Drive-By Healing

I was talking to Joann, one of the nurses I work with, who is also a healing energy practitioner, the other day, and after hearing my story about how I spent the night before crying while listening to Aretha Franklin in my bedroom, she walked over, placed one hand behind my head, at the base of my neck, and the other on my forehead. "Breathe," she said.
I breathed, and though she didn't tell me to, I closed my eyes. I could feel the faintest vibration coming out of her fingertips, so faint I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or if it was real. She brushed her hands down my back, across my shoulders, as if she was sweeping something off of me. It took all of about five minutes. I wasn't sure if it would have any effect, really, and was prepared to just shrug and thank her for trying. I didn't feel anything immediately, but as I was walking out to my car to go get lunch, it felt like my shoulders and upper back were actually getting warmer. I also felt more energetic than I have in weeks, as if she had swept the cobwebs away and I could actually see some light. I finished my Sunday as I always do, with my two-hour knitting class, teaching ten women how to knit scarves and pulling up my Etsy site on my Kindle to show them what I have created from yarn and polyfil. They were a lovely group, so eager to learn and complimentary of my weird little hobby of knitting animals. I left feeling elated, the kind of elation that comes from doing what you love and having your talents recognized, silly as they may be.
This was such an incredible turnaround from the day before, when, yes, I was listening to the same song by Aretha Franklin on repeat ("Ain't No Way"), and crying to the point where I was worried I might crack a rib. I felt like I had an actual hole in my abdomen, and I lay there on my bed, curled up like a salad-bar shrimp trying to suppress that ache. I wanted to message Gino and tell him that he is a special kind of asshole for doing this to me, but I was worried, as always, that he would tattle on me to his lawyer and make this divorce even harder. I texted Mike because that's easier, told him I'm sad we're not friends because he likes another girl more than me. I referred to a joke I made about how certain people are grown wrong, like square watermelons, and how there is no hope for them in the world, by texting him, "I guess I'm a square watermelon too."
I felt so much better yesterday. I met up with Sara, one of my best friends from high school, because she is in town from San Francisco this week, and while we were looking through old pictures and reminiscing about how stupid we all were back then, I found a picture of my chubby, frizzy-haired self with Evan, the only guy I dated in high school. He was this tall, gangly motherfucker, all elbows and knees and bad skin. I chased him for months, and when he finally agreed to date me, I was on top of the world. It took a few months of dating him to realize how obnoxious he was, and how he never gave me compliments and how I really didn't find him attractive at all. Sara pointed at the photo and asked, "Seriously, why did you think he was such a prize?"
I pointed at myself in the same photo and answered, "Dude, did I really deserve anyone better back then?"
Hindsight is 20/20, and when I look back at men I spent far too much time agonizing over, they all seem to have one thing in common: none of them were exceptionally good to me or treated me like I was special. Evan only dated me after the girl he really liked started dating someone else, and he broke up with me when they broke up so he could try to angle his way in with her. I took him back after she rejected him, dated him a little while longer, and then I had to break up with him twice to get rid of him after I started to recognize all of his flaws. The was also the fact that I really only started dating him so I could spend more time with our friend Chris, who was always with him.
I run into a similar set of circumstances with the guy I not so much dated as hooked up with repeatedly right before I got together with Gino. He was kind of a doofus, but he thought he was really cool, and he carried himself like he was King Shit everywhere he went. I had to have been just reacting to his confidence, because I really made a fool of myself with him. At one point, I actually remember watching him Vogue behind the bar at the club he worked at, and a friend pulling me aside, asking, "Okay, when are you going to get it?"
"What do you mean?" I asked, utterly delighted by his super-white dance moves.
"Girl," he said, leaning in, "You are way too pretty to be hung up on him."
I didn't see it. I had just come out of my shell, shed the thirty pounds I had carried around since I was 15 and figured out what makeup and a flatiron were. My self-esteem still had not quite caught up with my appearance, so to me, I was actually seeing someone who was above my station. Again, I was the one doing the chasing, always waiting for him to try to fuck someone out of his league, get rejected, and accept me as a door prize at the end of the night. This went on until he was thoroughly bored with me and I stopped trying. It took some time for me to see that I never really liked him all that much, and didn't even think he was that cute, but he was the first catch I got into the boat, so I wasn't going to keep throwing my line into the water.
Gino didn't treat me badly, necessarily, he just didn't seem to think I was all that special after a while. He would do little things that got on my nerves, like never holding the door open for me even when I had my hands full. One time, carrying two bags of groceries, he let the door slam right in my face and I just fucking lost it on him. "Why the fuck don't you ever hold the door for me? Didn't your mother teach you better manners?"
"Oh, so I'm supposed to hold doors for you and pull your chair out like you're some kind of princess?" he asked.
"I'M SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR PRINCESS, YOU JACKASS!" I responded, rubbing my forehead where the door bumped into it.
This was a flaw in our relationship that was never going to be corrected, and would have kept coming up again and again. I thought of myself as the lucky one in my marriage, and Gino also thought of me as the lucky one in our marriage. He thought I was lucky to have found him and didn't really think of me as somone who was that remarkable. The best couples I know have one thing in common with each other: both halves think of themselves as the one who lucked out by finding the other person. There is a love and respect flowing equally in both directions because they are both glad to have found the person they are with.
This tendency I have to pursue guys who don't give me compliments or treat me like the unique individual I am may have dead-ended with Mike. He did butter me up with a lot of flattery, and I will carry some of the truly sweet things he said with me for a long time, maybe just when I need something to get me through my day. I will try not to always remember that his adulations came with a strange flavor to them occasionally, such as the time he looked at me while we were making out in his kitchen and said, "Those eyes... Evil", or the time he told me he needed to leave my apartment because he needed to get away from my "tiny, delicious body". Or the time he told me not to put on more lip butter because he couldn't resist kissing me when my mouth tasted like a grasshopper cookie. I have to believe he had to make me the villain, the devil on his shoulder to give himself an out, so that when he went back to the girl he was seeing before, he could spin it so he had no choice, that I was some kind of pussy assassin who seduced him against his will. Anything to make him look saintly, anything to make it seem like he had no other option but to fuck me until I left him alone. If that's what he needs, I can't control that, and it doesn't take away the fact that he told me I was yummy and awesome. I can be yummy and awesome for someone else, and now that Joann has nudged me into a more positive place, I don't need to hear it from him. I am not a square watermelon. I finally feel like I can be my own Abilene from The Help, look myself in the mirror and tell myself, "You is kiiiind. You is smaaaart. You is important."