Messy
I always ask myself when I start these... Where do I begin? I'm just going to go, though.
So, I am super messy. I have issues with messaging back, and I think I always have. This applies to text messages, DMs on Snapchat, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram - you name it, and I've probably ghosted on it. And yet, I'll get pretty offended if someone takes a day or two to get back to me because, I don't know, insecurity...? In my defense, though, things often happen in my life that cannot be explained, and I have serious trust issues. For instance, this has been a "season of exes" for me. It hasn't been a particularly fun season, either. I can say this now. I've always kind of envied my friends that brought up their exes hitting them up, for some strange reason. I always wondered how it must feel to be wanted again after the passage of so much time. Well, I can attest to this now: it feels weird. As I mentioned in a previous post about my addiction to coffee (which is an ongoing issue, by the way), I had an ex reach out to me from high school in my DMs on Snapchat. To be more specific, also college? Because I tried to rebound with him after my first long-term relationship, like an idiot, and it didn't work out. Shocker, right? Needless to say, hearing from an ex after six years have passed by feels really, really strange. This didn't happen only once, either; it never does.
No, this particular ex has messaged me several times on Snap where messages can disappear, which is already pretty sketchy on its own. Perhaps I wouldn't feel so weird about it if he wasn't practically married to his girlfriend that he's been dating for four years? I very recently learned that he threatened to leave her, as well, because she falls under his definition of "fat." Don't ask me why I know this, but apparently he gave her an ultimatum. He said, more or less, that she needed to lose twenty pounds if she ever wants him to propose to her. Like, wow. This guy. I developed my first ever case of anorexia while kind-of-sort-of dating this asshole my first year of college in 2008, so this explains a lot.
We had been talking for a while my first year of college. He's always been my "what if" guy. He's from my hometown, he's two years younger than me, and he chased the fuck out of me in high school. To this day, I've never met anyone more tenacious. That alone was enough to keep me interested. The eating disorder had started earlier on. I went to Louisiana State University (LSU) in August of 2008, I had just turned 18 that summer, and I was living in the dorms on campus. I don't know how aware everyone is of the way girls are in the south, but to put it briefly, there's a lot of fat-shaming. It's hot down here, like, all the time and so girls wear very little clothing most of the year. It makes sense, right? If you look bad in those skimpy clothes, then you should just lose some weight, right? Sounds so easy. I dated around a bit my first year of college, and I tried to find it fun. I let a guy into my dorm room one night and he tried making out with me, and I was not having it. I was sick, I was watching Sweeney Todd, and trying to do my diction homework. I'd also never kissed a boy before; not really, anyway. I'd kissed a girl, but that's a different story for a different day.
At the end of my "trial and error" period with college dudes, I decided to go back to the spot that hurt the most: the guilt I felt for never having given my "what if" guy a real chance. I slipped into my lowkey "homewrecker" state, I messaged him on MySpace (ikr) even though I knew he was dating some girl, and I slid into his DMs. It was so easy. Everything fell right back into place, and we picked up where we'd left off in high school, which really hadn't been that long. We had always been off and on in high school, but this time was a bit different. In high school, we talked on the phone just about every night. He'd call me and we'd speak for probably four hours or so on my parent's house phone. He made me memorize his cell phone number at one point, which I'm sure he regrets now. It was never a short conversation with him because he loved to talk. He loved telling stories and seeing if I believed them. I've always been pretty gullible. They weren't boring stories, either. I don't stay on the phone that long with boring people. My anorexia was in full swing at this point, and we resumed our nightly routine of talking on the phone. I was taking my sister's Adderall to somehow keep up with the stress of being a music major, and I was taking laxatives and consuming nothing but coffee. Healthy, right? Sometimes I ate Nutella on wheat toast. Those were my cheat days, though.
I was very thin. That's really all I had going for me. I'd been shitty to this guy pretty consistently in high school, but I looked damn good, and I knew it. And I'd knew he'd come crawling back, and come he did. It was all so easy... until it wasn't.
My emotions began to get the best of me and my anorexia somehow escalated. I somehow became even more insecure, as a result. I'm not going to say that he caused it because that's just not fair, but he certainly didn't help things. I knew that I got major attention from him when I could fit into the size 0's and 2's in the department stores. I was skinnier than I'd ever been in high school. I think I weighed less than 110 pounds? I'm not even 5"4. My best friend (at the time) threatened to tell my mom I wasn't eating, so I started to eat again. Shit happened, my ex and I fell out, and I moved to Northern Louisiana to pursue musical theater with my new boyfriend at my side at a new university. It was no big deal.You'd never even know it happened, and I never talked about it.
This was only the beginning. These were simpler times.
Being confronted with anyone from my past always leaves me feeling a little shook. I'd heard that this kind of thing happens to most people - I just didn't see this shit happening to me. I am not friends with any of my exes. My relationships almost always end badly, and I self-sabotage. And if I'm being painfully honest here, I believe in burning bridges when I know it's best for my emotional health. I've also never had a therapist. I want to go on record and just put that out there.
About two weeks ago, my most recent ex popped up at my show. I was singing with my guitar player at Happy's downtown in Baton Rouge, and I just happened to have my contacts in. So I could see him clearly, standing in the crowd and looking up at me. It's also very easy to spot a ginger. He was dressed far too nicely for a bar, his hair was coiffed as usual, and I knew him instantly. And again, this did not happen only once. He didn't just stand out there for a few minutes watching me, either. That would be far too polite for this guy. No, he went inside after a while, played some pool (probably), and then came back out about four times to watch me. I counted because I felt like my heart was stopping and restarting each time. You know that feeling when your heart's hammering in your chest and you feel slightly nauseous? Yeah, that feeling. Four times. It was hard to ignore.
This guy also always made me nervous, and it had everything to do with the fact that he's a singer, as well. A really good one. He gigs all the time with various different bands and musicians in Baton Rouge. He hustles. I knew things were getting "serious" when he cancelled on a gig to go on a date with me. We actually sing at some of the same bars in the same area, so I knew it was coming. However I'd only been living here about three weeks when I saw him, so it was a bit soon for my liking.
The grand finale of it all was when he sauntered out for a fourth time and just pointed in my general direction. He held his right arm up for a minute, pointed his index finger, and I pretended not to notice. He didn't speak to me or approach me at all that night, but pointing? Pointing was fine. After that pathetic excuse for public acknowledgment, he disappeared.
I wasn't really all that surprised, though. This guy is anything but normal. He's my age (27, actually, I turned 28 two months ago), he sings and is a bartender at a restaurant, and he has a cat. He goes out just about every night with his dudes, "bros down" at the pool tables, drinks too much, and then goes home to his roommate and his black-and-white cat, Tux. I know all of this because we got pretty fucking close to something serious, as I previously stated. I stayed over multiple times, I wore his t-shirts. He kept an extra toothbrush for me. I even looked around his house a once, peeking through his things? He had financial self-help books and a clean bathroom. Definitely not your typical dude. Hipster as fuck, too, did I mention that? I mean, that could probably be assumed. He showed me his vinyl collection one night, and I thought I'd found the one. Ugh.
The catch is, his voice is lovely. I mean, it just is. And the music he creates isn't all that bad - it's decent. I basically fell for his talent, aside from all of his other weird accoutrements. He was befuddling, I hardly knew him, and that was a nice change of pace for me. I liked the mystery, and I remained pretty mysterious, myself.
All that aside, I am the messy one, and here's why:
While he and I were basically "together," I'd gone to a party that he was singing at after having a few drinks at an Irish-Italian parade in the French Quarter. I was pretty blitzed, really, but he was in my area and we lived in two different cities at the time. I was in New Orleans and he was in Baton Rouge. We both drove out to each other quite frequently; almost every weekend, at this point. So I drove out to River Ridge, which is about twenty minutes from the quarter, and I showed up at the party with a little too much personality. I showed my ass, and I still regret that a little. What followed the next morning clued me in to just how much of it I'd shown, though, and why he'd branded me with the word "wild" the first night we were ever together.
I had evidently fallen asleep. I woke in his arms the next morning on an air mattress in this "friend's" house, and I did not remember falling asleep. I spoke to his friend the next morning, who informed me that I'd just passed out in my chair and that before doing so, I'd tried to set my shoe on fire. Oh, and I'd also started my period. I' noticed that later, though, when I'd gotten home and saw that I'd stained one of my best friend's favorite pairs of jeans. Then it all clicked.
This guy is never going to speak to me again.
Well, I was wrong. He did speak to me, and for a while I thought things were okay. I mean, this is the same guy who'd mentioned tripping on acid more than once for whatever reason. He'd also apologized to me before for his behavior, and I remember being very confused because I didn't even really know what he was apologizing for...? And if my memory serves me correctly, I apologized for my behavior that night in person, as well as over the phone. I was mortified. I'd made it my MO with this guy to be my most unedited self around him, but this took the cake. As I said, though, I heard from him. Things seemed to be okay until he eventually quit responding, which occurred later than I'd expected.
The thing is, I expect relationships to fail now. I don't even know who's to blame anymore, and I don't care. I've stopped expecting "forever" with anyone. This may all seem a little too dark, but that's just where I am in life right now. Insert the *metaphorical shrug* here.
That being said, it still hurt. I still didn't understand why we couldn't have at least discussed how he felt. The thing is, we never talked about our feelings. He'd whispered my name in passion a few times, we'd slept together several times, he told me he missed me and that he wished I was there on New Year's Eve? But we never once disclosed the ways in which we felt about one other. And that's, I don't know, kind of important when you're "dating" someone.
So, yes, I am messy. And yes, I dropped my phone in the French Quarter a little over a week ago and liked a message on Instagram that he sent me that was a year old because my phone was spazzing out and I was creeping. Label me a "TLC Creep" all you want, but I was going to address his behavior eventually, and everybody who knows me knows that. Even though I am not all that confrontational, it's hard for me to keep my feelings at bay.
I still haven't checked my Instagram messages, though, and I refuse to until I am emotionally ready for that can of worms that I've re-opened, albeit unintentionally. I just... can't. I've decided to put a pause on my romantic life, for the moment, and to really focus on the things that I can improve upon. I'm not trying to re-invent myself or anything - I love who I am. I think that I've got some serious work to do, though, on how I communicate, and my overall maturity level when it comes to matters of the heart. There are times when I still feel like I'm in high school, and that's just... weird.
And these exes? They can just go somewhere. I don't have time for the bullshit. I'm 28 years old now, and I'm going to escape my emotional baggage until I'm in the damn grave.
Because I'm messy, and I know it.
So, I am super messy. I have issues with messaging back, and I think I always have. This applies to text messages, DMs on Snapchat, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram - you name it, and I've probably ghosted on it. And yet, I'll get pretty offended if someone takes a day or two to get back to me because, I don't know, insecurity...? In my defense, though, things often happen in my life that cannot be explained, and I have serious trust issues. For instance, this has been a "season of exes" for me. It hasn't been a particularly fun season, either. I can say this now. I've always kind of envied my friends that brought up their exes hitting them up, for some strange reason. I always wondered how it must feel to be wanted again after the passage of so much time. Well, I can attest to this now: it feels weird. As I mentioned in a previous post about my addiction to coffee (which is an ongoing issue, by the way), I had an ex reach out to me from high school in my DMs on Snapchat. To be more specific, also college? Because I tried to rebound with him after my first long-term relationship, like an idiot, and it didn't work out. Shocker, right? Needless to say, hearing from an ex after six years have passed by feels really, really strange. This didn't happen only once, either; it never does.
No, this particular ex has messaged me several times on Snap where messages can disappear, which is already pretty sketchy on its own. Perhaps I wouldn't feel so weird about it if he wasn't practically married to his girlfriend that he's been dating for four years? I very recently learned that he threatened to leave her, as well, because she falls under his definition of "fat." Don't ask me why I know this, but apparently he gave her an ultimatum. He said, more or less, that she needed to lose twenty pounds if she ever wants him to propose to her. Like, wow. This guy. I developed my first ever case of anorexia while kind-of-sort-of dating this asshole my first year of college in 2008, so this explains a lot.
We had been talking for a while my first year of college. He's always been my "what if" guy. He's from my hometown, he's two years younger than me, and he chased the fuck out of me in high school. To this day, I've never met anyone more tenacious. That alone was enough to keep me interested. The eating disorder had started earlier on. I went to Louisiana State University (LSU) in August of 2008, I had just turned 18 that summer, and I was living in the dorms on campus. I don't know how aware everyone is of the way girls are in the south, but to put it briefly, there's a lot of fat-shaming. It's hot down here, like, all the time and so girls wear very little clothing most of the year. It makes sense, right? If you look bad in those skimpy clothes, then you should just lose some weight, right? Sounds so easy. I dated around a bit my first year of college, and I tried to find it fun. I let a guy into my dorm room one night and he tried making out with me, and I was not having it. I was sick, I was watching Sweeney Todd, and trying to do my diction homework. I'd also never kissed a boy before; not really, anyway. I'd kissed a girl, but that's a different story for a different day.
At the end of my "trial and error" period with college dudes, I decided to go back to the spot that hurt the most: the guilt I felt for never having given my "what if" guy a real chance. I slipped into my lowkey "homewrecker" state, I messaged him on MySpace (ikr) even though I knew he was dating some girl, and I slid into his DMs. It was so easy. Everything fell right back into place, and we picked up where we'd left off in high school, which really hadn't been that long. We had always been off and on in high school, but this time was a bit different. In high school, we talked on the phone just about every night. He'd call me and we'd speak for probably four hours or so on my parent's house phone. He made me memorize his cell phone number at one point, which I'm sure he regrets now. It was never a short conversation with him because he loved to talk. He loved telling stories and seeing if I believed them. I've always been pretty gullible. They weren't boring stories, either. I don't stay on the phone that long with boring people. My anorexia was in full swing at this point, and we resumed our nightly routine of talking on the phone. I was taking my sister's Adderall to somehow keep up with the stress of being a music major, and I was taking laxatives and consuming nothing but coffee. Healthy, right? Sometimes I ate Nutella on wheat toast. Those were my cheat days, though.
I was very thin. That's really all I had going for me. I'd been shitty to this guy pretty consistently in high school, but I looked damn good, and I knew it. And I'd knew he'd come crawling back, and come he did. It was all so easy... until it wasn't.
My emotions began to get the best of me and my anorexia somehow escalated. I somehow became even more insecure, as a result. I'm not going to say that he caused it because that's just not fair, but he certainly didn't help things. I knew that I got major attention from him when I could fit into the size 0's and 2's in the department stores. I was skinnier than I'd ever been in high school. I think I weighed less than 110 pounds? I'm not even 5"4. My best friend (at the time) threatened to tell my mom I wasn't eating, so I started to eat again. Shit happened, my ex and I fell out, and I moved to Northern Louisiana to pursue musical theater with my new boyfriend at my side at a new university. It was no big deal.You'd never even know it happened, and I never talked about it.
This was only the beginning. These were simpler times.
Being confronted with anyone from my past always leaves me feeling a little shook. I'd heard that this kind of thing happens to most people - I just didn't see this shit happening to me. I am not friends with any of my exes. My relationships almost always end badly, and I self-sabotage. And if I'm being painfully honest here, I believe in burning bridges when I know it's best for my emotional health. I've also never had a therapist. I want to go on record and just put that out there.
About two weeks ago, my most recent ex popped up at my show. I was singing with my guitar player at Happy's downtown in Baton Rouge, and I just happened to have my contacts in. So I could see him clearly, standing in the crowd and looking up at me. It's also very easy to spot a ginger. He was dressed far too nicely for a bar, his hair was coiffed as usual, and I knew him instantly. And again, this did not happen only once. He didn't just stand out there for a few minutes watching me, either. That would be far too polite for this guy. No, he went inside after a while, played some pool (probably), and then came back out about four times to watch me. I counted because I felt like my heart was stopping and restarting each time. You know that feeling when your heart's hammering in your chest and you feel slightly nauseous? Yeah, that feeling. Four times. It was hard to ignore.
This guy also always made me nervous, and it had everything to do with the fact that he's a singer, as well. A really good one. He gigs all the time with various different bands and musicians in Baton Rouge. He hustles. I knew things were getting "serious" when he cancelled on a gig to go on a date with me. We actually sing at some of the same bars in the same area, so I knew it was coming. However I'd only been living here about three weeks when I saw him, so it was a bit soon for my liking.
The grand finale of it all was when he sauntered out for a fourth time and just pointed in my general direction. He held his right arm up for a minute, pointed his index finger, and I pretended not to notice. He didn't speak to me or approach me at all that night, but pointing? Pointing was fine. After that pathetic excuse for public acknowledgment, he disappeared.
I wasn't really all that surprised, though. This guy is anything but normal. He's my age (27, actually, I turned 28 two months ago), he sings and is a bartender at a restaurant, and he has a cat. He goes out just about every night with his dudes, "bros down" at the pool tables, drinks too much, and then goes home to his roommate and his black-and-white cat, Tux. I know all of this because we got pretty fucking close to something serious, as I previously stated. I stayed over multiple times, I wore his t-shirts. He kept an extra toothbrush for me. I even looked around his house a once, peeking through his things? He had financial self-help books and a clean bathroom. Definitely not your typical dude. Hipster as fuck, too, did I mention that? I mean, that could probably be assumed. He showed me his vinyl collection one night, and I thought I'd found the one. Ugh.
The catch is, his voice is lovely. I mean, it just is. And the music he creates isn't all that bad - it's decent. I basically fell for his talent, aside from all of his other weird accoutrements. He was befuddling, I hardly knew him, and that was a nice change of pace for me. I liked the mystery, and I remained pretty mysterious, myself.
All that aside, I am the messy one, and here's why:
While he and I were basically "together," I'd gone to a party that he was singing at after having a few drinks at an Irish-Italian parade in the French Quarter. I was pretty blitzed, really, but he was in my area and we lived in two different cities at the time. I was in New Orleans and he was in Baton Rouge. We both drove out to each other quite frequently; almost every weekend, at this point. So I drove out to River Ridge, which is about twenty minutes from the quarter, and I showed up at the party with a little too much personality. I showed my ass, and I still regret that a little. What followed the next morning clued me in to just how much of it I'd shown, though, and why he'd branded me with the word "wild" the first night we were ever together.
I had evidently fallen asleep. I woke in his arms the next morning on an air mattress in this "friend's" house, and I did not remember falling asleep. I spoke to his friend the next morning, who informed me that I'd just passed out in my chair and that before doing so, I'd tried to set my shoe on fire. Oh, and I'd also started my period. I' noticed that later, though, when I'd gotten home and saw that I'd stained one of my best friend's favorite pairs of jeans. Then it all clicked.
This guy is never going to speak to me again.
Well, I was wrong. He did speak to me, and for a while I thought things were okay. I mean, this is the same guy who'd mentioned tripping on acid more than once for whatever reason. He'd also apologized to me before for his behavior, and I remember being very confused because I didn't even really know what he was apologizing for...? And if my memory serves me correctly, I apologized for my behavior that night in person, as well as over the phone. I was mortified. I'd made it my MO with this guy to be my most unedited self around him, but this took the cake. As I said, though, I heard from him. Things seemed to be okay until he eventually quit responding, which occurred later than I'd expected.
The thing is, I expect relationships to fail now. I don't even know who's to blame anymore, and I don't care. I've stopped expecting "forever" with anyone. This may all seem a little too dark, but that's just where I am in life right now. Insert the *metaphorical shrug* here.
That being said, it still hurt. I still didn't understand why we couldn't have at least discussed how he felt. The thing is, we never talked about our feelings. He'd whispered my name in passion a few times, we'd slept together several times, he told me he missed me and that he wished I was there on New Year's Eve? But we never once disclosed the ways in which we felt about one other. And that's, I don't know, kind of important when you're "dating" someone.
So, yes, I am messy. And yes, I dropped my phone in the French Quarter a little over a week ago and liked a message on Instagram that he sent me that was a year old because my phone was spazzing out and I was creeping. Label me a "TLC Creep" all you want, but I was going to address his behavior eventually, and everybody who knows me knows that. Even though I am not all that confrontational, it's hard for me to keep my feelings at bay.
I still haven't checked my Instagram messages, though, and I refuse to until I am emotionally ready for that can of worms that I've re-opened, albeit unintentionally. I just... can't. I've decided to put a pause on my romantic life, for the moment, and to really focus on the things that I can improve upon. I'm not trying to re-invent myself or anything - I love who I am. I think that I've got some serious work to do, though, on how I communicate, and my overall maturity level when it comes to matters of the heart. There are times when I still feel like I'm in high school, and that's just... weird.
And these exes? They can just go somewhere. I don't have time for the bullshit. I'm 28 years old now, and I'm going to escape my emotional baggage until I'm in the damn grave.
Because I'm messy, and I know it.
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