other shoes...

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do you ever have moments where a bunch of unexpected people in your life can't say enough nice things about you? as though people are bending over backward to tell you how great you are? compliments are flying and not from any of the expected places?

lately that's been happening to me a lot and i find it disconcerting. partly because i feel like i asked for it by posting my blue thoughts to my blog and partly because i suspect that my constant need for approval is really pretty transparent.

Still, very unexpected things have been said that I may have drawn out but still weren't things that i thought i would hear. Like for example I have a "graceful rolling dancing way of walking" uh yeah. i do? damn that's pretty cool. I would certainly aspire to have a walk like that if I believed such a thing were possible.

Also I have a sweet blog which is also awesome. I am a calm and sturdy presence in people's lives. I'm hella hot AND classically beautiful. I'm awesome and a deep thinker. I have an old soul... shall I continue or do you get the idea? These are fantastic compliments. These are like the 10 out of 10 of compliments someone could want and really not many of them relate to how I look. Although the looks ones are great. And not one of these comes out of my blog comments which, trust me, are REALLY good for my ego.

And yet [and this is not a cry for flattery or reassurance although I do love both of those things, it's just what I'm thinking about this afternoon] I don't believe a word of it. Not a word.

I just keep waiting for the other shoe. [yeah that seems like a theme lately]

I keep waiting for the fantastic people around me who think I'm awesome to like notice that I actually suck. To realise the cranky unhappy person I really am. To spot how selfish and ungenerous I often feel. To realise that I've fooled them this whole time. To... I don't know something shitty.

It's not like I don't know where this comes from. I can trace it firmly back to my enormous lack of friends from the day i started school until the day I graduated. Okay that last year I did sorta start to popular up but I still think it was because I started smoking and I was and still am a very generous person [read: easy to hit up for smokes.]

And it isn't just that I had no friends. I had enemies. I had people who tortured me because they thought it was fun. They would befriend me just to set me up for something. I got beat up by a gang of boys from swimming. Regularly. [did finally win that one... but it took years] In high school I was the person whose locker got stink bombed. Repeatedly. Whose locker got taped shut or kicked in or whatever. Hell my french teacher wrote a reference letter discussing the grace (??!!??) with which i handled the negative attention. IN A REFERENCE LETTER! So it's not like the teachers didn't know it was happening.

The custodian knew my on sight and by name. He could find my locker without direction. In fact when he saw me he went for his crowbar without waiting to hear what I had to say.

My mother told me recently that I used to come home from public school and tell her what happened that day and that she would be amazed that I still had the courage to speak. This implies that I don't even really remember just how bad it was. I'm just grateful that I had a mother who showed me that friends could be found in books and adults as well or I would be totally fucked instead of just screamingly insecure.

It does, I believe, go a long way toward explaining both my sense of 'where's the other shoe coming from?' and my total difficulty believing that people like me. I recall discussing this with a friend (who dumped me not too long afterward [i think because i held her hand while she had an abortion and that she then couldn't handle having me around to remind her] {incidentally that's why I know I can't ever have an abortion} [icky vacuuming noise] *shudder*) [hah how's that for effective use of parentheses? (damm I love all forms of brackets and am sad i can't use diagonals here cause stupid blogger thinks they're html)] who looked at me very sincerely and said 'but sass you're not that girl anymore' and that hit me very hard and I still go back to that moment when my insecurities get the best of me.

It does, I admit, lose a little power due to the dumping... but I can really understand how it's hard to be around people who've held your hand through that sort of thing. Or with whom you spent several months being suicidal (different friend that dumped me... and was then embarassed when I greeted her on the street). Still E was right, I am NOT that girl anymore.

I'm a smart, talented, hella hot (!! yeah right :), witty, generous, compassionate and maybe even beautiful inside woman. But still there's that little girl that nobody ever liked sitting inside that woman and going 'yeah right' or 'just you wait' or 'they're setting you up... you'll see... I warned you!' or 'did i mention there's another shoe?' or whatever.

And I still can't figure out how to shut her up. How to tell her that people *do* love her. How to tell her that even if people don't love her that she's still okay. How to fill that hole inside myself that can't ever hear enough good things because I don't believe any of them. How to look in the mirror and see the eyes or the collarbones instead of the saddlebags or the jiggly bits. How to hug that little girl and tell her everything is going to be okay and I definetely don't know how to fill up the bottomless bucket of reassurance that she needs. How to see the woman everyone else sees instead of the girl I can't let go of.

Don't get me wrong, I'm hella better at it than I was and a big part of it has involved teaching myself to speak nicely to myself. Not to call myself an idiot. Not to make fun of myself or my ways. To get rid of a lot of the self deprecation. To be NICE to myself.

That's helped enormously and took years for me to even be able to see... but still. I always smell the other shoe... I always feel like shitty things are about to happen... and I want to let that go.

I just know that the nicer my life is the stinkier the other shoe gets.

What's funny? I'm probably the most positive and cheerful person I know. *rueful laugh*