As I said a couple weeks ago, if I agree with President Obama, you know our shared position must be correct.  Similarly, if I agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan, who though she is fictional is still a woman who gives women a bad name, well, you know that our point of agreement must be a truth. 

And the truth I am forced to confront, sitting here maybe 15 miles from where I met The One, is that Daisy was right when she wished for her daughter to be "a beautiful little fool.  That's the best thing a woman can be in this world."¹  

I never wanted to believe that.  I've never been beautiful or little, and from the age of 16 I saw myself as an academic.  I made my plans on the outrageous basis that a woman could use her mind first and foremost and still have a full life including friends and family.  The reality, of course, is that I'll be 30 in a few months, and if I don't hurry up and develop an eating disorder I'll be alone for the next 30 years.

Now please understand I mean no disrespect to sufferers of eating disorders with the foregoing statement.  It's a shocking statement to grab the reader's attention and dramatize the way I feel about an issue [puts away composition instructor hat].  But five years ago I found a stretch of time in my life where I managed for an extended period to get by on 1,000 calories or less a day, overexercise, and feel light-headed and tired much of the time.  This was during my brief time of non-academic employment, so I didn't need mental energy or awareness to do the job I had at the time.  I managed to get into a size 4, which was clearly. still. not. thin. enough, as evidenced by ultimate rejection at the hands of The Guy I Thought At The Time Was The One.  

Why am I, an outdoors enthusiast raised with healthy habits by parents who did not put pressure on my appearance, so convinced of this?  If I may be arrogant for a moment (hey, it's my blog), I'm smart, well-read, funny, generous with my time, talents, and money, a good cook, a decent home handyperson, a loyal friend, and a knowledgeable sports fan.  The only plausible explanation for my lack of male company at that time, especially given the fact that back then I never left the house without Wearing An Outfit And Perfect Makeup, was that I wasn't thin enough yet.

So, in the quiet of my heart, I determined that I would develop a full-on eating disorder and overexercise even more.  Even though I was already disturbed by how much I could feel my neck vertebrae every time I put my hair back, my goal was to get so skinny that every woman who saw me would think "Bitch" and every man who saw me would think "Geez I hope she's alright."  I also figured that if I forced myself to that level I would be too damn tired to be opinionated and outspoken, and thin-ness and quietness together with the above mentioned qualities would mean that I had finally proved to whomever makes these decisions that I should have a man already, given that a lot of women I know who are not particularly smart, pretty, thin, or otherwise interesting at all have men in their lives.

Had I managed this, would I be single today?  Not bloody likely.  Now, in retrospect, there were flaws in this plan.  The first of which is, no matter how whittled down and worn out I could have made myself, any facade of me as a quiet, calm, non-opinionated woman would not have survived the 2004, 2007, and 2008 baseball postseasons, to say nothing of the 2008 presidential election.  The second flaw came in the form of a string of illnesses and injuries that, well, I won't get graphic, but I will say that extreme dieting and over-overexercising might hospitalize me these days instead of just making me tired.

After all that happened, around the time of my social dismissal for not being cool/cute enough for the folks my age at the church I was attending, I made my decision that my life was not about life anymore, it was about work.  I redoubled my wacky academic job search and prayed fervently that God would get me the heck out of my beloved Philly 'burbs already so I could start over.  Now, I had a vague notion that that starting over would somehow, magically involve getting back to a size 4, becoming outwardly calm, and finding a guy in some new place, but there you are.

In the midst of all this, I met The One.  Now had I met him at a bar, not work, we wouldn't have talked for five minutes.  I would have grabbed my best friend and run out the door.  Why do I say such a thing about the only person I've ever truly loved?  For one, he's beautiful.  Since I never made it to Skinny Bitch territory, I tend to avoid beautiful men--too much pressure.  Also, I wasn't at the level of thin-ness I had as a goal (and still am not there today, alas), and so I kept thinking, "What is his problem?  I know I'm not attractive yet, so is this some kind of joke?  Why doesn't he leave me alone?"  Third, I was 200% focused on my career and desperate to get the hell out of Dodge.  Romance was not on the itinerary.

You can't pay for your drink and run out the door of your workplace though, so day after day we talked and eventually, terrified all the while, I fell in love.  And, getting back to Daisy Buchanan, I'm neither beautiful nor little but I certainly did make a fool of myself.  I was vulnerable to The One in every way a person can be vulnerable.  I allowed him onto the vanishingly short list of People I Don't Put On An Act For.  I believed his assurances that I didn't need to give up either dessert or solid food on a lifelong basis to be worthy of him physically.

Then, as the job market turned, I got a ticket the hell out of Dodge.  There was never--and hadn't been for years--any question that I was going; my soul wouldn't have survived staying here in the place I love.  Distance led to all the problems you can imagine between me and The One, and I caused several more that have nothing to do with distance.  Perhaps a lot of it was fueled by cowardice.  Perhaps I was retreating from a lifetime of knowing that everywhere we'd go, from church to the grocery store and everywhere in between, every woman we saw would be thinking, "What is he doing with her?"  And I'd feel guilty if we had daughters who took after me and not him; any daughters of mine won't be "beautiful little fools" either unless they're a lot luckier than I.

So here I am.  Alone.  In Philly.  Happy to be with what's left of my family.  Desperate to get the hell out of here.  Fully cognizant that I'll need to develop an eating disorder if I don't want to be alone forever.  In pain.  Tired.         

¹Dear readers, I'm sure that quotation is inexact.  I'm a few hundred miles away from my personal library and will fix it when I get home, I promise!