Echo

You know that moment when you suddenly realize you’re completely intrigued by someone for seemingly no apparent reason, and you find your mind constantly drifting off, wondering who this person is and what his life is like, and you have a deep burning curiousity to find out?

I briefly dated a guy once who wasn’t good enough for me. My friends and family are usually very supportive of the things I do, but for the first time, several of them pulled me aside on different occasions and told me that he shouldn’t be in my life. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t that physically attractive (which is subjective anyway; you’ll think someone is good-looking if you really like who he is), but he had a really ugly personality–incredibly insecure, selfish and sadistically cruel. But he played the victim well, which was how I got drawn into that mess. In hindsight, I learned a lot from those months–about myself, about what I want and deserve, and about not feeling obligated to take home one-eyed, three-legged kittens from the dumpster that keep clawing me when I can have a healthy one. The hardest thing to realize was that I was with him because I felt sorry for him, and that at no point did I ever LIKE him as a person; that made me really question myself. Regardless, at the end of the day, feeling sorry for someone is an absolutely terrible and destructive reason to be in a relationship and I’ve definitely learned my lesson.

So he broke up with me and gave me the same sort of bullshit statements that didn’t make a whole lot of sense given the context (sorta like what Amber’s blind date was spewing). The following weeks were difficult because I was trying to make sense of the rejection and pretty much beating myself up over it, forgetting that I was just letting my ego wrap around being rejected and taking it out on myself, rather than putting into perspective who that rejector was and realizing that it was actually AWESOME that he ejected himself from my life.

One day, Roxie and Lauren were over and I was being somewhat mopey. So Roxie tells me this story:

There was this guy who liked one of her friends. Her friend is really pretty, charismatic and fun and a lot of guys like her. So there was this one short, ugly Mexican guy who wasn’t in her league at all who liked her but she wasn’t interested. He was very persistent and really sweet to her so finally, she started hanging out with him. At the beginning, he showered her with attention, but the more she got into him, the worse he treated her. Finally one day, he broke up with her abruptly. Her friend became obsessed with him after the breakup and became a wreck, completely FORGETTING that she hadn’t even been that interested in him to begin with before he started taking away his attention! It was all about a wounded ego. The whole thing in her head wasn’t even about him. If it were about him, she would have seen that he wasn’t that great to begin with and whatever. But when ego got involved, it became this thing of, “This guy who isn’t even on my level just dumped me, so what does that mean about me???” In reality? It means nothing. But from the way she was seeing the situation, it wrecked her self-esteem.

It’s not worth it. Someone once told me, never date ugly guys. They’re the ones that treat you like shit. Some girls mistakenly go for less attractive guys because they think they’ll be easier to get. The first problem with doing this is that this action is indicative of low self-esteem. Furthermore, if these “ugly” guys are insecure themselves, they’ll fuck with the girls, especially when they think the girl is too good for them. So theoretically, the good-looking guys will actually treat you better.

It’s probably not so much about good-looking versus not. Again, it comes down to confidence and self-respect. When a person respects himself or herself, he or she will be capable of respecting other people. Those who do not respect themselves have no capacity to truly respect other people. Similarly, when people are confident, they can put things into perspective better and not let insecurities and competition run rampant. They don’t have black holes for self-esteem that end up needing to destroy anything that comes too close to them, or that shines brighter than they do (or shine at all, for that matter). They can handle conflict more productively because they understand that disagreements don’t threaten their sense of self and therefore, are not dangerous. Dr. Phil (I’m so sorry to quote him but a psychologist friend of mine told me this) once said, you can tell if a couple will last just by watching them fight. From all of the couples I’ve observed in couples’ counseling, this is incredibly true. You watch a couple that goes for each other’s throats, and you realize how destructive the relationship is for both partners. Versus, you watch a couple that can stay on each person’s respective side, and no matter how heated it gets, they understand that deep down, they respect each other and you can feel that respect anchoring them during disagreements and know that no matter what is said, nothing that was said or done was meant to intentionally hurt the other person, and that trust and respect is what keeps them together.

I’m finding that I’m spending most of my work day with my head in the clouds lately, just thinking about stuff. But I finished all my articles today so I’ve got some space to do that for a while.

I’m reading “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself,” which is an anthology of autobiographical essays written by incarcerated women. They were all participants in a writing workshop with my favorite author, Wally Lamb. These stories are incredibly powerful. The majority of women incarcerated in the United States have a history of being survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and the stories in this book contain examples of these common experiences. They show how abuse can really interfere and affect a person’s development and relationship to their environment. When the women discuss themselves as children, you can see how, with a more nurturing environment, the lives of these women could have very easily turned out differently and so much better. It’s really sad when some of them talk about how much they needed their parents’ love, how vulnerable they were to their parents, and the ways in which they were rejected and hurt, and how this need to be loved and subsequent rejection caused them to repeat patterns of getting into destructive situations or acting destructively.