from a world that's grown so cold and vicious

8 months.

we are now 8 months into this fucking covid pandemic and i am fed up. i'm just so tired of the bullshit. 

i've spent most of this year continuing to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. i'm tired of it. i'm tired of everything coming back normal when we all know there isn't anything normal about me. i keep holding my breath. i want to have hope but there isn't any left. i've surpassed five years of not knowing what's wrong. and let's face it - something has been wrong with me for 32 years and we still don't know. 

i was supposed to have an appointment booked for the end of november which is now rescheduled to december. i have to wait over a month for possible results. i have to wait over a month for whatever the next step is going to be - more testing, probably, or they will just give up on me.

i can't even begin to tell you how difficult it was to not throw myself off my balcony back in march/april when i couldn't get any treatment. i struggle with these thoughts a lot more when my health is bad. when i have no quality of life and i imagine what the rest of my life is going to be like if i can't get better. i'm still here. but that bad place in my head just keeps growing. 

my body still remains a mystery. i have no idea how the day is going to go. but i'm fine. there's absolutely nothing wrong with me. every test is normal. my doctor couldn't even decide if i should get a flu shot. i got one anyway and thought i was going to die. no matter what i do, i just feel like i'm failing. i'm doing everything i can and it just isn't enough. i'm extremely scared for what they're going to tell me in december.

how do you escape yourself when you don't know what it is you're running from?

confessions of a skinny girl

thanksgiving,1988: my mom has an appointment for an ultrasound to check on her baby's development, 7 months into pregnancy. she finishes the appointment and makes an attempt to leave the hospital, but i wasn't having any part of that.

sometime later in the evening, i was born, weighing in at barely 4 pounds. the doctors immediately stuck me in an incubator and told my parents that due to the complicated nature of the fact that i was overly premature and most of my body wasn't quite right, i wouldn't be able to leave the hospital for awhile. they weren't even entirely sure i would survive. they weren't sure how i would grow up.

i progressed through the first few years of school as a problem child who refused to do anything i didn't consider fun. i was enrolled in a ukrainian boarding school where i couldn't stand ukrainian class. eventually, my parents took me out of that school and into a regular public school. but once i had applied myself, the faculty soon realized that i was too smart for my own good. now i was being bullied for being a small, skinny kid who was also really smart.

i wasn't sure why this kept happening. it wasn't my fault that i was skinny or intelligent. i ate as much as the next kid but never gained any weight. my parents had taught me how to eat healthy and it stuck with me because when i started eating like shit, i felt like shit. it was easy to see the connection that healthy food = a healthy, alive amber.

several schools approached me to enroll in gifted programs and instead, my parents decided to move to a remote area and let my brother and i grow up there. the public school gave me a gifted test and put me in different classes even though i had expressed no interest in those classes. as i got older, i kept trying to hide how skinny i was in loose fitting clothes. having to change for gym class and noticing that all of the other girls were much bigger than me was intimidating. i would once again be bullied for being small, even though i had a way with words to get out of almost any situation.

this continued to happen despite me never commenting on any other body but my own. am i supposed to be your size? am i not supposed to be wearing kid's sized clothes in grade 9? are you not supposed to be able to see my hips, collar bone, and ribs protrude out of my skin? well, i'm sorry. but that's just how it's always going to be. and if that meant a life of loneliness and constant bullying, i didn't care. the optimist in my knew that someday things would change.

i spent my teenage years with the same issues; people would shame me for being skinny and others would tell me that they'd kill for my body. let's just say that skinny shaming always outweighed the positive aspect. and over the last five years, i've been able to "put on weight" - where my hips and ribs weren't nearly as noticeable protruding out of my body. but i could just as easily take it off if i exercised or became sick.

at 5'6", a normal BMI should be anywhere from 118lbs to 130lbs. i can't ever recall a time where i came anywhere close to the 130 mark. even today, i still get skinny shamed. i get close friends telling me that i'll "never be able to finish that" or that i've "eaten a lot" - phrases that continuously irk me in numerous ways. in grade 10, i weighed 115lbs. a decade later, i weigh in at about 118lbs and that's after i had a life-threatening illness.

i keep seeing articles every day over the last little while where fashion magazines and photos are actually photoshopping women's bodies to be less skinny. less bony. more "normal" looking. we're shamed for being overweight, for being normal looking, and for being skinny. most of which is thrust upon us and cannot be changed without determination. there's issues for having a thigh gap. there's memes of hot dog legs and bikini bridges. society will always find something wrong with your body and i think that's totally fucked up.

my brother and i have been roughly the same size all our lives and yet, because he's a dude, he doesn't get the same kind of skinny shaming i have experienced. dudes have it a little easier but i'm not saying it's any better.

from what i've been through, i'm just happy to be alive.
love your body because it's the only one you have.

the cheating curve

i wanted to write about how the cystoscopy went this week but i'm actually tired about writing about how terrible my health is and how there aren't any answers for me. the good news is that everything came back normal and they took another urine sample. they put me on 3 days of a new antibiotic to prevent any new infection from occurring and to kill off whatever infection remained.

in the meantime, i'm still waiting for complete feeling and mobility of my left leg and foot to come back entirely and not feel like constant pins and needles. i don't know why it ended up happening this way, but i am not impressed.

great. now let's go on to what is currently keeping me awake:

infidelity.

no, i'm not in a relationship. but i remember when i was. i remember when i was some dude's girlfriend, and i almost want to use that term loosely, since there was never a distinct indication of the time we seemed to go from coworkers to friends to out one night to walking me home to in my bed to seeing each other to wait, what, i'm now your girlfriend to uhhh i don't know how i feel about this to god only knows what.

and 3 months later, that's what it was. i was officially a girlfriend because i was told. i didn't have an opinion in the matter. and i guess you can say that's likely when it all started to go downhill and i realized we were totally wrong for each other. i started wandering off. i started hanging out with dudes where i knew something would happen, because it always did.

and right around this time, this dude, who i was the apparent girlfriend of, and we had been together for four months, decided to tell me that he was in love with me.

me. 
he was in love with me.

you want a sure way to ruin everything? tell a commitaphobe 4 months into barely dating that you're in love with her. yeah, see how that goes.

i always had a sneaking suspicion that he was beginning to know what i was up to some nights when i went out. i was young. i wanted to go out and see my friends. he was a homebody. he wanted to see his friends. i hated his friends. i hated his family. i hated being with him. i hated how every other dude in my life made me feel better about myself - even if there wasn't anything between us at the time. i hated knowing that he told me he loved me and i didn't say anything back. and never did. i hated knowing that i was going to have to break up with him. but i couldn't. i was stubborn and he was in love. i knew he was the one that would have to break up with me in order for this to work out in my favour.

so, i started hanging out more with my friends. and he started hanging out more with some of his new friends. one of his classmates. a girl. a girl who was married and old and "ugly" - his words. he told me she was not his type. but i'm not even sure he knew who his type was. they would do lots of things together. and when time came for us to do the long distance thing, she brought him to see a jays game once and then i met up with them. it just seemed odd that this married woman was hanging out with this 22 year old dude. but as i was looking for a way out, i didn't care.

more months passed and then i got a text from him saying that some girl at a party kissed him. well, hey! here's my way out! except, fuck that. i knew i was better than breaking up with him over text. so, i let it slide. and kept doing what i was doing. i wasn't sleeping around but just keeping my options open. a few weeks later, i came home and was making every excuse not to see him. eventually, he was fed up and broke up with me through a text message. really, dude? uh, okay. you do that then. he obviously took it a lot harder than me (as they.. always tend to do.. i'm just heartless or something) and had to unfriend me on facebook and all that.

and from time to time, i'd lurk a profile or two. guess who he's dating now? that married girl. she might even still be married. i don't fucking know or care. it's just bizarre. and well, at least i know now that i had a right to be suspicious of them in the first place.

i say all of this because in the last year or so, i've been propositioned on more than one occasion to get with married/committed dudes. all with psycho wives/girlfriends. talking to them is one thing. sexting is another. but i don't see what i'm doing or what they're doing as wrong or cheating. it was only when i physically kissed other dudes - that was my line drawn on the cheating curve. yes, i talked. yes, i flirted. yes, i wanted it all. but until there was something physical, i was convinced i was never in the wrong. and currently. this is sort of how i continue to feel about the opportunities i'm presented with.

some have been going on for a year. some come and go in monthly intervals or when i'm mostly just feeling down. some i've even turned down because i don't want to get involved. i'm all for open marriages and open relationships. i'm all for primary partners and polygamy. i've been there. i've done that. and actually, it's kind of nice. gone are the days when one person can give the other what they need. but any of the ones i've been involved with have yet to become physical. in fact, it gets a little hard to believe when a much older, married man, tries to explain to me how much he cares for me. that isn't what i signed up for. and it doesn't necessarily make me feel better about myself when a sketchy, old, married man with kids is saying these things to me.

i'm not a naive girl. and it's because i tend to get myself into these situations over and over again that i know when and how to get out of them. participating in someone else's infidelity is not my fault.

i only wish i knew that earlier.