Confidence

I realized tonight that I have gotten into a habit of thinking that I am the "ugly girl." You know how you are casually dating or sleeping with someone and he and his friends are always talking about the other sweet parties they go to? Sometimes it starts to feel like the girls at all these other parties that they bring home are smoking hot and you're just the one they feel ashamed to mention to people. The interesting thing, though, is that when you are actually around them, for whatever reason, often enough to find out about the other girls they're bringing home, or if you were to randomly stumble into an awkward situation one night, sometimes you realize that you're not the ugly one. In fact, you're pretty smart, funny, laid back, cool, and assured, comparatively. It made me wonder about why sometimes powerful women have a hard time finding happiness in romantic relationships. I think it has to do with what a man (or another woman) can handle at any given time. A strong, worthwhile woman is a lot harder to play games with than someone equally attractive but a little less headstrong both because she can see what's going on and because strong women do command a decent amount of respect. Thinking about all of these good things made me realize that I have been forgetting about the power of positivity over the past semester or so. I had been forgetting that worry about things makes them true instead of just believing in yourself, wanting certain things, and waiting to see what happens, which generally brings out the best of all circumstances.

I'm going to breathe now, for a while, and remind myself of all of the good that is life and of all of the good ways of looking at things. That's it, for now, but I'll probably have more to say on it later.

Relationships

I just realized last night that I might have been too busy idolizing the past to enjoy the present. I'm relating this to my independent study because I think that relationships and dating are a women's issue. A central one. And they have a lot to do with body image and sexuality because so much of how our ideas about these things are shaped have to do with our past experiences with men and women in dating situations. I realized that I talk about one of my exes an awful lot. Like all the time. Granted, he was a good friend and I dated him for two years, so that's a pretty significant amount of time I shared with him. And I talk about past relationships because we learn a lot from the things we did during them and mistakes we made. But I also am becoming aware that in remembering the relationship as a whole and in looking for similar qualities in someone new, I'm not allowing myself to be happy with the beginning phases of new relationships because I am so eager for them to become something else. I am not content just to date someone occasionally or to run into them around campus and have something happen after a few weeks or months, I am much more interested in making it all happen at once, and I think that is a false hope. I definitely believe in the power of being present in the moment, so I'm going to try to revise the way I'm handling things, and I would tell anyone else who has hit some relationship bumps to do the same. You can't look for your old partners positive qualities without ultimately ignoring all of the good things in your new interests. Sure, you can have certain things you know you like in a person, but you need to separate them from being possessed by any one person and instead let them become simply adjectives and character traits.

I'll let you know how it goes for me. You let me know how it goes for you.