History of Me

Just bear with me, this post is mostly for my own benefit (well, most of them are but this one especially so). Don’t feel like you need to read it, it’s more therapeutic for me than anything else.

I want to understand something more about myself and how I got to where I am now. I want to know why, no matter what I do, I always circle back to caring about being single in some way and why I feel the way I do about my (lack thereof) romantic history. 

I’ve said I’ve been heartbroken before, especially here, but the truth is I don’t know if you could call it love - ever. But it depends, doesn’t it, on what the definition of love is. Does it need to be reciprocated? What is it like to truly be in love? I don’t think I really know, at all. 

I remember having crushes as early as primary school, very much innocent in the way little kids do. I know I had one long running crush that lasted for years and since I’m such an open person with my feelings (much too open) I think that everyone, including him, knew about it. 

I used to daydream about it sure but I don’t recall ever considering doing anything about it or thinking it would ever be reciprocated. It wasn’t, but I don’t remember even ever thinking it could be. 

In year 7, when I was 12 I had a ‘boyfriend’ let’s say. It wasn’t a relationship so much as he lived around the corner from me and we were part of the same neighbourhood gang and went to the same school. We never so much as held hands and we ‘broke up’ sometime between the end of the year and the start of high school and we never really spoke after that. I think we had an argument perhaps, but for all my supposed feelings at the time I think it was the attention that I really wanted. I still liked that crush I’d fancied for years, I’d even tried to be one of the guys, and yet I’d been in this completely platonic thing with someone else for a couple of weeks.

I did give that ‘boyfriend’ a Christmas gift and I remember being so stunned when he kissed me on the cheek and feeling so touched for days. 

Most of the boys at primary school and high school either ignored me or weren’t that nice to me. The crush from primary school didn’t go to my high school so I rarely saw him again and I got over it quickly, particularly when a chance meeting at a bowling alley had him make fun of me in front of his friends. 

There were crushes that came and went through high school and I did have a few guy friends, outside my school, who I saw from time to time, but never anything solid with the exception of one. We ‘went out’ on one date, he gave me s kiss on the lips, then came out a few weeks later as gay. Even after he told me I was still crushed, feeling like I had ‘loved’ him, and it was an impossible situation. Probably not the first I felt, but definitely not the last.

No one else ever asked me out in high school. I took one of my guy friends to my ball, they took me to theirs. I wouldn’t have stayed home if I hadn’t had them but I know it would have hurt - all of my friends had dates, ones they liked. 

I wasn’t antisocial or particularly weird in high school. I wasn’t necessarily popular, but my friend group was big. I always had a knit group of female friends and people to talk to in class and our much larger lunch groups. I also had friends outside of school. I don’t think I ever felt like there was no one at all, but I did still feel lonely a lot, sometimes that people didn’t understand me. I’m sure that most teenagers feel that way though. 

I had a friend, female friend, for a very long time - about 13 years or so from about the time that we were 9 through to about the time that we were in our early 20s. Very formative years, really, which is why I think our friendship did me so much damage. She was very insecure growing up and I, very sensitive and impressionable, took on a lot of her issues without meaning to. As the years went by more often than not, and likely without her realising quite as much as I did, that her behaviour and her words would get to me. Things like commenting on my weight, that I wasn’t as pretty, that guys wanted her not me, that she assumed I was busy so excluded me without asking, that my other friends didn’t get me like she did, that I wasn’t a good enough friend. There was so much in that friendship that as an adult with some distance from the situation I can now view as really toxic, abusive and damaging. It’s not her fault entirely, but I can’t deny that for all the good times we did have, I am still left with irrevocable psychological trauma that I still am working through. 

I can’t say for sure, but sometimes I wonder that the damage to my self esteem she contributed to may have left me incapable of truly finding a real love. 

I love myself and I am confident now - but it has taken a lot of work and it is still a constant struggle. Perhaps I am always drawn to people who I don’t have to worry about being close to, as they are unavailable in some way or another, because I have been so scarred by one person I used to trust the most. The same person who used to make me feel like I was never good enough and, which was often the case, was someone any guy would choose over me. 

I have so many stories from that time that I can’t forget. 

My first real kiss was someone who used me to get back at her. Someone she swore she wasn’t interested in until they hit on me and instead of being angry at him - she was angry at me. I was just stupid enough at the time to have thought if she wasn’t interested, maybe they liked me. 

I had a male friend who I fancied for years, and he would always make an effort to tell me how not interested he was. But then that he liked that friend. They hooked up. 

I spent the last night of year 12 Leavers (Schoolies) shivering on some strangers couch after a campfire circle of guys plainly saying they’d prefer her over me, then she went off with one and everyone else just left me alone without s blanket or pillow or anything else. 

I felt hit by lightening upon meeting someone a few years later, spoke to him every day for months, only to have him tell me he was never interested and immediately meet someone else. 

Actually, that happened twice and went on for much longer and hurt so much worse the second time around. It took me years to stop hurting the second time.

The only real dates I went on in my early 20s we’re with people I met online. Not one of them went well and I never went on a second. 

I liked someone at work only for it to come back to me that not only was he far from interested but that he requested to be in a different team. I apologised directly to him more than once in the years since. 

I went travelling for most of a year and barely so much as kissed anyone, I had no travel romance with the exception of another minor crush that I really regret. By then I’d started to feel that anyone I fancied just resented me for it, my affection was almost always greatly unwanted and often uncomfortable for them. Never just rejection but beyond. 

The first time I was intimate with anyone I was so excited to have met someone but after a couple of dates and bed I never heard from them again. 

And that happened again, and again, and again. None of them wanted to actually connect with me. 

Then there was my only real relationship. Four years nearly, off and on, being kept at arms length, never being told he loved me, never taking me to family events, bagging me out to his friends, talking to other girls behind my back, gaslighting me, and progressively descending into a spiral of his own unhealthy habits until he broke my heart. 

Possibly the closest, I’d say, to really loving someone. But did I? 

There were so many times that I would think how afraid I was that he’d leave me because no one else would want me. That makes me feel sad and sick to think of. But that’s what I believed - and based on my history up til then I can’t blame myself for thinking that way.

I used to think sometimes that I was invisible. It works in my favour in some ways because it’s part of what has always given me courage to travel alone or do things alone, particularly at night. If I’m so invisible, what danger could I ever really be in? 

I’m not going to argue that it’s a positive or healthy mindset, but in a way it helped me. I’m not afraid, which is good, but the root of that lack of fear is a feeling of flying so far under the radar because I don’t think that most people notice. Men particularly, and I’ve never once been afraid alone at night of another woman. 

When that relationship ended I really struggled. And yet since then I have worked the hardest to reach a stage both psychologically and physically to be a much healthier version of myself. 

I don’t feel invisible anymore but as a result I am more afraid. I don’t have the complete lack of attention I used to have but now I feel more vulnerable despite the confidence i now have that I didn’t then. 

And yet I still feel like there’s something missing. That’s what I hate about myself and I resent - I am a whole person on my own, and I have proven time and again to myself and everyone I know that I am strong, independent and that I don’t need a man. I really don’t need a man.

So why do I want one so bad? Why, no matter what I do, do I always come back to this? 

I have experienced nothing from men except pain, disappointment, rejection and trauma. Even from some of the best ones I’ve met, the better dates and connections that I’ve thought I had, I have felt the most hurt. And yet I still want to try. 

Last year I let friends and family convince me that a nice guy was good for me. I felt it was off and should have trusted my intuition but I gave it a chance only to suffer through bland conversation and mediocre sex until the lockdown happened and I woke up to myself. Even then I was going to give it another chance before I got ghosted the literal week the lockdown lifted. 

And then there’s all the times I’ve been rejected by guys who’ve interpreted my politeness as flirting, or been ghosted by guys I considered legitimate friends of mine until they realised I wasn’t interested. 

Then most recently I met someone really amazing, with who I felt a strong connection I hadn’t felt in so long if ever, and had fantastic chemistry, conversation and things in common with. And you know what happened? Not emotionally available and just not that into me. 

This year I will be 32. In all my life I have not experienced one positive romantic relationship, i have certainly never been in any situation that was truly reciprocal, and I don’t think that I’ve ever truly been in love. 

I don’t know where or when or how exactly I went wrong, but I wish I hadn’t. More than that I wish I didn’t care but I do. Maybe I’m just not meant to love no matter how much I have to give and how worthy and amazing I think I am. 

Everyone my age has some kind of baggage. Mine is from all the romance I’ve never had. 

Doesn’t Moulin Rouge say that greatest thing is to be loved and love in return? A life without love is no life at all? 

Maybe books and tv and movies have just lied to me for so long that I believed in love that isn’t real. 

I love my family and my friends and my dog. I love the world around me. Mostly, I love myself. 

Maybe that’s just going to have to be enough. Maybe one day I won’t circle back here anymore and somewhere that missing piece will just disappear and I will stop caring. 

I don’t want to be sad about romance or men or anything in between. I just want to be happy as I am and life my best life with the people that do care about me and I them. 

I don’t know what I wish, but it’s not to feel this way.

Sam xox