5K and barely break a sweat, but I can sit in a coffee shop and write a novel about his kiss when he walks in the door from his run.

So maybe love doesn’t happen the first time you wake next to each other, or when you admit to them how old you were when you had your first kiss, or when they finally have your friends’ stamp of approval, or when your father tells them over dinner how much you cried over your first heartbreak and he vowed to never let that happen from another boy but when we finally accept about ourselves the things we try so hard to force upon others to accept. When we’re finally in love with ourselves – that’s when love happens.