Love, or, what I want out of love, my ideals about love–is that love will allow me to put forth the best of myself. I recall this quote: “I love you, not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.” Sounds simple, right?
Not really. Because our world has a way of complicating the simplest things. Do I blame human nature?
Simple as it is, it gives me a colossal headache. BECAUSE I AM A SOCIALLY AWKWARD INTROVERT, who is mind-boggling shy and verbally disabled before the opposite sex. It takes me a long time to get comfortable with guys, to really be myself. I’m always so nervous about being looked at or being judged–damn you, internalized male gaze (that will be another blog post, probably). I mean, I know what the problem is and I should just be confident about who I am, but it’s really hard when imagined criticism is coming at you from all directions. It’s absolutely exhausting to constantly have to undo all the mental conditioning. It’s frigging hard to be a girl these days.
(Apparently I wrote this draft in September, but I never got to finish it. I have no idea what I was planning to write next, so I’ll just post this as it is.)