Learning To Become A Beautiful Object

Learning To Become A Beautiful Object

MARISSA LOUIE

There’s a gaping hole inside of me that belongs to my desires, needs, and secret yearnings.

The hole is cavernous and almost never satisfied. Who can blame it after being starved for so long? Hungry and mean from years of denial, it feels impossible to be content. I want it all: I want to be in love, I want to be in love with a man who is handsome, kind, and smart, I want to be in love with a man who is emotionally intelligent and values personal well-being and growth, I want someone who is generous, thoughtful, communicative.

When I say all this aloud, I become aware that this is not very much to ask for.

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My whole life has revolved around love, attaining it, possessing it, pining for it.

Like a shadow going through the motions, I have perfected the ontological mimesis of girl cum Richard Siken poem. Therapy was never just for myself. Reading was never just for myself. I wanted to be the kind of woman who was ready for and capable of maintaining a healthy relationship. I wanted to be the kind of woman who deserved to be loved.

The summer I met Bryan, my mantra was a repeated Maya Angelou quote I had seen hastily scribbled on my sister’s vanity mirror the summer prior,

That year, this kind of thinking felt radical, unimaginable, and new. I preened at the idea of my own magnanimity. Clearly, my ability to forgive and my willingness to fall back in love were signs of my own maturity.

But I bastardized everything in my head— blind to the mental gymnastics needed to repeat my old patterns of love-seeking validation under a new guise of bravery.

I wasn’t the picture of health I was envisioning. If I could have manifested a physical personification of all ways in which I have grown, and not grown, post-Teddy, then Adam would have been a good start. I’m not delusional or self-important enough to view a relationship as an appointed vehicle for transformation. Still, he felt like a test.

how different are a gaslighter and a man with narcissistic tendencies anyways?

For a year, I was the fool who fell for his steady diet of praise, followed by retraction and avoidance. An anorexic in all natures, and more specifically an age-old victim to the classic binge/starve cycle, is never able to resist a new kind of purgatory, whether it be emotional, bodily,

“The ‘killing’ of oneself into an art object—the pruning and preening, the mirror madness, and concern with odors and aging, with hair...—all this testifies to the efforts women have expended not just trying to be angels but trying not to become female monsters.” or otherwise. Gilbert and Gubar describe it as thus,

Of the roles available to women, I have been both the angel and the monster. I have been both sick [grotesque] and sickly [malnourished]. In many ways, volleying between extremes feels like home. To be a woman is to be crippled and caught at every turn. My own coming of age was marked with insecurity, isolation, and self-loathing. Shame has always been a paramount factor to keeping women in line.

Previously, I understood the solution to be the I believed that if I could successfully reduce my own needs, I could have everything I ever wanted. It sounded like a good deal at the time.

I learned the truth the hard way— wanting things made me feel greedy and selfish, minimizing myself felt suffocating and tortuous. I spent college bursting at the seams. It was humiliating to need, and even more so to be rejected for those needs. It felt like there was no other choice but to repeatedly unravel. One can only hold onto themselves as a tightly wound, self-contained bundle for so long.

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Eventually, and even rhythmically, the pressure builds so steadily that you are given no other choice but to implode.

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It’s no wonder then, that the women have admired the most were the monstrous ones. It was so gratifying to watch their descent into madness. Why should they conform to the rigid structures set in place?

What was stopping them [me] from losing their shit at any given moment?

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to themselves and others,” whereas empowerment is a feeling that individuals learn to cultivate when their power is compromised-to-nonexistent.

This reckoning was a hard one. Identifying as the crazy girl felt empowering. It was a conscious rejection of patriarchal expectation, a refusal to bend to the shape of the cool girl. And yet, this wasn’t true at all.

power and feeling empowered — a distinction that Brittney Cooper diagrams in her essay “Bag Lady.” Cooper writes that “power is conferred by soc

In her Britney Spears essay for the cut Tavi Gevinson writes, “there is a difference between having

ial systems” and enables people to “make decisions that are of social and material consequence

It is only with the end in sight that I can connect the dots from Teddy to Adam. And while it’s a relief in many ways, it feels difficult to give up the age old impulse to fix, fix, fix. The critical lover wants to grant him another chance, tell him exactly what he’s done wrong, and wait patiently for him to get better.

I have only just begun to realize that not everyone hold themselves to impossible standards, and in fact, I have assumed far too much far too often with the secret hunger for reciprocity— care. The end of my relationship with Teddy felt like a race against a bomb.

Every day, every hour, felt like it could be our last. The voice in my head said get better, faster, sooner, NOW. If you do not become a healthy, communicative girlfriend then this relationship will end.

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This standard didn’t go both ways. There was no pressure for Teddy to get better. I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, I was carrying the weight of my relationship on my shoulders. I worried that the rate at which I was progressing as a human being wasn’t fast enough for his quickly thinning patience.

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So when I met Bryan, I was determined to get it perfect. I had a head start, I just needed to speed to the finish line before he realized how completely flawed I actually was.

But the truth is that none of the men in my life have been self-less. They have not worked tirelessly on self awareness, improvement, and betterment. In Bryan’s case, I suspect the work felt arduous and impossible. The foundations were so little, and he was starting so late. It was much easier to give up, assume I was a villain, and start over.

Re-live the easy parts.

In Adam’s case, he genuinely believes he is trying.

He has conflated self-flagellation and self-reflection.

He moves laterally. The insight is always critical enough to inspire change, and shallow enough to divine no real action.

And he capitalizes on those sensitivities to remain inert. Follow through requires a level of commitment, clarity, and bravery that he is unwilling or unable to summon. Still, it’s good enough to fool himself and the people who choose to stay in his life. He has memorized the rhetoric of, and moreover, convinced himself that he is a good man. I can no longer let myself fall prey to this narrative. His delusions.

The world he lives in is both fantastical and absurd. In it, he is both the hero and the victim at any given turn. Situations where he is at fault become misunderstandings. And all criticisms become invalid under ulterior motives.

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I refuse to continue relationships with people who don’t have the maturity and self-awareness to realize and own up to their own mistakes.

If they cannot realize when they have made a mistake, crossed a line, or done something wrong without my explicit say-so, then they do not have the where-withal that I am looking for in a partner. If they do not know how to apologize for and fix their own failings without my explicit say-so, then I am better off

I refuse to be a teacher, a mother, and a shrew any longer. without them.