Skinny Women, Online Dating, and Figuring Out Who You Are

I'm watching All My Children, and I've decided that the lovely actress who plays Kendall is entirely too skinny. She looks skinny although she's on-camera, which is supposed to make people look like they weigh ten more pounds. If that's true, that woman is a piece of paper in real life. I mean, she's positively emaciated. She's all cheekbones and curly hair... she has almost no curves, and her body's concave. It's kind of gross.

I think skinny women are unhappy. My friend P claims that her friend T is just one of the metabolically blessed types, and that's why she's so thin, but for all that, it sure doesn't sound like T's had a very happy life overall. Either way, she's tall and stick-thin. I look like a dumpling next to her, and while I do have my definite share of body fat, I am not overweight. Anyway, I'd much rather be slender with plenty of curves both in the front and in the back, so at least people know I'm a girl.

Anyway, I signed up a few days ago with eHarmony. I was very scared to do that. I seemed to be asking for the very thing that will rock my world, to factor a man into an equation I can control so long as I'm on my own. A few things made me put my fear in its place and do this anyway. While I'd regained some contentment, I had begun fantasizing just a little about how great it would be to find a guy whom I dig who digs me fully in return. I'd just begun to fantasize, but that was a pretty big step, considering how futile I still feel it really is. Also, when I used a small voice and suggested the possibility, even in jest, to my friends, they returned with unanimous enthusiastic endorsement of the idea. I was startled by both the unanimity and the enthusiasm. Then, well, I felt it was almost imperative to go through with it, not in a bad way, but in a supported way. And maybe a small part of me heard my aunt's religious perspective echoing in my ears... "Man was not created to be alone." Maybe there's a richness in experience to join together with someone else... and I'll miss that joy altogether if I don't even make an effort to find it. I'm still scared, and I'm definitely not sure entirely that I'm ready... but I'll give it a shot.

On this show, "Zarf," the transgender character, is speculating that finally "being Zoe" will be hard, because he doesn't know who she is any more than he knows who he is as a man. I have never really understood the whole "figuring out who you are" thing. You ARE who you are, you know?

Like, I knew that I had to get over my divorce and "get to know" myself on the new terms in my life. But the terms were new, I was not. I wasn't precisely the same person I was before my divorce, in other words... but I was STILL ME. Me with more compassion, maybe... me with more humility. Me through a baptism of pain and betrayal which strengthened me to the core and left me a whole lot smarter and a whole lot less innocent, but STILL ME. I knew I had to grow my life to fill the places my ex-husband filled; life abhors a vacuum. When I moved on from the HL and TCMT, the same thing had to happen. Getting through the at-first-lonely weekends and getting through the holidays were hard, but I had to do it to know I could do it, to know there was nothing to fear from it. I knew I had to grow past the pain and hard feelings before I could even admit there was anything worth finding with someone new.

But it's by doing what we love, with whom we love, that we ARE who we are. That whole concept of who am I, that doesn't make sense to me. It's a question that I just don't understand.