Butterfly Cauldron

Perhaps it is simply because it has been so very long since I've been in a relationship, but I'm finding this annoying accurate. It's not true that I have managed to escape life unbruised -- far from it -- but perhaps distance allows you to forget or maybe heal the damage done by those experiences.

I mentioned before, I believe, that I'm becoming more and more optimistic. This is strange for me, since I have spent a great deal of the last decade or so being anything but optimistic. So, I'm feeling more and more hopeful -- about everything but my prospect for romance, ya know. Which is strange, because you'd think that, since everything else bodes well for me, I'd be thinking that my love life would be getting better too. I'm trying to figure out just why that isn't the case.

I like myself. I think I'm funny, I'm smart, I'm a great friend -- I think I'd make an awesome girlfriend. And yet -- and yet. Where does that come from? Why is this the one part of my life, of myself that I cannot seem to believe in?

It's not my body. Sure, I'm a fat girl, but lots of fat girls have significant others, husbands, wives, the whole deal. Granted, I'm not gloriously beautiful, but I'm far from ugly. I'm clean, I take care of myself, I'm comfortable in my skin. So, it's not my body.

And it's not so much my health, either. Sometimes, I still get twitchy about it. But I figure, lots of people with worse illnesses find love, so why not me? I'm not dying, I'm on medication and get good medical care so -- why not?

I'm just not sure where this inability to to see myself in a relationship comes from. It makes no sense. As I said -- I'd be an awesome girlfriend, of this I am certain. And yet -- there it is.

Does it come from the fact that physical relationships were downplayed in my childhood? Sure, my parents kissed, lightly, in front of us. They hugged and whatever, but it was always assumed that it wasn't terribly important. I mean, these are the parents who never, ever had the damned sex talk with me, after all. Even after roughly a third of the girls in my high school ended up pregant over a four year period. No talk about sex, or birth control or childbirth or any of that. Which makes me wonder just what the HELL they were thinking -- I was obsessed with having sex by the time I was 12, for gods sake!

Ahem. Anyway.

I have no idea where it comes from and it bugs me. If I can't see it happening, does that prevent it from happening? Yes, I know. I think too much. Part of my problem really, living in my head. I meet someone I like (which, frankly, I haven't done in years. Another problem, really.), we talk, my mind goes a billion miles a minute and before you know it, I've got us involved, happy, then fighting and breaking up and have talked myself out of the risking it. Seriously. It makes no sense and yet, there is it.

So anyway. I'm thinking, is all.