Difficult to Love

When I was a teenager on the Internet, I met a beautiful girl named Audrey who shared my love of the British rock band Placebo. Audrey was one of the most gorgeous girls I'd ever seen and she lived an impossibly complex, stylish, and inspiring life. I wrote poetry about her and after I read posts about how perfectly poetic and picturesque her existence was, I'd be jealous for hours that I couldn't be that wonderful. She posted this on her tumblr awhile back and I had to repost:

you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

It's a poem called "for women who are 'difficult' to love" by Warsan Shire, and it's amazing and beautiful and incredibly powerful and hit me in all of the feels.

I posted already once about my difficulty with my love life; I've found, at the ripe old age of 27, that maybe solitude is the best option for me. I'm doing my best not to come at it from a 'crazy cat lady' sort of perspective but a more philosophical one; I am a complicated girl. I have unresolved daddy issues, problems with authority, and a wanderlust that makes me hard to pin down. I change my mind at the drop of a hat and I have trouble finishing things. I like getting dolled up and going on dates, but I prefer lying on the couch with my best friends watching Netflix and unwinding. I always feel like I can't live up to someone's perception of me, or worse, that I don't deserve their love anyway and sooner or later they'll realize it. It's a complicated and shitty position to be in because I've made myself 'unlovable' in that way; I don't like to open up and show my vulnerabilities, and therefore it's hard for anyone to get close enough to me to love me.

I've been working like crazy on the film set, twelve-hour shoot days or more sometimes, and the one this weekend was a doozy. We couldn't start until sundown and we wrapped a little after five A.M. when the sky was the color of new bluejeans and I was almost convinced that the gray fox that had just run across the road in front of our headlights was a mirage. I took on a lot with this project, not only because I really liked the script and believed in it but because the director/writer is like my older brother. He's one of my favorite people in the world and I wanted to stand by him and help him any which way I could to make his dream come true. It's been a very fun summer, and I love everyone we're working with; the pool of actors Shawn hired are top-notch and we have an incredibly dedicated, wonderful, talented crew. Beyond that, we've all become close and had a terrific time hanging out on set and between shoots, and I'm not looking forward to the wrap party because I don't want it to end. That being said, sometimes I have gotten frustrated or exhausted or worn down working on this--- people who've never made an independent film won't likely understand how much work goes into it, and to say that these things are a 'labor of love' is an understatement. Still, I am really enjoying myself and this experience is one that is really making me happy and confident.

My weight's holding steady around 240. Meh. I wish I was losing faster, but I guess I can't complain since that means I'm 108 down from when I had the surgery seven months ago. That's a lot of progress in a short amount of time.

I rejoined the gym (Gold's, since it's less than half a mile from my house) and hired a new personal trainer named Zack. Zack's kind of ridiculously attractive and looks like a male model, but he is also really nice and seemed to know what he was doing. He's pre-med and has never had a gastric surgery patient as a client before, so I think we can both benefit from this as a learning tool. He had me do a lot of stretching and made me jog on the treadmill. Once upon a time there's no way I could've maintained a jog for more than a few seconds, but he made me do it for almost two full minutes. We also did lunges (during which I proved how bad my balance was), box-steps and kettlebell swings. We're going to focus on toning me up and building lean muscle instead of doing tons of cardio; we're going to do mostly flexibility/stretching exercises, incorporate some basic yoga, and do toning and weight-training. I'm also going to make full use of that membership by swimming my ass off and using the hot tub on sore muscles. I need to up my vitamin intake and I ordered more Chike because that shit is delicious and it's the only protein shake I'm really good at drinking. Oddly enough, pre-surgery I liked vanilla or chocolate but I'd never really get strawberry, but I find with protein shakes, strawberry seems to sit the best with me.

I also ordered some Quest bars. I've never had them before, but they were having a promotional sale for fourth of July and some of those flavors sound absolutely amazing. I've seen Shelly talk about them on her blog, especially the chocolate chip cookie dough ones, but I have to be honest, I'm mostly excited about the lemon cream pie one.

Trying to be better. It's too easy to fall off the wagon, even post-surgery. Better choices and accountability are the two things I need to work on the most.