My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

--> A year ago today, I was supposed to get married to the man I’d loved for seven years.  I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of her wedding day – in fact, it wasn’t until we hit a visa dead end and realized marriage was the best way out that I even let myself believe in the idea of ‘I do’. I grew up with a solid feeling that I would probably wind up married with kids because most people do.  I never allowed myself to dream of a Prince Charming, a love of my life, because I was deeply afraid that if I could find someone to love that much, he would never love me back.  In fact, I wasn’t even sure someone I didn’t love that much would ever love me back.  The best I could allow myself to hope for was to meet someone I liked, who liked me as well, and who would overlook my physical appearance (which I considered to be my biggest flaw) and agree to spend his adult life with me.  We would be content, if not googly-eyed in love.  Wedding dreams don’t really wor

(Warning: this post contains some generalizations about Italian men.   This is not in any way intended to be offensive, nor does it represent and inflexible prejudice on my part – I’m perfectly happy to amend my judgments at any time.   These views are mine alone and are based only on my relatively limited experience of traveling in Italy.) “It’s going to be your ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’!”   “You’ll never come back because you’ll fall in love with a hot Italian guy and have his babies and live there forever!”   “It’s just like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’.”   Well, first of all, if it were the latter book it would be titled simply “Eat.”   Or maybe “Eat, Write, Maybe Make Out.”   But overall comments like those above, which represent the great majority of reactions to my announcement that I’m taking three months off from work and moving to Italy to live off savings and write , have left me with a sardonic half-smile.   I usually say something dismissive about how Itali

My head fills with blood, pumping in a rapid thud, thud in my ears.  My shoulders and wrists ache, my hands are slipping toward the front of my mat, and my hamstrings refuse to budge further as I attempt to 'ground my heels'.  The bead of sweat that slipped down between my breasts during an earlier pose is now creeping back up my sternum, sliding past my throat and up behind my ear into my hair.  All I can think is how much longer, how many more breaths, oh right, breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth, breathe into the pose and try to relax because the next one will probably kill us. "Don't forget to relax your jaw."  The tall, handsome yoga teacher's big paddle feet go past the edge of my visual field.  I try to remain in the moment but I can't help cracking a grin.  He's been telling us to relax our jaws periodically throughout this class and every time I react internally like a 13 year old boy.  Same deal when he has us open our hips

--> It’s been a rough couple of weeks since I got back from London.   I went to meet my friend Tess’s baby (he’s as delicious as he looks in the photos) and to see my good friends, but I also went to confront my past there and kind of reclaim my territory – I liked to say I was going to ‘piss all over London’ with a wicked grin on my face, but as the trip approached I got progressively more terrified, until my dad had to give me some of his anti-anxiety meds to stop me hyperventilating in the office the day of my flight. As expected, being in London was really hard.   One day I walked the southern boundary of ‘our’ old stomping grounds and I could feel the blood pulsing in my brain and heart and I knew I had to change routes and go out of my way.   I likened it to touring a haunted house: ghosts of my relationship were everywhere, reminders of how happy I’d been and how long he’d lied to me, how much I’d put up with it… I walked past pubs where I’d cried on friends’ sho

I never thought I would miss having more body at my disposal, but I hate how this new(ish) single life I'm living feels like a loss of mass, like I'm missing part of me all day, every day. I don't mean just metaphorically, either. I remember, early on in my relationship being solidly long-term, marveling at the feeling of knowing another body so intimately that it was almost an extension of my own – I could touch it and interact with it almost as freely as I could my own, and that freedom came without the chains of disgust in which my own body was wrapped. Similarly, I found I loved 'belonging' bodily to someone else. Once I became less twitchy about him randomly touching parts of my body I usually preferred to 'pose' in preparation, like my stomach, I was filled with happiness at the thought that he might just reach under the dinner table and lay a hand on my leg, or slide a hand across my lower back while we moved through a crowd. The idea of

Have you ever been through something so traumatic that when you look back on it from a healthier space you almost can’t believe you survived it?   That’s how I feel when I re-read the blog posts I wrote during the end of my engagement; I can see how fine that last thread I was hanging from was, and how close I came to it snapping every single day.   I can still remember, on a visceral level, just how painful simply existing was, and I’m genuinely shocked I didn’t self-harm or try to end myself. These days, as I creep up on a date which, in a parallel universe, is my eighth anniversary with the best man I’ve ever known, and which is now just another April day on which I don’t even know who I agreed to marry a year ago – these days I’m mostly better.   I’m currently experiencing a pretty tough downswing in mood, brought on by an ill-advised trip to Mexico with one of the more intimately loved-up couples I know, so it’s not all rainbows and moonbeams, but I’m

--> One of the most difficult things about dating in the aftermath of my last relationship is the question of when to oh-so-casually mention THE WORST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME and how to paint it in an authentic but not terrifying light.   It’s complicated stuff: bring it up too early on or emphasize the trauma too much and I give the misleading impression that the betrayal still rules my life, but mention it too offhandedly or gloss over the pain I’m still working through and I give the equally inaccurate impression that I’m completely over it – or worse, that I wasn’t completely devastated because I didn’t invest my entire self into the relationship. It also brings up the complex issue of my self-confidence.   Nearly everyone assumes that my self-worth must have been completely shattered by what my ex did to me, but it wasn’t.   Which is kind of odd, given how fragile (at times almost non-existent) it was before.   Yet somehow, although the betrayal destroyed m