I don’t care if you think I’m pretty

It feels generic and it feels fake. Not because I don’t think I’m beautiful or sexually attractive, but because of the implications.

As I go back to Tinder, the parade of men continuously telling me I’m “beautiful, pretty or interesting” begins, mostly after a day or two of matches. While I fully understand the logic behind their compliments, I can’t help but feel slightly disgusted by their homogenous approach.

They tell me I’m beautiful as if I should feel flattered that they have seen some aesthetic value in me. They expect me to respond with gratitude and openness, as if the mere fact they have judged my appearance palatable is enough to feel validated. They tell me I’m beautiful, but all I’m really hearing is “I would buy you”. 

Some of them keep repeating the phrase after I reply a forceful “thank you”, expectations dictating higher returns from their verbal investment. They believe that by complimenting your looks they have somehow done all they need to seduce you. Sometimes they choose repetition as their tactic: “Didn’t you hear me telling you that you are pretty?”, their thirst clearly impairing their cognitive functions of nonverbal decoding.

Perhaps the prospects that bother me the most are the ones that, without previous knowledge, immediately tell you that “you are so interesting”. They perpetuate the myth that in order to be loved bought you need to be unique and idiosyncratic. They work within the anti-feminist rhetoric that tells girls they are valued because “you are special, you are not like other girls”. How could you possibly assess how rare I am without even crossing a few words with me? They swear I am so different, they have never before encountered such magnificent mythical creature.

They believe that by praising intellect they are somehow better or more refined than the group of men that praise looks. They fail to see that in telling women “its so refreshing to see smart women these days” they perpetuate eschewed ideas about feminism in womenkind. By feeding these notions, girls view themselves as different from other girls and distance the concept of women (the conglomerate of other females) as the Other. It results in women hating women, and ideas such as “they (women) are terrible” but “I am not like them”.

Interactions that follow this pattern are so pervasive, each of them further encouraging me to abandon the search for a male partner. Their repetitiveness makes all sincere attempts at flattery meaningless, and the undesired consequences produce am unpleasant disgust that renders me unable to seriously consider them as relationship-material. I want someone withwhom I can interact horizontally, and intellectual ability and good mental habits are necessary requirements for my mental sanity.

Reaching the Climax

During the following two years, everything revolved around sex. Every time we saw each other we would perform our weekly ritual. I remember spending hours giving head, aided by the energy and lust of teenage years. As a multi-orgasmic adult, I really don’t have many recollections of actual climax obtained through the whole exchange. 

Being taken advantaged of sexually wasn't really the worst part of my molestation. Although the feeling of disgust sometimes made itself present during the acts, I didn't really feel violently forced to perform sexually at the time. Following the pervasive logic of rape culture, it was my understanding that what she did to me was not rape because I never screamed "No".

She constantly pushed my limits, way beyond my consent and comfort. Her understanding was that I had to let her do whatever she thought was best because she was experienced and knew better than me. Coerced, I never felt like I was in control of anything anymore. Certainly not my body. I felt there was no way out.

I tried to be a good girlfriend - comprehensive, caring and understanding. I struggled to see things from her point of view. She constantly told me she did not choose to be in a relationship with me, that it was my fault for asking for it. I had been tempting her for years on end, talking to her and asking for her advice. For years I defended her actions passionately, even after our violent separation.

The most difficult thing I had to overcome after being sexually abused for so many years was the fact that I had acquired a twisted and unhealthy understanding of social and romantic interactions. During my transitional years into adulthood, I had the idea that what I had experienced was normal. 

The End of the Beginning

These past weeks I have written a series of texts revolving around my drug abuse and my molestation as a young girl. I've danced around the specifics - the what, the hows and the wheres of my story. After yesterday’s anxiety attack, I decided the best I could do was to separate my entire Monday to vomiting writing the inevitable text I have been avoiding so far. 

I’m forcing myself to write this in order to cease the anxiety that has followed me this past twenty something hours. My stomach turned violently throughout. I don’t promise great writing, I just need to get this out of my head.

I don’t remember how I ended at her desk. I was sitting on the floor, waiting for my mother to finish some paperwork. Mom exited the room for a few minutes so she could use a photocopier. She was the office’s secretary.

Elaine leaned in and kissed me on the lips. I remember my heart ridden with anxiety, as if I had been given a secret so enormous I was sure I would fail my mission. It burned. My mouth burned. It burned all the way home, and through the night. It was as if there were acid on her lips. As if she ripped off my skin.

I thought the burning sensation was meaningful, but I never quite understood  why I had such an extreme physical reaction. I didn’t comprehend the situation I saw myself in. I felt she had sucked me into an inescapable vortex. I didn’t feel any romantic attraction towards her. I never found her physically attractive. Even when I naively thought I was in love with her, I never told her she was beautiful, because I never looked at her and saw beauty. I had always been a bit disgusted by her.

Next Saturday, she decided she wanted to take me to the movies. I told my parents I was going to the mall with schoolmates. They believed me. I thought it was a date. Not thirty minutes passed before she inserted her fingers inside me. I didn’t really know what was going on. She didn’t really ask for any type of permission, she just possessed me as if she were entitled to my body.

After the movies the took me to a store. She went in with me to the changing rooms. And to public bathrooms. And to her car. She continuously pinned me against the wall and tried to take off my clothes. I didn’t really want to be exposed like that. I just wanted to please her. I don’t know why I wanted to please her.

Perhaps I liked the attention. Most surely I liked the lies she told me. She sold me a fairy tale and I wanted to buy her fantasy. Until then, no one had given me a second look. I was desperate to find some sort of companionship, someone to love me. I wanted to be bought by someone. I wanted to be resignified through sex.

All we ever did was sexual. Since that day, the weekly ritual was created. She would pick me up at the mall and take me to a motel. We would have sex for hours. She would tell me she loved me. We never talked about anything, or did anything other than fuck. This ritual became my normal.

She would call me throughout the week and force me to masturbate on the phone. I also had to report on the things my parents did. I would cry for hours before and after her calls. I remember looking at the night sky and asking myself what I did to deserve this pain. I never knew where it came from, it didn’t occur to me that she caused it. This continued for two years.

Anxiety filled my life in such way I was unable to feel it anymore. I was used to living in a constant state of panic, keeping record everything I said. Every lie stated. Making sure I was consistent with my stories. Making sure no one suspected of us. 

She would stress that if I made any mistake, it would cost her life. As a lawyer, Elaine was aware of the possibility of criminal charges made against her if the truth ever came out. She held me responsible of any future charge made against her. She would also be revoked of her license to practice law. She never missed the chance to repeat this information to me.

After the first year, she began buying cocaine and giving it to me. I remember not really feeling any desire to try it, but she insisted on using while we were together. Looking back, it was obvious she was already an addict. She started bringing me to buy with her, making me wear revealing little outfits so others would see me. I would have to bring an additional change of clothes, usually short skirts and fishnets. She wanted to exhibit me.

I remember feeling violated by the men’s eyes and feeling helpless about it. Some of them expressed their disgust when they realized my age. We would enter one of the shadiest neighborhoods in the island, where she grew up as a kid. Sometimes I think exposing me was a way of getting revenge on all the abuse she got as a little kid, as if ruining my life would somehow make up for the fact social injustice exists. She wanted to take away my white privilege. She had this idea that because my mother was white, I was somehow rich and spoiled.

She fetishized my white skin against her coffee complexion. She admired my green eyes, especially if she could make me cry. She would try to hurt me on purpose so my eyes turned red.

"You look so pretty when you cry, I wish you always looked like that" was a line I constantly heard. She taught me how to cry so she would like it.

Yesterday I was organizing my weekly schedule with Gina, when the subject of birthdays came up. As I wrote mine on the calendar, I felt a strange sensation possessing my body.

I am going to be twenty six.

As if I rationally knew I was going to turn twenty-six this year, but my mind hadn’t had the chance to process that I’m not getting any younger. I had to step outside to smoke a cigarette and, by Gina’s account, spent 45 minutes in chain-smoking silence, processing this very old news.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with my age. As is common to most kids, all I ever wanted to do as a small child was to grow up. In my case, my desires were exacerbated by my misunderstanding of the asynchronous development gifted disabled children have, always too advanced regarding intellectual capacity, but painfully disadvantaged in other areas, unable to see basic signals of socialization.

As my teenage years began, I begged my mother every year to send me to college, as I felt increasingly alienated by my classmates. Fearing my rebellious tendencies would be exacerbated in the university, my mother decided to enroll me in a specialized Art School, ensuring I would never be able to skip one grade in my entire life.

The school operated with a double curriculum that prevented anyone who lacked particular artistic and technical abilities to skip any steps, regardless of their intellect. Even with the insistence of my academic teachers, I would never be able to acquire the fine-motor skills to skip the three grades they recommended during my first month there. I felt trapped.

About a year into Art School, I began to be molested by Elaine. Sometimes I think the only reason she was able to get inside my head was the fact that I had no friends nor people I trusted. I was unable to connect with anyone around me. Looking back, I remember most of my peers feared me as if I were some kind of satanic entity, surely misunderstanding my goth tendencies. 

Elaine was very proficient in emotionally manipulating me. I remember being told repeatedly that it was my fault we had to hide ourselves from the world. The logic stated “if I only weren’t so young, we could’ve openly displayed our affection”. I truly believed at the time I was in love with her and that she was my first girlfriend, blinded by the very obvious fact she was a middle-aged woman having sex with a thirteen year old girl. 

She narrated the story of our forbidden love with passionate self-delusion. She would promise me that we would be together forever, and that when I turned eighteen she would whisk me away into happiness and freedom.  As a young girl discovering her sexuality, promises of higher education, a place to call my own and eternal devotion seemed like the fantasy I was waiting for all my life. 

As years went by, coping with my age became increasingly difficult. Elaine made me feel I was pretty much worthless until I turned eighteen, as I had no control of any aspect of my life. More so, she made me feel like my opinion didn’t matter until then, like my experiences were not valid nor true until I reach adulthood. She wanted to stress the fact that if I was with her, she would be able to validate me, because I wasn’t able to do so for myself.

Had she not tried to violently rape me when I decided to culminate our weekly meetings, I would have probably returned to her, unable to see our interactions as abusive, I reacted with sheer violence and hit her in the most primal response. To grab a weapon and attack with fearless force is the most common response I have to the various attempts at violent sexual assault I’ve experienced in my life, all unsuccessful to this day. 

I still remember when, years later, she insisted on our returning together, forcefully touching and throwing herself at me, trying to rip off my school uniform. Frozen with fear, I was unable to compute anything from the shock. It had been two years since she last touched me.

I’m going to have to end this post now, as I think I’m beginning to have a panic or anxiety attack. I think I’m going to cry now. I’m crying now. I’m going to vomit, I feel the influx on my throat. I don’t want to cry. Why am I crying? Oh god I don’t want to cry. 

I’m sorry, I will have to continue this later.

The Onion

Memory is such a frail thing. Until writing my last entry, I had completely forgotten about those early years and exchanges that preluded my molestation.

I seldom think about Elaine, not anymore. Processing what happened to me was something I left for my adulthood, as I started seeing a therapist once I entered college; always painfully aware that whatever I said as a minor had to be told to my mother by law. Although I was still seventeen during my first year in, I profited from the strict separation policy my university has regarding its medical services.

Now that I remember those details, it comes to mind that I stopped writing once Elaine exposed my stories to my mother. Hyper-vigilant, I understood that mom now checked everything I owned and everything I wrote. I learnt to keep it all in, to never let my thoughts on paper.

I remember starring at the sky and crying uncontrollably every night, wordless. To this day I am still a master of crying without makig any sounds, tears carefully falling on my cheeks. Careful with what I dared to say, careful with every detail I spoke. I kept tabs on every lie and every piece of information for years.

Perhaps thats how I became the hermetic seal I became for the next few years. I wanted to trust others, but opening up was never an option. It didn’t really help the fact I never bothered to reframe my abuse until I was about twenty. Until then, I had accepted as truth the fantasy that she was my first girlfriend and that there was nothing wrong or weird about what happened to me. All subsequent events were brought to me through poor decision-making skills, and I had nothing to feel victimized about.

I was once described by one of the most important women in my life as an onion:

When you think you have seen it all, she shows a depth of layers yet to be seen.

“I think it’s […] false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.”—“I am not a story,” Galen Strawson, Aeon

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.” – “The White Album,” Joan Didion

“Cinderella is the one with the moral authority.” – Wynton Marsalis, Ken Burns’ Jazz

“… ages and ages hence.” – “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost

“across the tired years” – “Youth Calls to Age,” Dylan Thomas

“The silence of your lonely room” – “Night and Day,” Cole Porter

Ted and Robin explain that it isn't Marshall's loyalty, but in every relationship, there is a "reacher" (a person who reaches beyond their level of beauty), and a "settler" (a person who settles for someone below their level of beauty).

Jenkins (How I Met Your Mother) - Wikipedia

“I believe that believing we survive is what makes us survive.” – Isobel “Izzy” Stevens, Grey’s Anatomy, “Drowning on Dry Land,” Season 3 Episode 16 (video)

“The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside. If it's true, it's true, and you'd better live with it.” — Richard Dawkins, Interview with BeliefNet

“But this is the fanciful side of the situation. It has a real side, so difficult that, though I think of it every day: I never thoroughly think it out. Now let me determine to think it out as I walk home.” —Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

“We live as we dream -- alone.” —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [misquoted in episode]