And then again

So glad I was sober for my last couple of days in Reno, even though I'd spent three days experiencing nausea, racing heart rate, and really annoying restless leg syndrome. That's what I meant by "cold turkey sucks."

Yet, even though weed is legal in Nevada and I was really uncomfortable, I did NOT succumb and go out and buy any.

What I did buy was an expensive massage. And I am so glad I did. One nice thing my masseuse did, over and over,  was tell me how attractive I am. Explains the expense, I suppose.

So I am much happier now than when I left, and have been thinking about what Will could have done better.  Even though I know I fell in love with him because he had many of the same good and bad characteristics as my primary caretakers, one of those characteristics, sadly, was considering me unattractive. He never told me I was pretty or beautiful. He considered the body parts that most men liked to be way too much (he considered Kate Hepburn's shape the peak of feminine beauty). My family growing up generally told me that my physical appearance was either ugly or just not pretty. 

I also started hearing that I was too fat in sixth grade. I had begun gaining weight in fifth grade after getting glasses.

In eighth grade, my Mom told me, "Just make sure to never do what your sisters did and take Ex-Lax to reduce weight." Well, I never thought of doing that until Mom said it.  Years of off-and-on bulimia followed. The only times I've ever liked my face and body have been when other people did.Which has been a relatively rare experience. In feeling I'm "not attractive enough" I have a lot in common with many American women.

But I won't whine too much because I've been listening to Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, by Crystal Hefner. It seems that becoming and sustaining work as the "perfect" beautiful woman is harder than anything I ever had to handle in my life. (She did so much cutting on herself from the age of 19, just to be perfect) Also, in retrospect, my sex life was so much happier than her required leadership of the five girl nightly performances in Heff's bedroom at the Playboy Mansion. I can count the number of "bad" sexual experiences I've had on the fingers of one and a half hands whereas it sounds like during her twenties she had ONLY bad sex. In the Mansion!  Read the book!

Nevertheless, it's an axiom that what we feel we lack, we seek. But only if we know it's a lack. Perhaps if I hadn't been told over and over that I had a lack, or if society and my family hadn't told me that it was important for me to look a certain way, and that way was different from how I actually appeared, I wouldn't have missed being told I was attractive so much from the man I loved for fifty years. You know that scene where the hero takes the heroine's head between his hands, looks into her face and tells her she's beautiful? I always wanted that. Never got it. And of course, having less power than Will (the person who needs the relationship less always has more power), I couldn't ask for what I needed.

But right now none of this bothers me. Something got fixed on Monday. Something inside. The great hole in my heart had some salve slipped over the still-raw cauterization. Maybe now I can begin to "move forward" just a bit.