Sticks and Stars

[This one I really wrote today...]

Last week was bad news on the dating front. Or maybe it was bad news on every front but the dating front is the one that was newest and thus most affected. Or maybe it wasn’t particularly bad news, but just me feeling angsty and blue and a bunch of other doldrum-y things that made everything feel like bad news.

I probably shouldn’t even be writing yet because I’m still feeling plenty of malaise, but I will see if I can sum up what’s got me down. Let’s try a numbered sequence, shall we?

1. In the past year I’ve lost about 100 pounds.
2. This leaves me thinner than I’ve ever been in my life.
3. Because it happened so quickly and is such a huge change, I have no sense of what I actually look like anymore.
4. When I see photos of myself, I assume they must be wrong because I look so thin.
5. I’ve been freaking out about this dating thing. Big time.
6. Part of my freaking out is due to my fear that the photos I’ve posted are complete lies and when I actually meet people they will see that I am a big fat ugly dork.
7. Even worse, I will have to see the disappointment in their faces and deal with the awkwardness of coffee (or whatever), while enduring their disappointment.
8. As a result of my fear and anxiety, I am shoving everything not nailed down into my mouth.
9. As a result of shoving everything not nailed down into my mouth, I am bloated and gaining weight.
10. As a result of being bloated and gaining weight, I am all the more convinced of #6 and #7.
11. As a result of #10, see #8.

I should also add a set of side points:

9a. I haven’t gained that much weight but given that I have no idea how my body looks, I have no perspective on how much weight I’ve gained.
9b. When I talked to my dad this weekend, he asked whether I was still losing weight, to which I answered no, to which he responded, “I didn’t think so, you look like you’ve gained about 20 pounds.”
9c. I definitely haven’t gained 20 pounds.
9d. My dad is an asshole who likes to say little hurtful things to bring anyone down who dares to be happy about anything.
9e. Despite knowing this, I am now more convinced than ever of #6 and #7.

And the end result of all this is that I have a pile of dating-related messages stacked up in my inbox and I’m unhappily burying my head in the sand, pulling it out only in order to stuff another cookie in my mouth, and feeling all the worse as I let the days go by and these perfectly nice people wonder why I just dropped out of sight, eventually getting annoyed and rolling their eyes and moving on, at which point I lose any chance I might have had with them, whether I want the chance or not.

Would it be terrible if I tell them all that I am too ill with the flu to communicate at them moment? Can you call in sick to dating?

[Wrote this last week but I'm finally getting around to posting it...]

girltrueheart is completely right in her comment on my last post, that I essentially need to get over myself and give this whole thing a chance. I think that mostly I’m just overwhelmed. I’m a slow going, need-lots-of-time-to-process kind of gal, and that’s how I imagined this happening. I figured I’d post my profile, every so often I’d poke onto the site and see if anyone struck my fancy, maybe send a message or two, and every so often maybe someone would send me a message. I didn’t expect that I’d be so constantly inundated by people and I’m finding it hard to process.

Mostly, they don’t stand out as people who really pique my interest, but then again, you never know for sure until you meet someone and have a chance to talk to them and know them in real life. Mostly, I don’t reply to their messages, except in some cases where I do, but I always feel conflicted. If I had more time or if there weren’t so many of them, I’d at least be inclined to exchange a couple of messages with them to see if something particularly compelling arises, but I don’t feel like I can do that. So instead I just get overwhelmed and run away.

Last night I got shut down by someone I thought had a lot of potential and that brought me down enough that I just wanted to give up on this whole idea, but instead I thought about which people I felt most comfortable with based on communication thus far (regardless of level of my attraction to them) and sent them nice emails, which garnered nice responses, which made me happy.

It’s now time to start meeting some of these people but I’m going to try to not freak out about that too much for now. The hours immediately prior to meetings are a much more useful time to freak out anyway. I’m staying focused on the nice-but-maybe-not-my-type ones, which seems like a good, easy way to ease myself in. And who knows, maybe the not-my-type nice ones will turn out to be better over all, especially since my taste in men tends toward lying, emotionally stunted assholes.