Taking Ownership: I Like Myself The Way I Am

Posted on 07. Sep, 2010 by Brittney Winters in Lifestyle

Approximately three years ago, I lay in bed, curled up on my side, facing the wall, silently weeping into my pillow so that my boyfriend couldn’t hear me cry myself to sleep. Shaking with suppressed sobs, all I could think was that I was fat and ugly and that there was no possible way that my boyfriend could find me attractive. I felt like a loathsome she-beast incapable of finding someone to look past the flaws, both exterior and interior, to find me and love me for it. My hair was too thin, my face was too fat, my stomach was too pudgy, I had far too much body hair, and I dressed like a bum because I was too fat to fit any of my regular clothes.

At the time, I was 19, in love, and completely insecure. My boyfriend was an athlete and when he wasn’t going to basketball practice or working out, he was studying hard, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was working on his music career, and while he was doing all of that, he doted on me. I was an a cappella drop-out (I had creative differences with my groupmates), barely maintaining a C-average, sleeping through classes because I was too stressed out about the fact that I was perpetually behind in my homework as a pre-med, and perpetually on edge because several people I thought were friends launched a slanderous campaign impugning my moral character. When I wasn’t pretending to all the world that my world wasn’t falling apart, I was clinging to my boyfriend as if my life depended on it.

Because I felt that he was so fantastic: a great student, a good athlete, a talented musical artist, a great lover and Christian to boot, I felt that I constantly had to keep proving that I could be what he needed me to be. I changed the way I dressed, the way I talked, who I talked to, where I went, what I did for fun. I started attending church regularly and joined the church executive board. I stopped talking to previous boyfriends, hookups and crushes because he didn’t like the fact that I’d slept with people before him. I became soft-spoken and timid. I was scared of scaring him off. I was scared of being myself.

I gained weight because I could never tell him that I wasn’t really that hungry when he wanted food late at night in addition to the three meals a day we ate together, and also because I never went to the gym because I was too embarrassed and ashamed to go when the gym was filled with ridiculously skinny girls. I lost a lot of friends because I made my world revolve around him. My best friends in the world didn’t see me for weeks at a time. My own mother barely heard from me. I lost myself in who I thought he wanted me to be and I was so patently unhappy, being his Stepford girlfriend, that I lashed out at inopportune times. I became exactly what I feared – someone difficult to be with.

A pertinent fact that needs to be stated is that he never asked me to change. To be perfectly honest, he did ask me to not wear that obscenely short miniskirt anymore (he wasn’t the only one to comment on it, in retrospect), to not swear so much (later, I would accidentally curse in front of a group of visiting preteens from a Christian school — oops), and to lay off the vulgar jokes (I maintain he was too uptight about me telling that skullf*cking story– it was a good story!), but he never asked me to change anything that was patently me. I just thought that with his being so amazing and with so many nay-sayers to our relationship (one actually going so far as to say in Bible study that I wasn’t good enough for him — and another of them being my own mother), that in order to be worthy of him, I needed to be different.

Eventually, he broke up with me. The long and sordid details of our relationship with each other post-breakup are, well, long and sordid, but, suffice to say, my already fragile ego took several hits and I scraped up enough dignity to walk away from the situation, but not quite enough self-respect and class to not trash-talk the young man who broke my heart. I will say this though: I never spread any lies about him. Everything I’ve ever said about him was true, but it didn’t come from a place of pure honesty. It came from a place of extreme bitterness and anger about how our relationship and, even more importantly, our friendship, disintegrated before my eyes. It came from a very dark place that wanted him to be as miserable as I was because I blamed him instead of taking responsibility for my own insecurities that contributed to the disaster that was our relationship. We were both to blame. Not just him. Not just me. Both of us. And that is something that’s taken me nearly three years to accept.

It’s also taken me the same amount of time to learn to find and like myself again.

I swear. I drink. I wear miniskirts and bikinis. I don’t go to church. I tell vulgar jokes and stories. I read cheesy romance stories. I read (and write) Harry Potter and Twilight fan fiction – but not Harry Potter/Twilight crossovers. Those suck. I knit. I regularly fight the urge to shoplift from Barnes and Noble because they don’t put security sensors in all their books and from Kohl’s because of a long-standing grudge because of an ill-made sweater that unraveled on my body at school in the 10th grade. I sleep more than I should. I probably watch far more porn than is healthy. I’m brutally honest and when you get to know me, unfailingly outspoken. I’m unfailingly loyal when I believe the cause is right. I love furry animals and babies (but furry infants are just weird). I cry at any depiction of love on television, the silver screen or the internet. I crave a combination of exhilarating freedom and cozy intimacy.

I know a lot more about myself now than I did at 19. I’m sure I’ll know even more about myself as I get even more comfortable in my own skin. And I haven’t cried myself to sleep in a fit of self-hatred in years.

And I like myself the way I am.

…And if you don’t like me the way I am, then you can just suck it.

Tags: Acceptance, Adjusting, Dating, Fear, growing up, Intimacy, Personal, Relationships, Taking Ownership