1) a personal issue I've had for a long time now;
b) photography and posterity.
I'll save the photography for the end to lighten the mood.
Issue one: Ondrea Tucci and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, body image
Derek leaves for three months in eight days.
While I'm going to miss him very much, three months away isn't all that much, and I'll have school going on, so the time will not go dully by. Derek mentioned that he'd write me letters while he's gone (which I am fucking THRILLED about. Dan was deployed for...uh...nine months, I think...and I wrote him quite a bit and it always gutted me that he couldn't be bothered to write me a single letter back. Despite my references to written letters being something I wanted), and I'm pretty good at dealing with (read: compartmentalizing) separation, so I'm not worried or sad about the coming weeks.
What I AM concerned about is my god damn awful body.
I still have about twenty five to thirty pounds left to go before I'm at a number my brain is happy with, but I don't know how the image of myself will play at that number. I will be at a lower weight than I was when Derek and I met, and I will be at a lower weight than I was before I got knocked up with my son (though I never want to be the weight I was before my daughter ever again. I hit that weight when I was homeless and struggling in Vegas, and I looked like a fuckin' mummified corpse. Yuck). I remember hating my body even at that weight, but I didn't hate it so much that I wouldn't take hawt newdz.
Something most people know about me but is a truly forgettable fact (and I like it that way) is that I used to work in the sex industry. I was a stripper, I was a cam girl, and I was on the appointment setting side of an escort service (or a phone pimp, as I loved referring to myself as, even though that's exceptionally far from the truth) with a boss that was very not subtle about moving me to the other side of the service (i.e. ho'ing it up in a major way for major money). There is even an amateur porn of me floating around somewhere, and my deepest horror is that it's presented to me one day, because I remember doing it, and ew. I don't regret it, but I am not happy about the memory. I made a great deal of money doing the former two jobs, and even more money with the latter, though that had absolutely zero to do with my skill. The truth is, while yes, talented cam girls and talented strippers tend to make more money, the market in the early aughts wasn't terribly saturated, so if you were doing those jobs, you were raking in cash whether you were talented or not.
Being completely honest, I land in the "not" camp. I have lied through my god damn teeth about being good at both jobs, but the truth is that I am awkward, uncoordinated, and uncomfortable in my body because I god damn hate it.
I've written before about how I have a love/hate relationship with being invisible to men anymore (sorry to not include ladies! But I have ALWAYS been oblivious if ladies were interested, because I was never hoping for their sexual attention. I don't mean to be disregarding!), and for the most part, I quite enjoy not being subjected to the catcalling and unsolicited dick pics and everything else I used to get when I was younger and thinner and hotter (and running in single circles where that kind of thing wasn't necessarily surprising, but who's counting?), but a part of me is depressed that I don't have an outlet for validation outside of my inner circle that's eager to let me know how hot I am. I have always taken a very "you tell me I'm sexy and you have sex with me because you HAVE to" approach to the compliments I get from my partners, because that's honestly what I think. The validation that comes from a one night stand is equally as tricky, because while it could be looked at as being so hot that someone just HAS to fuck you ASAP, it could also be that people are just desperate to get laid. Which....no surprise...is the option I choose.
What the fuck does this have to do with my husband leaving, you are probably not asking. Well, I will tell you.
Before my boudoir shoot, I was obsessed with looking at lingerie so I could find the perfect pieces that would make me look sexy and slender and the absolute hottest I could look. I have always thought lingerie was absolutely impractical, and as I am a pretty fervent practitioner of no muss no fuss sex, the putting on and then removal of lingerie, plus the delicate care it takes to keep it clean, is just too much god damn effort.
As previously discussed in an earlier blog, it's been a solid two years of mirror avoidance for me. I have been hating my figure for a very long time now, and I can look at myself without hoping I'm struck by a solitary meteorite that would put me out of my misery forever. I've gained enough confidence that I've been wondering about what kind of photos I can take for my husband while he's gone. Photos of the hawt newdz variety.
Now.
If I'm being frank, the vast majority of me doesn't want to do this at all. Only partially because I still absolutely loathe my body, and I struggle to see how anybody would want to put their penis anywhere around me. Most of me doesn't want to do this because...like...who takes a three month vacation away from their spouse and uses that time to fantasize...about their spouse?? This is totally the time where all of the porn that you don't want to look at when you're home because you don't want your fat spouse to find it and fly downward into a horribly hideous self hate spiral can be looked at without fear of being "caught". I don't have a problem with porn, while we're on the subject...I have a problem with my self image, and the horribly unrealistic standards of sexuality and beauty that pornography projects. But masturbation fodder is a thousand percent understandable. Probably seems like a conflicting ideology, but here we are. Because Derek has low T, and our sex life has taken an absolute fucking nose dive for the last few years, the presence of porn has an additional level to it for me: if there's sex drive and a boner, and the immediate thought is "I'm going to chill with some porn and my bare dick" rather than "dear sweet lord, I need to fuck my wife because she's awesome at the sex stuff", I take it personally. I feel less than, because sex drive is already so rare for my husband (according to him, anyway) that not utilizing it to bone me seems deeply intentional. I'm getting off track. The next three months for Derek is seriously the perfect time to indulge in porn because what fat wife is there to stop him? Not this one, that's for sure! So why would I ruin that by sending pictures of my tuber-like naked body when there are curvier, thinner, hotter, younger women with breasts that do not, in any way, resemble fried eggs nailed to a wall? I shouldn't.
I've thought about it, though, and then I get into a couple of hours where I look up lingerie because forcing yourself to dress in a way that is supposed to be sexy is natural and not at all weird.
And I'll look at lingerie and think about how cute it is and think about how cute I could look in it and then I delete everything from my cart and remind myself of what I actually look like, and why would anybody want to see that kind of thing when they're on a three month trip away from the tangible reality of it?
I miss hating myself in such a way where I still allowed for the idea that people wanted to see my naked body in all of its honesty. I hate myself in a way now where I am thoroughly convinced of how NOT sexy I am, and just being kind of resigned to the fact that I'm always going to be a woman that men settle for because their preferred reality is unattainable (which should tell them something about society, but that's for another day). High Fidelity did a pretty good job of explaining that even the hottest of fantasy partners eventually becomes reality to the person they're with, and the sex gets old and the hotness gets stale and the unsexy underwear is discovered and there are nights without fucking and no matter how fucking gorgeous and sexy someone is, there will always always ALWAYS be a "grass is greener" moment or moments in those relationships.
Understanding that doesn't help put me in a head space where I think it's logical to either send my husband off with, or plan on sending him, personal nudes.
Issue two: I'll regret this when I have Alzheimer's.
It occurred to me yesterday that I will eventually forget days like yesterday, where Derek and I drove around the entirety of the island looking for photos to take on a rainy day that was grey and dull and not the greatest, photo-wise.
So I told myself I would take more photos for posterity and upload them in here so I could reflect back when I'm older and either remember the photos and have a nice little flashback, or still completely forget the day, but have photos of it to shove my horrible memory in my face.
So, here are the photos I took yesterday during our three hour drive around the island:
The Makapu'u lookout. I have a shitload of water droplets on my lens, and they're refracting light and being distracting, but the view is still pretty. I had never stopped at this lookout before. Makapu'u Lighthouse is next.
The initial plan had been to find surfers that were defying good sense and surfing during the crazy swells we've got going on right now. Instead, these guys just stood at the edge of Makapu'u being reasonable.
Driving on the H3, and the pali were just fucking lousy with mist. I knew I wasn't going to get a "good" photo of this driving 60 mph down the highway, but I wanted to at least try and get SOMETHING. This is my favorite way to see these ridges. I'm not sure they're ever more gorgeous and dramatic. They're beautiful in sunlight on a clear day, as well, but there's definitely something to the mist-laden aesthetic.
So there we go. I'm going to do my best to get better about throwing in just regular photos that are regular to detail my life here a bit better.
Which reminds me, I DEFINITELY have some photographer photos that I want to put in here, as well, but that's for another day.
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