Of doubts and doormats

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. --Anais Nin

It's funny. I don't like to be honest with myself. People tend to think of me as an effusive, open person, and in some ways, I am. I mean -- I'm honest with them. Just not with myself.

To everyone else, I'm (as one friend put it) "really dumb for a smart girl" -- the kid who graduated with highest honors a year early last week and is perennially talking about deconstructionism, Dante, the decline of modern civilization, and debunking The Da Vinci Code -- but capable of getting into massive quantities of trouble. I'm the spoiled brat with the heart of gold, the effervescent center of attention with the smile that could melt steel. My energy is "exhausting", as Dane kindly put it recently, and as JJJ said the other day, I can be a "real b----" - but to know me is to love me anyway for some inexplicable reason. I'm quick to laughter but equally quick to tears, I make friends easily but I lose them easily too, I can debate apologetics with unsurpassable alacrity and yet more often than not live a life in violation of all that I stand for, I rail about modern culture's obsession with feminine perfection yet habitually subject my body to cruel and unspeakable torture because it doesn't look like Mischa Barton's. Go figure.

In me, choleric and sanguine fight for dominance, arrogance and low self-esteem peaceably coexist, and deep-seated narcissism is tempered by the self-loathing that lurks just beneath it.

And yet somewhere in between the big brown eyes and the asymmetrical smile, the liters of Mountain Dew and the drama-queen antics, boys fall in love, or at least very deep like, and I reel them in and then drive them away, because... hell, I'm so afraid. I've been afraid of people loving me ever since Joe went away. And sometimes it feels like it's better not to trust people at all than to trust them and have them walk out of your life and take your run-through-a-paper-shredder-beaten-to-a-bloody-pulp heart with them.

I'm used to having the world at my doorstep, boys wrapped around my little finger, guys who tell me what I want to hear. And I fill the vacancy within me with plenty of such quasi-romances. But the doormat guys who I seem to attract have never loved me for me -- they've just fallen in love with a construct of their imaginations, the superficial likability that is me, but as soon as the bad, shitty reality becomes apparent, they're gone. That makes the pulsating voice resound in my head, the one that tells me I don't really deserve to be loved anyway. And sometimes, I buy it. And I curl up into a ball and cry. In the end, I control the boys around me because I fear what they will do to me otherwise. Every once in a while, the facade cracks and I genuinely fall in love with somebody. But that scares me shitless more than the rest, for then I start feeling weighed in the balance and found wanting, and I'll end up doing anything in my power to prevent people from leaving. In the end, they all leave anyway. And I pretend I didn't want them there in the first place. It's a vicious cycle.

And it's so not what I want anymore. I'm too old to play such childish mind games with myself. I can't go through life fearing people because they might leave me -- because it keeps turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm through with controlling and manipulating and pleading. The next man in my life will have to actually be a man, will have to damn well prove to me that he's in it for the long haul whether I like it or not, that he wants me for who I am regardless of the stupid mistakes of my past and the flaws I have now. I want a guy who will say "Damn it, woman, I love you and I'm going to be with you and you can freaking well deal with it." I'm waiting for that elusive guy who stays because he wants to stay and not because I asked him to, the Great Non-Doormat who will wrap me in his arms without being wrapped around my little finger.

Someday. I figure it'll take a good decade and by then I'll be worthy of such a guy.

Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft may win / By fearing to attempt. --William Shakespeare