Plain Jane

Note from Jane: I wrote this post about a week ago but I didn't publish it because after I reread it I felt like it was a steaming pile of bullshit. I doubted I could follow the advice I offered at the end. I've tried to pay attention to the way I've treated my friends and other women in general the last few days, and I quickly realized I have a lot of work to do to be the supportive woman I expect us all to be. So, since I've been making an effort to change my ways, I feel like I can now publish this post without feeling like a complete hypocrite.

You would think the older women get the more secure we would feel. You'd expect us to get comfortable in our own skin and stop comparing ourselves to other women. Not so much.

We get so in touch with our insecurities that we recognize that other women have the same insecurities and we use that information to prey on each other. Remember when you were a kid and another girl was mean to you? Your mom said "She's just jealous" or when you got a little older she'd say "She's just insecure and it makes her feel better about herself to make you feel bad about yourself." It made little sense at the time but mom had it right, as cliched as it sounds, and we're still jealous of each other and try to tear each other down.

When a guy has a problem with another guy, he'll confront him face-to-face. He'll just say he has a problem and they either hash it out or duke it out until it's resolved. Women are much more subtle. We can make a jab with a sharp butcher knife feel like a compliment at first. We can make sabotage seem like a kind gesture on the surface.

Have you ever heard a woman say "I love your new haircut. It makes you look soooo young." It sounds like a compliment, right? But any woman who has been on the receiving end of that will walk away wondering "Does that mean I looked old before?" Or how about this one: "That's such a cute dress! It makes you look so thin!" That's a nice, backwards way of saying "You're kind of fat but that dress helps hide it." And it's not just a figment of our imagination because we all know we've said something similar to someone we thought looked like crap before she finally got her hair fixed or who's put on a few pounds and needs to camouflage it.

A few months ago, Gregarious Girl had knee surgery that kept her from her normal gym routine for several weeks. After she was able to get back into the swing of things she told some co-workers how good it felt to be working out again and how well her workouts were going. Guess what showed up at the office the next day? A big box of assorted donuts. Sabotage disguised as a kind gesture because one woman got worried someone was going to look better than she did.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical. I'm certain most women have genuine friendships. I know I do. But some of us specialize in being frenemies. And it only takes one frenemy in the group to start the back-stabbing and suspicions. I have to admit I've been a frenemy before. In my defense, though, even if it is a crappy defense, I learned to be a frenemy from other frenemies; they made me suspicious of all the other friends, thus, turning me into a frenemy. And the really, really ugly part: they made it seem okay to be a frenemy.

The really crappy thing about frenemies is that we genuinely care about our friends but every now and then we get really jealous and the claws come out. We don't want them to come out. We can't help it! It's survival instinct (maybe?) -- we have to fight to make ourselves feel better or go down in flames fueled by insecurity.

When I was about 8-years old a friend's mom gave me a copy of the book Little Women for my birthday. It was age inappropriate, really, and completely went over my head when I tried to read it. A few years later I read it and really liked it. It's about four magnificent sisters and their struggles to overcome their character flaws. Isn't that all of us? Unless you're in serious denial or have an ego the size of Texas, you're aware of some of your flaws and you probably struggle with keeping them under control.

I think maybe a character flaw of womankind is our insecurities and attacking each other to hide them. We cause a distraction by pointing out someone who's gained five pounds so maybe no one will notice we've gained ten. We point out the co-worker who sometimes doesn't get her work done on time as a smokescreen to hide our own perpetually-flawed reports. We gossip about a friend's relationship problems to make our own seem less serious and talk about how weird another friend's idiosyncrasies are so maybe we can feel more normal. Have you done it? I know I have. And I hate myself for it.

The way men compete is easier on them. They play football, or poker, or lift weights to see who is better at something and there's a clear winner; but we have to try to out dress, out cook, out accessorize, out decorate, and out pretty each other. It's exhausting! And expensive! I'm waving the white flag of surrender on behalf of all women. Let's stop being the kind of little women who pick at each other and start being the women who support each other and cheer each other on. Who's with me? Anyone?

I've decided the fastest, easiest way to get over someone is for them to tell you that you're not good enough for them. Usually the hardest thing to figure out after a break up is what you did wrong, or what's wrong with you that makes you completely unloveable to the person that walked away.

A side note on this topic: Manfriend tells me that sometimes men break up with women for no real disernable reason --there just isn't the thing there that needs to be there to make it click. Maybe you're just not his "type," maybe he's just not attracted to you, or whatever, but there's nothing really "wrong." But women feel like there has to be a solid reason and we drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out what it is, but the reason might just be that the guy doesn't feel any chemistry. I guess I believe him because his manformation is usually accurate, but at the same time I still think there has to be something "wrong" with me if a guy doesn't like me.

Anyway, Heartbreaker made it easy on me by telling me. Even though he didn't say specifically what it is about me that isn't good enough for him, just knowing that's what he thinks makes it final. I know that no matter what I do it won't change anything. Even if it did appear to change things, I would never really trust that it had truly changed. Because at one time he did think I'm not good enough for him, I would always think I'm not thin enough, pretty enough, smart enough, or grown up enough for him to really want to be with me. And I would live in fear that another woman would come along who is all of those things, and he would leave me for her.

I've been surprised at how easy it is to keep my mind off of him. The first couple of days weren't that easy. I kept thinking about what he said and what I said back, and replaying the hurtfulness of it over and over again in my mind. But after that, a magical kind of calm has quieted the chatter in my mind because I don't have to wonder over and over "What's wrong with me? What did I do wrong?"

I know he didn't think he was doing me a favor by saying what he said, and it sure didn't feel like a favor at the time, but it turns out it was really a good thing.  

It sucks to be stupid. I would know because I did the dumbest thing I've done in a really long time last week.

I have long thought, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks this, that guys have a weird sixth sense about women who've love them (or liked them, or whatever) and they can tell when we're picking up the pieces and getting on with our lives without them.

I went through a purging kind of mood last week where I decided I had a lot of emotional junk I'd been holding onto for too long, and I decided I needed to forgive people who had hurt me, let go of the past, and move forward. I actually reprogrammed my Heartbreaker's number back into my phone. And what do you know? The very next night he texted me. How did he know that I'd forgiven him? How did he know that I had decided I was up to the challenge of being just friends with him again? It had to be his damn sixth sense. (A side note about this sixth sense: I know it's real. Just ask my friend, Gregarious Girl, because she's going through something similar.) 

So, apparently with me to forgive is also to forget, because within a matter of minutes I found myself walking through his front door again. It was the same, but different, because I was a little more cautious. I had resolved that it would be different. But I forgot how easily I am sucked into his games. I swear I floated home on a cloud of happiness. I really, really liked this guy.

Even on the way home I wondered when I would hear from him again. Would this time really be different, or would he freak out and decide he had made a huge mistake even hanging out with me again? Imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me the next day. Color me shocked! I only had to wait hours, not days, to hear from him. 

This made me think even more that this time was going to be different. He must've really missed hanging out with me. It was a fabulous day! All my patience was paying off. And then the bomb fell. The e-mail I had become too familiar with popped up in my inbox again. "It was fun, but you're a really good friend and I would never want to ruin that."

Oh. My. God. Seriously? I should've known. The signs were there again. I should say I have no one to blame but myself, but I would like to assign a little bit of the blame to him. I mean, come on. He knows I am putty in his hands and he abuses that power he has over me. I know this is a rambling peice-of-crap post, all I'm saying is it turns out guys are big jerks who use us to prop up their sad egos. One minute you think you could possibly love them, then you see what they really are, and you kind of hate them. The most frustrating thing is how quickly I can be talked back into crossing the line back to love again. 

My blog can also be found on Wordpress now. I'm not in love with the style of my Wordpress version yet and I have to figure out how to change the URL, so I'm going to keep both for a while. So, if you're browsing around Wordpress and you want to check on the new page, I think the URL is: http://teressia.wordpress.com.

I'm not very proud to admit this, but I went through a phase a few years ago during which I purchased a lot of celebrity gossip magazines. One especially guilty pleasure was USWeekly. It's pure trash! But they do have the fun "Who Wore It Better" feature, so it seems like it's not just a celebrity gossip magazine, but also a fashion mag.

One of the regular spreads that I can't stop myself from purusing should I find an USWeekly in my hands (a very, very rare occasion these days, I swear!) is the layout called "Stars: They're Just Like Us!" It shows pictures of celebrities doing everyday things like ordering a sandwich at a deli, pushing their kids in a stroller while shopping, or talking on the phone at Starbucks. Then you think "Hey, I order sandwiches! I talk on my phone at Starbucks! I'm just like Kirsten Dunst!"

I'm starting to think that, just like Jennifer Aniston and I share a lot of similarities (we both wear flip flops with jeans and lighter lip gloss in the summer), men and women share a lot of similarities. A few weeks ago Manfriend sent me an e-mail at work,so I knew something was up because we're not really at-work-e-mailers. He had totally morphed into a chick -- "Do you want to hang out sometime soon? I'm a mess." The poor guy was in a tailspin over a really confusing girl.

He filled me in on the details later that week. He was kind of a wreck, and as much as it sucked to see my friend looking like a whipped puppy, I have to confess I was a little...well, giddy. Not because he was sad, but because there, right in front of me in living color, was a man who was sad over a woman. I had begun to think this was something that never happened. I thought all men were unfeeling, selfish snakes that, if touched at all, should be held cautiously by the head and kept at a distance so they wouldn't bite.

I thought "Wow, guys are just like us! We're not so different after all." I keep thinking part of the problem with men and women trying to relate to each other and figure each other out is the "us" vs. "them" way of thinking. I mean, are gender differences really that big, or would we benefit if we could just learn to relate to each other as people first, then men and women second? I don't know. I can't decide. Every time I think of a man as a person first, then as a man, he does something that makes me think "That's such a guy thing to do!"

There are some things that are probably always going to be different about us. Men are probably never going to go to the bathroom in groups during a night out. Women are probably never going to sit on the couch watching football all day with the remote control in one hand and the other hand down our pants. I'm just saying maybe we have more in common what we think. Perhaps, and this is just a theory in the very early stages, but perhaps, men aren't the enemy after all.

I've hated the sound of crickets chirping for as years, and I knew it was because the sound make me anxious and scared, but I didn't know why. Until I saw the movie "My Sister's Keeper," about a family with a terminally ill child. When one person in the family is that sick, the whole family is sick. Normal as you know it is gone.

It was the summer between fifth and sixth grade. That was the summer I really learned to eavesdrop: you hold your breath so you don't make a sound and listen with your squint your eyes so you can hear all the things they want to hide from you. It was the summer I learned to hate a quiet house on a hot night, with the windows open and the sound of the crickets filling in the gaps while we all laid in bed wondering what was going to happen and trying not to be the one crying loud enough to be heard. It was the summer I loved, and then hated, bologna sandwiches because they are what I ate almost every day for lunch while my parents were at the hospital. And it was the summer I learned that when the phone rings in the middle of the night it's not good news. It was the summer I learned to get dressed fast so my parents could get to the hospital when the phone did ring.

It was the summer I learned to lay awake all night on my grandma's couch while my little sister slept on the fuzzy rug on the floor or in the recliner across the room because if her phone rang I wanted to hear the update. It was the summer I started hating hospitals and their smells, their quiet halls, their dimly-lit rooms.

It was the summer I learned to hide tears. It was the summer I started writing my thoughts down in letters to people who would never see them. It was the summer when I first saw pity in someone's eyes when they looked at me. It was the summer the sound of my mom crying made me want to throw up.

It was the fall I learned to quit telling my family what happened at school because whatever it was, wasn't as important as what had happened at the hospital. It was the fall that I never knew what my friends were talking about when they asked if I had watched their favorite show on TV the night before because I had been at the hospital to see her. It was the fall when I could finally see her everyday again. It was the fall that my mom got to know the nurses and the nuns at the hospital better than she knew me. It was the fall that food became a friend to me.  

It was the winter I felt completely unimportant. It was the winter I became selfish and wanted my parents to notice me again. It was the winter I gave up mattering to anyone and settled for being in the background. It was the winter I started hating the smell of the rehabilitation center and its smell, the sound of moaning coming from half-closed doors, the community dining room with food spilled on the floor, and its dimly-lit rooms. It was the winter I started borrowing clothes from her closet because she would never know.

It was the spring she came home. It was the spring we all learned to laugh together again. It was the spring I learned I still did matter. It was the spring I learned to live with a toddler in a 21-year old's body. It was the spring my 5-year old sister and my 21-year old sister had more in common with each other than either of them had in common with me. It was the spring I felt like I didn't fit in all over again. It was the spring I learned to be patient.

And then it was summer again. It was the summer the 21-year old toddler started growing up. It was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. It was the summer we got back to living.

I managed to drag myself to church yesterday. I know, I know...what kind of church let her in the door, right? Turns out they don't ask many questions there so even though I swear like a sailor and am seriously addicted to gossip they still let me in if I sneak in 10 minutes late, sit in the back row, and leave during the last song. I haven't been in a while so the early service on a summer holiday weekend was the perfect time to ease back in.

Bored with the kind of lame, very repetitive music, I flipped through the program and waited for the main event. I noticed the sermon was titled "Giving up vs. Giving in" and I thought maybe this could be applicable after all. I've kind of given up on things lately: my appearance (my hair is so frizzy it looks like a Brillo pad, I haven't had a bikini wax in about three months, I haven't been to the gym in a week, and yesterday I ate five cupcakes), dating, and seriously persuing any dreams beyond sleeping in on Saturday.

Right away I did what I do best. I started comparing myself to my friends. I thought of a friend, we'll call her Gregarious Girl, who recently decided that rather than sitting at the bar during happy hour waiting to make a connection with a random guy, she'd take a more proactive approach. She's trying online dating. She's tried to get me to join in the, um, fun, but I just can't convince myself that it's a good idea for me. I live through her good, lukewarm, and even downright awful dating experiences vicariously. But God bless her, she keeps on trying.

And then I thought of another friend, an eternal optimist, apparently. We went to high school together and lost touch shortly after graduation. Just a few days ago we reconnected via Facebook. She was the girl in school everyone wanted to be friends with. She was fun, friendly, and cute as can be, and it turns out that status, coupled with her stories of love and loss, make her the Elizabeth Taylor of my world. Even though she's been through serious heartache, she's still the same sweet girl and I think if love knocked on her door again, she'd let it in and give it another try.

Thinking about these women made me feel like a complete failure. I always thought I was tenacious, but I haven't been through the tough times and heartbreaks these friends have been through and I've already given up. They haven't. They're keepin' on keepin' on!

I don't want to get too preachy on anyone here, but one of the things the pastor asked yesterday was how does fear control you? Have you withdrawn from relationships because of the pain of past failures? It's true; I have let fear have a little too much room in my life. At my age, everyone has a past, right? How do you use pains from the past as stepping stones instead of letting them weigh you down? I guess you have to get to the point where the desire to love someone becomes bigger than the fear and the desire to withdraw. The pastor said that instead of giving up because of our past failures we have to give in to God. Even if you don't believe in that, I'm sure you can agree that it's better to give in to whatever might happen if you take a chance than it is to give up on anything happening at all.

Right? Sure, right. My brain's got it, but my rejected heart isn't quite ready to jump to the next stepping stone just yet. I'm going to keep hanging out with Gregarious Girl and my personal Liz Taylor and hope I can learn something from them.

I removed this post because it's not the kind of thing I normally post, but due to popular demand, it's back.

10.  He likes mojitos. (Since this list was originally posted, Curt has clarified he doesn't drink mojitos, he just had a lot of questions about them one night in Vegas.)

9.    He's my friend, and I only hang out with awesome people, so he's awesome by association.

8.    I suspect he has a secret love for Texas A&M sports teams. Gig 'em, Aggies!

7.    He regularly donates blood. (Give me a break. Ten things is a lot to come up with.)

6.    He reads my blog to get in touch with his inner girl.

5.    His kids are cool.

4.    When I break my weedeater he brings his over to finish edging my yard.

3.    When I go to the bowling alley to hang out with him and Betty, he buys me beer and pizza.

2.    One time I left the poker table to get a snack, and he played my hand better than I would have, so I won the pot. All $7.75.

1.    He's smart enough to have married Betty!

I sat at lunch and listened to my friend describe her aunt's penchant for buying fabulous, impractical things. She has a lot of nice china and crystal, she said, because I guess she thought she was going to get married, but she never did.

I knew exactly what that implied and tried not to let the look of recognition show on my face. Single but hopeful women sometimes live our lives in a holding pattern. We don't think our life will really start until we get married, and we're so hopeful that'll happen that we make a hobby out of planning for it. Some of us pre-plan the wedding by picking out all the stuff we love in bridal magazines and taking mental notes at every wedding we attend, some of us buy the dress and stash it in the back of the closet, and I guess some of us deck the house out like we think it should be for a couple, buying stuff we think will impress our future mother-in-law.

The risk we holding-pattern women run is that we make all the preparations for a happily ever after that never comes. I thought about what my friend had said about her aunt for the rest of the day. Which is worse, I wondered? Holding on to hope and then being disappointed when your dream never comes to fruition, or giving up hope for fear of disappointment, and becoming a hard, jaded person?

Recently I became so convinced that all my chances are gone and that I needed to let my hope die, that I really felt like something in my life had died. Hope was replaced by empty, and I have to admit that feels pretty crappy. Then I thought, what comes after death? I believe heaven comes after death; and I think heaven is good. So, if a part of my life has died, the part that believed in happily ever after, doesn't it seem like something good, something heavenly, will follow? How? I don't know.   

The truth is I don't know how I feel right now. I don't know if I'm ready to hope again because hoping means risk. I don't know if I want to risk being completely disappointed and hurt again. For the most part, I do feel empty and have written off the hope of love, but every now and then a glimmer of hope shows up. It's an annoying little part of my personality that I can't seem to completely kill off.

Part of me wants to believe that it really is darkest before the dawn, and that something heavenly is just around the corner. There's still a part of me that wants to buy the dress and have it ready in the back of the closet "just in case." But mostly I just want to believe again, and this time I want to believe with all I have. Not just say I believe while telling myself it might not happen, so don't count on it because you'll just be disappointed when it doesn't. I'm reviving my hope. 

I've noticed that lately I spend more time with guy friends than with girl friends. I'm not one of those girls, either, if that's what you're thinking. Everyone knew one of those girls in high school, or maybe in college, who didn't have a single girl friend to hang out with. Those girls always said "I just get along better with guys. Girls are too catty." This was secret, girl speak for "I have a trashy, whorelike quality, so girls don't really like me. Because I sleep with guys they like or used to date." Those girls always had a story steeped in drama that went something like this: "My friend, Christine, (well, she used to be my friend) totally stabbed me in the back because her boyfriend, Jeff, liked me. And I didn't even do anything to get Jeff to like me. We were just friends, and even if he did like me, I didn't like him back. We were just in the same math class. So, she started telling everyone that I'm a slut."

Anyway, I'm not one of those girls. I have girl friends, I just don't see them as much as I see my guy friends. I attribute this to the fact that they don't have as many real responsibilities. No guy has ever said "I would meet you for a beer after work, but the house isn't going to clean itself." Or "I wish I could meet you for a movie but I have got to get to all this laundry that's been piling up." No, single guys don't make that stuff a priority. And married guys don't do that stuff. Their wives do.

So, a couple of weeks ago I started worrying about what it says about me if I spend more time with men than with women. I started wondering why I have more male friends than female friends. I think it's because guys see me as one of them. This is cool for me because I get lots of insight into the male mind. This is not cool for me because it means I am officially no longer a threat to any woman on this planet. Don't worry that I'll take your man because he doesn't even notice I'm a woman. I might as well change my name to Mike and start wearing sports team T-shirts everywhere. My "buddies" (that's what guys call their other guy friends) wouldn't even notice, because, hey, I'm just one of the guys. How am I supposed to use all this valuable insight into the male mind that I've gained if there are no men in my life to be insightful about?

I don't know where I went wrong. I am the type of girl who never leaves the house without wearing lipstick, who matches my shoes to my top, and makes smelling good a priority. I'm not a beauty queen, but I'm not one of those people you see in the store and think "Is that a man or a woman?" I'm clearly a girl. So, why do guys think I'm one of them?

The only thing I can think of is that since I'm single, and I don't have a lot of real responsibilities, I haven't really grown up yet. This makes me kind of like a lot of guys. I rarely cook; in fact, I still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner a couple of times a month. I blow off household chores until the next day if I have a chance to meet a friend for a drink instead. I put off buying nice furniture until I have a reason to do so. And I'm ashamed to admit this one, but I have been known to pull a pair of jeans out of the hamper, smell them, shake them out, and wear them again in a bind. I mean, I've done this in the last month. I know, it's gross and I'm not proud of it, but when do I have time to do laundry? I had to meet my buddies at the bar to watch the game last night.

In reviewing the last paragraph, I've realized that I may in fact be a guy between 23 and 27 years old. No wonder my guy friends think I'm one of them. I now know why they pulled me out of the "chick" category and flicked me into the "dude" category. Hmmm, while I'm here I'll try to get some more insight for you girls and pass it along as I can. Stay tuned!