You know how when you watch a horror movie and some bobble-head who was just having slutty sex with her football captain boyfriend decides she's going to investigate the maniacal laughter emanating from the darkened basement without telling anybody where she's going, without a flashlight and or light sabre, and dressed only in bra and panties, and you're thinking, like, oh dear GOD. DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT. Followed immediately by, I would never do something so stupid...
We've all been there. And by there, I mean yelling at our TV screens as opposed to being on the verge of dismemberment because we foolishly had premarital sex and then decided to check out the basement armed only with our panties.
My point is, we all assume we know what we would do and how we would feel given what should seem like some pretty cut and dry circumstances.
I used to think that, but now I know I'd probably be the idiot having my head chopped off in the basement. I'd definitely be the idiot having slutty sex with the football captain.
In a way, I recently experienced my own horror show. I survived. As per Dr. Q, I did so "kind of by the skin of the teeth," but here I am nonetheless. As one commenter on my blog put it, the universe sent me a bitch-slap of a wake up call and now I need to do something about it.
(To my commenter: I would agree, you may have watched too many Oprah reruns. That's OK, I love you anyway, and agree with you. Actually, I read her magazine every chance I can, which is worse than watching the reruns. Her new show Oprah: Behind the Scenes is fantastic by the way. I've somehow become hooked on Oprah 25 years after the party started and subsequently closed down. At any rate, your comments were exactly what I needed, when I needed them...so thank you.)
The problem wasn't that I had survived something that could have just as easily have left me with a mild case of decomposition, but that I wasn't doing it right. Surviving that is.
I have always believed that when faced with a near-death experience, a normal person would automatically feel blessed, and so much MORE alive for having survived.
A normal person wouldn't take another minute for granted, would realize what mattered most in her life, and would seize every day like it was her last, having had the fact that future days aren't guaranteed bitch-slapped right into her.
In fact, it's not uncommon for people having survived some pretty bat shit circumstances to wake up the next morning and completely change their lives. How often have you read some survivor story profile (probably in O Magazine) that says something like:
"As soon as that airplane toilet was sucked out into the stratosphere with me still on it, I just knew I was in trouble. As I flew through the air, I thought about my family, my children, my friends, and all my dreams and hopes for the future. Right before the toilet swung around and knocked me unconscious, I remember thinking that if God/Buddha/Allah/Sweet Baby Jesus/Grown Jesus/et al. would just spare my life, I would be a totally different person and would never waste time complaining again! Since I landed safely on top of a Bouncy Castle with my pants down at 150 mph, I can honestly say I am so grateful for every day, and am living life to the fullest. I left my kids with their father, and moved to Portugal where the men are hot and the drugs are legal."
Or something like that.
The point is, surviving something is supposed to feel lucky. I wasn't feeling lucky, and I sure as hell wasn't feeling grateful either.
I really wanted to feel both. I desperately wanted to feel grateful and happy to be alive. Not just happy - I was expecting meadow-twirling levels of exhilaration.
Needless to say, what I actually felt was a bit of a letdown in comparison. Admittedly, there have actually been moments where I was pissed. Pissed right off that I lived.
Clearly, I'm a survivor failure. Just continuing to breathe should be simple, and yet I've been fucking it up.
However...I'm done with this too.
Frankly, I will never feel lucky because of what happened. Being raped, horribly injured, left untreated, and then horribly injured even further isn't lucky. It's terrible. Lucky is winning the lottery - not an exploding vagina.
My life circumstances didn't immediately change because I kept on breathing. They're not going to, unless I change them. This may take some effort, but I'm still breathing, which is one less thing to have to work on at the same time. I can't imagine things would be any easier if I were deceased.
I have no idea what my life purpose is, but I can think of at least three people that I annoy greatly. Since I don't like them either, my continued ability to annoy them still counts for something. It may not be much, but I'll take it.
Also on the good news front, the indomitable Dr. Q has declared me, "perfect." He wanted to know if I had had sex yet, and I told him he was crazy, particularly because the last time I asked about sex he had made it sound like I could only ever have the most boring, terrible, passionless sex imaginable and even then the man would have to have a very small penis. Hardly seemed worth it.
Apparently that's not exactly what he said word for word, but nonetheless, he revised his opinion following my very last exam. I am perfect, there is nothing wrong with me, and I can have any kind of sex I want. Not even another doctor looking at me could ever tell what had happened. Only...how important is anal?
To which I replied, what if it's the most important thing ever?
Really..?
No, I've never tried it. But what if I wanted to?
Fiiiine. Go have anal. Just be careful. And with that, Dr. Q shook my hand, said good-bye, and went on to his next patient.
And so to summarize...don't be an idiot by checking out the basement. If you do, put some clothes on. I'm not feeling lucky but I'm feeling better. Also, anal sex.
That is all.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
The Proposal
My desk is a mess. My colleagues don't know how I can find anything, and I don't either. I'd really rather not bother looking. However, when I found my forehead resting on top of a coffee lid and scissor handles, it became apparent that I should at least clear a space for when I just need to put my head down and cry.
Surprisingly, my forehead becoming attached to the sticky side of a coffee lid had little to do with actual work and slightly more to do with Alex having just told me his girlfriend is pregnant.
I had called him from work to keep the conversation short, and business-like. In contrast to the months of thought I had put into how I would once and for all end our friendship and put a stop to all future communication, I figured the conversation itself would be short and sweet.
(My original plan had always been to have this conversation in person. In my fantasies we would be alone together, I would know exactly what to say, I would look amazing, and there would possibly be a wind-machine somewhere in the vicinity to blow my hair around fetchingly. If I cried, it would be no more than a very pretty tear or two - enough to demonstrate heartbreak, but not enough to generate any snot or swelling.)
(In turn, he would be devastated, and would simply say that he understood completely how and why I felt that way. Depending on my level of delusion on any particular day, I imagined he would then break up with his girlfriend rather than face the thought of not being able to send me text messages any more, and we would all live happily ever after. Except for the girlfriend. Imagining a happy ending for myself can be hard enough, so she was on her own.)
I had even made plans to visit him on my holidays, but as it turns out, my vagina exploded and I spent the first night of what was to have been my holiday in hospital.
Not that it would have mattered all that much, because Alex and his girlfriend had taken a last-minute vacation package to Mexico, so while I was laying there wondering what it meant when the nurse told me my vagina was packed, he was on a beach with her.
So we stood each other up. One more than the other.
Actually, it was this thought that made me angry enough to force the inevitable conversation. While I was experiencing one of the most horrific and terrifying moments of my life, his girlfriend was at an all-inclusive...with him. I realize that life isn't fair, but should I ever make it to an afterlife, I'm going to be demanding an explanation, and somebody or something is getting kicked in the balls.
Once Alex returned from Mexico, he wanted to know if I had been out his way and gone already. I told him I never made it, due to a bit of an accident.
Suddenly, he was very worried about me and wanting to know what happened. I wasn't sure I wanted to tell him, but it made for a great excuse for a phone call.
Which is roughly when things went off the rails - presuming things had ever really been on the rails to begin with.
First off, I hadn't planned on telling him what happened. Alex is actually one of the few people I had told about the original assault, and we spent a good several hours crying together on the phone when I did. He actually cried with me, and I did not need a repeat. Not so much the crying - I couldn't bear Alex being amazing all over again when I needed him to be the guy worth getting rid of.
I told him everything anyway, and he was amazing.
For my part, I wasn't eloquent. I stumbled and stammered and heard my voice breaking, felt my nose getting snotty, and instead of ending with the by now well-rehearsed and sunny sounding proclamation that I'm sure I would be just fine and am getting better every day, I told him how I may as well be a fucking eunuch and I was so sick of hurting all the time and I can't even take a shit properly and how I'm never going to be normal again.
I couldn't believe I told him all of that - particularly the part about going number two, because he and I have had actual arguments over whether girls really do that or not. I had always assured him we did, but for a guy who refuses to buy toilet paper in public, it was a hard sell.
Even more worrisome was how quiet he got after I was done. I had no idea what he could be thinking. First he said that although he knows I don't know who that piece of shit bastard who started this whole thing was, but if I ever did know, he would kill that guy. Straight up kill him. I know that, right?
Then he said this. "You also know, that whatever you can or can't do sexually is like, the least important thing about you right? To me, you are so much more and so much more important than that."
And then he told me Shelley is pregnant. He's so glad I can tell him things like I do, because he tells me things that he doesn't tell anybody else. Not even Shelley. He tells me things he can't tell her. In fact, the only people who knew she was pregnant at that moment was him, her and me.
This is when my forehead hit my coffee lid, and stayed there.
In defense of all that came next, I really did try. I actually used him telling me how he can talk to me in ways he can't talk to her as a jumping off point. Didn't he think that was a bad thing? Didn't he think that it was probably a good thing we never ended up seeing each other, and didn't he think that now that Shelley is pregnant we should stop talking? For good?
As it turns out, he did not think any of those things at all. In fact, he thinks that I'm the most amazing woman he's ever met and can't imagine not having me in his life, in any way possible.
In case I didn't believe him, he spent the next twenty minutes describing all the ways I'm amazing, and if he didn't feel that way, would we even be talking at all still? And even though he knows others would consider the relationship he has with me to be cheating, he knows how he feels about it, and that's enough for him to know it's not wrong at all.
Why couldn't he just say he saw my point and leave it at that? This unplanned for reaction was exactly why I wanted the conversation to happen in person. I still would have had no idea what to say, but at least my hair would have been blowing fetchingly.
And so I back-pedalled. I back-pedalled like the Tour de France on rewind. We would stay friends. We would stay in touch. We do have this connection. I feel it too. We always will. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you too.
I had tried to end things, but I've never been good at writing conclusions. Instead, once we had re-declared our intense, undying like for one another, there was nothing left to do but congratulate him on his impending fatherhood with another woman.
Only...he didn't seem that happy. He sounded scared and sad. It wasn't planned, although from everything he told me I can't help but think there was a little bit of planning on her part. He had trusted her to take care of things. He wanted kids, but maybe not now. He always thought he'd be married.
I told him if everybody waited until everything was perfect and they were totally ready to have children, the world would end due to population decline.
He knew this was true, but still...he just thought he'd be married.
Better buy the ring, I said. She's no doubt waiting for it.
Maybe he said. He's not getting any younger, and neither is she. Maybe it's time to grow up.
Maybe it is. Better go jewellery shopping.
There is indeed a time for everything, apparently up to and including a time to counsel the man you love to buy another woman an engagement ring and marry her.
Somewhere in between a time to reap and a time to sow, I'm sure the authors of the bible considered slipping that one in there, but probably deemed it too fucking depressing.
******
And so, right now, I'm working on a proposal for a book. I'm pitching it to publishing companies as the opportunity to score another bestseller along the lines of "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. If they could make money paying for that that bitch to travel all over the world because her marriage was going badly and she was experiencing distressing levels of ennui that only eating and praying and banging some guy in Bali could ease, have I got a deal for them.
In fact, they don't even have to send me around the world. I'd be fine with a weekend trip somewhere. I'd be sure to capitalize on the Eat, Pray, Love template, but I can't promise I'll pray. Maybe...Eat, Drink, and I'd Love to Bang You But You Can Only Stick It In Half-Way Unless You Have a Small Penis...? It's a working title - not written in stone.
The point is, I'd very much like to escape my life for a little while, and being paid to travel the world and write about how it perked me up a bit would be a great start.
Maybe they don't pay for me to go to three countries - maybe I propose they just cover gas money for me to go to IKEA. The point is...I feel like I'm done with just about everything. So done, that it's time for something different.
Surprisingly, my forehead becoming attached to the sticky side of a coffee lid had little to do with actual work and slightly more to do with Alex having just told me his girlfriend is pregnant.
I had called him from work to keep the conversation short, and business-like. In contrast to the months of thought I had put into how I would once and for all end our friendship and put a stop to all future communication, I figured the conversation itself would be short and sweet.
(My original plan had always been to have this conversation in person. In my fantasies we would be alone together, I would know exactly what to say, I would look amazing, and there would possibly be a wind-machine somewhere in the vicinity to blow my hair around fetchingly. If I cried, it would be no more than a very pretty tear or two - enough to demonstrate heartbreak, but not enough to generate any snot or swelling.)
(In turn, he would be devastated, and would simply say that he understood completely how and why I felt that way. Depending on my level of delusion on any particular day, I imagined he would then break up with his girlfriend rather than face the thought of not being able to send me text messages any more, and we would all live happily ever after. Except for the girlfriend. Imagining a happy ending for myself can be hard enough, so she was on her own.)
I had even made plans to visit him on my holidays, but as it turns out, my vagina exploded and I spent the first night of what was to have been my holiday in hospital.
Not that it would have mattered all that much, because Alex and his girlfriend had taken a last-minute vacation package to Mexico, so while I was laying there wondering what it meant when the nurse told me my vagina was packed, he was on a beach with her.
So we stood each other up. One more than the other.
Actually, it was this thought that made me angry enough to force the inevitable conversation. While I was experiencing one of the most horrific and terrifying moments of my life, his girlfriend was at an all-inclusive...with him. I realize that life isn't fair, but should I ever make it to an afterlife, I'm going to be demanding an explanation, and somebody or something is getting kicked in the balls.
Once Alex returned from Mexico, he wanted to know if I had been out his way and gone already. I told him I never made it, due to a bit of an accident.
Suddenly, he was very worried about me and wanting to know what happened. I wasn't sure I wanted to tell him, but it made for a great excuse for a phone call.
Which is roughly when things went off the rails - presuming things had ever really been on the rails to begin with.
First off, I hadn't planned on telling him what happened. Alex is actually one of the few people I had told about the original assault, and we spent a good several hours crying together on the phone when I did. He actually cried with me, and I did not need a repeat. Not so much the crying - I couldn't bear Alex being amazing all over again when I needed him to be the guy worth getting rid of.
I told him everything anyway, and he was amazing.
For my part, I wasn't eloquent. I stumbled and stammered and heard my voice breaking, felt my nose getting snotty, and instead of ending with the by now well-rehearsed and sunny sounding proclamation that I'm sure I would be just fine and am getting better every day, I told him how I may as well be a fucking eunuch and I was so sick of hurting all the time and I can't even take a shit properly and how I'm never going to be normal again.
I couldn't believe I told him all of that - particularly the part about going number two, because he and I have had actual arguments over whether girls really do that or not. I had always assured him we did, but for a guy who refuses to buy toilet paper in public, it was a hard sell.
Even more worrisome was how quiet he got after I was done. I had no idea what he could be thinking. First he said that although he knows I don't know who that piece of shit bastard who started this whole thing was, but if I ever did know, he would kill that guy. Straight up kill him. I know that, right?
Then he said this. "You also know, that whatever you can or can't do sexually is like, the least important thing about you right? To me, you are so much more and so much more important than that."
And then he told me Shelley is pregnant. He's so glad I can tell him things like I do, because he tells me things that he doesn't tell anybody else. Not even Shelley. He tells me things he can't tell her. In fact, the only people who knew she was pregnant at that moment was him, her and me.
This is when my forehead hit my coffee lid, and stayed there.
In defense of all that came next, I really did try. I actually used him telling me how he can talk to me in ways he can't talk to her as a jumping off point. Didn't he think that was a bad thing? Didn't he think that it was probably a good thing we never ended up seeing each other, and didn't he think that now that Shelley is pregnant we should stop talking? For good?
As it turns out, he did not think any of those things at all. In fact, he thinks that I'm the most amazing woman he's ever met and can't imagine not having me in his life, in any way possible.
In case I didn't believe him, he spent the next twenty minutes describing all the ways I'm amazing, and if he didn't feel that way, would we even be talking at all still? And even though he knows others would consider the relationship he has with me to be cheating, he knows how he feels about it, and that's enough for him to know it's not wrong at all.
Why couldn't he just say he saw my point and leave it at that? This unplanned for reaction was exactly why I wanted the conversation to happen in person. I still would have had no idea what to say, but at least my hair would have been blowing fetchingly.
And so I back-pedalled. I back-pedalled like the Tour de France on rewind. We would stay friends. We would stay in touch. We do have this connection. I feel it too. We always will. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you too.
I had tried to end things, but I've never been good at writing conclusions. Instead, once we had re-declared our intense, undying like for one another, there was nothing left to do but congratulate him on his impending fatherhood with another woman.
Only...he didn't seem that happy. He sounded scared and sad. It wasn't planned, although from everything he told me I can't help but think there was a little bit of planning on her part. He had trusted her to take care of things. He wanted kids, but maybe not now. He always thought he'd be married.
I told him if everybody waited until everything was perfect and they were totally ready to have children, the world would end due to population decline.
He knew this was true, but still...he just thought he'd be married.
Better buy the ring, I said. She's no doubt waiting for it.
Maybe he said. He's not getting any younger, and neither is she. Maybe it's time to grow up.
Maybe it is. Better go jewellery shopping.
There is indeed a time for everything, apparently up to and including a time to counsel the man you love to buy another woman an engagement ring and marry her.
Somewhere in between a time to reap and a time to sow, I'm sure the authors of the bible considered slipping that one in there, but probably deemed it too fucking depressing.
******
And so, right now, I'm working on a proposal for a book. I'm pitching it to publishing companies as the opportunity to score another bestseller along the lines of "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. If they could make money paying for that that bitch to travel all over the world because her marriage was going badly and she was experiencing distressing levels of ennui that only eating and praying and banging some guy in Bali could ease, have I got a deal for them.
In fact, they don't even have to send me around the world. I'd be fine with a weekend trip somewhere. I'd be sure to capitalize on the Eat, Pray, Love template, but I can't promise I'll pray. Maybe...Eat, Drink, and I'd Love to Bang You But You Can Only Stick It In Half-Way Unless You Have a Small Penis...? It's a working title - not written in stone.
The point is, I'd very much like to escape my life for a little while, and being paid to travel the world and write about how it perked me up a bit would be a great start.
Maybe they don't pay for me to go to three countries - maybe I propose they just cover gas money for me to go to IKEA. The point is...I feel like I'm done with just about everything. So done, that it's time for something different.
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