Girls, Girls, Redux
Apr. 24th, 2010 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
parasitegirlI went to a workshop today. It was great and I look forward to tomorrows and it's not the point right now.
The point is that KIKI saw me and ran up to hug me. She's the second women in two days to hug me (the first was on a tour of schools). It felt good. It feels too to greeted with joy by other women.
That's not what is prompting this revisiting of a post I recently deleted, but it helps me do it. Hang with me...some of this will read familiar, but I think I need to be clearer about where my post about female friends came from...and what I meant to say. I knew when I posted it that I'd gotten it wrong, and that I might be unleashing some shit...but I hadn't thought long enough to know what to write. and I hadn't anticipated the wounds I would open.
My female friends...well my historical the lack of many female friends…is something I’ve avoided writing about much.
Last week I Skyped (for the first time) with my friend Rook.
I met Rook years and years ago…or should I say I met Robin years ago. She, like me, has multiple names, although our reasons for having them might not all be the same. Rook is more outgoing than Robin and it was Rook I was talking to…but for the first years I knew her…I knew Robin and saw glimpses of Rook only through the eyes of others and from stories she told.
She’s Rook now. Rook comments on my FB…and perhaps it was through re-meeting me on FB and LJ, with many years of growth behind her, that she worked up to being herself in person aorund me, if only on Skype. It seems I intimidated the Rook right out of her for years. She decided quickly that near me, she was Robin and that’s about all she could be. She mentioned more than once the intense jealousy and insecurity I used to trigger in her and how she’d worked through it. She assumed I always knew about how she felt. I had twinges of it, sure, but no clue it was as large a thing as it was.
I knew that, like some of the other female friends I had at the time, she wasn’t completely comfortable around me. I saw the distance. I sometimes felt the barbs. I used to get the clearest window into what these female friends of mine held back around me when I introduced them to each other. I’d watch the speed at which they would sense each other like-minded equals and share more with each other than they would with me alone. It would make me sad, but I didn’t know what could be done. I honestly didn't know if it was me, or them, or a combination.
When we Skyped I laughed at the thought of her being shy about dancing around me. I didn't mean to laugh at her, but to laugh at what a parody I was on the dance floor then. I did lose myself in the music. I did dance for myself...I also would think nothing of, when I got hot, checking to make sure I was wearing a bra before I tossed off my shirt. It wasn't to be sexy, it was for my own comfort. I didn't think about those around me. I wasn't ramping up the sexy in those moments, or thinking about how it would look that way and make people, men and women, uncomfortable and wondering of my intentions. I just wanted to be comfortable. I didn't think beyond that. I didn't consider how it would affect others and how that would reverberate back to me.
And that would be the root of the problem. I didn't think beyond myself as often or as well as I should have.
Robin met me near the middle of my college years. I'd had a few close friendships in high school and a cast of friends (mostly male, some female) that represented a good cross sections of the groups I was in. and those groups skewed heavily male (geek groups)...but Rook met me in my college years. In my college years my social groups became more fractured,separated now not only by interest and age, but by distance. There were fewer cross-overs and constants.
I spent many of those years in motion, in constant motion: To class, to home, to Madison, to my studio space, to the art that shows me the pain I am just now dealing with, to the art that shows me the love I won't deal with, to a con 16 hours away by car, to this group of friends, to that group of friends, to these arms that held me, away from those arms I'd left, away from those arms who'd embraced another, into arms I shouldn't have been in, to class, to home...
Old friends (male and the few female) could pick up a narrative thread and follow it through the absences, or the distractions I presented, lovers who saw me weekly could find it too. My school was small, 400 students, and we saw each other and the numbers, time, and the art made us intimate in a way (which I sometimes literally drove screaming away from) the other girl in the drawing department and I grew close because we saw each other's work and writing and what we were like stripped down on the paper....but Mel is a huge exception.
In those days friends probably found me disjointed and sometimes hurtful because I was such a jumble of places and storylines that it could be hard to make sense of all the me they were getting...but they knew me in a way that encouraged them to stick with me, and we got through things. I am thankful for those who have stayed.
I didn't stay in one place for very long. I often didn't stay long enough to really see the impact my words and actions had on people. I wasn't looking. if I'd wanted to look at something I would have slowed down.
I didn't see the pains I caused when I caused them. I didn't get the obvious signals being relayed back to me, unless they were shouted. If I'd seen that I might have understood my own role in creating distance, fomenting barbs, isolating myself. I wasn't deliberately mean, just thoughtlessly...but that difference means nothing to people who get hurt.
I also avoided looking sometimes. You can't stay in motion if you look too closely...lest you get charged with fleeing the scene of a crime knowingly.
I knew there were things about me people they weren't liking, but I didn't know exactly. I wasn’t making the right connections or getting the big picture. There were things like my confidence, the way I talked, the way I viewed my body...that I knew were and issue but I didn't know how to change those things without losing myself.
It's this thought thread I really messed up the first time, so hold with me.
I never meant to say that men liking me, or my confidence, or my body, or my being opinionated, made women wrongly dislike me and boo hoo. But...my confidence, my relationships with men, my body, and my opinions were a good deal of how I managed to fuck up a good amount of friendships.
I was confident then and confident now. It is too simple a thing to say my confidence then was manufactured and now is genuine...but back then, my confidence was disproportionate. I had a slew of insecurities I was working through, and in working through them and learning about myself, I'd started to have the glimmers of a me I liked, or wanted to like, or wanted to believe in. In an attempt to nurture that newfound (and regained) confidence...well...I dialed that shit up to 11.
Much like the dance floor, I wasn't doing it for others, I was doing it for my own comfort...once more I was not seeing the impact it had on others, not understanding the reactions I was getting back.
You want confidence in a friend, a constantly insecure friends drains you, a confident friend can bolster you up and inspire your own confidence...but that's not the sort of confident I was. My confidence was being broadcast at a volume at which it smacked people and smothered them.
You can take my relationships with men, my body display, my wit, my smarts...and they are part of me...and at the right volume they can each be an asset to me...the glimer of them, or even the steady flow of them, are not bad things....but if you take me "back when"...you can turn that dial back up to 11...and they become monsters.
I was aggresively me.
It is hard to see when you've dialed things up too much. It's hard to crank that dial down when you've still got the insecurities gnawing at you lest the devour you. You fear turning it down will extinguish it all. You fear they will see the loser you really are and then you'll be alone.
And, thus, when at my worse...I went....well...Alpha. It wasn't my intention (if I can even be said to have had any goals) but I turned everything full blast not to hear my own doubts, not to slow down, not to lose everything...and in doing that, I hurt people.
I'm not sure it would be fair to paint me as an Alpha Female. I was an all-gender Alpha. In my hopes to prove to myself than I was smart enough, confident enough, good looking enough...it wasn't just females who felt hurt by me. They weren't the only casualties...but they were the absences I felt more and they were the people around me my brand of insensitivity hurt most.
I did not intend to build myself up by tearing them down, but in trying to stand tall I stomped those around me.
Over time I hope I've dialed things down. I know better how to see those around me, how to read how my actions affect others, and when the things I pride myself on are getting amplified beyond what is reasonable.
There are female friendships I regret have faded, those I regret I lost due to my actions, those I am not sure what happened, those I know better now, those who had reconnection, and those I am very close to. There are also those I had had to leave...and those I have forgiven
I say forgiven because, for all my blame, there were some friends who, for their own reasons, hurt me disproportionately in ways I still don't fully understand...there was a particularly messy friendship in those years that I have yet to write about, although it forms the core of females I alluded to the first time I posted about this. That wasn't my best call in my first time posting this, as it shifted the pain I felt from one former friend widely over the general catagory of "females back in the day" and it wasn't females back in the day who should shoulder the bad blood that bloomed between me and one other girl. The fall out from that relationship probably made me harder on other females back in the day, wrongly so.
When Rook and I talked it hurt to hear how often she said comments like “Hell, SHE really had that looking up to you hating you thing!” I think she might have been overstating it…but my gut knew she wasn’t imagining it.
It hurt because it made me aware of how much I had been ignorant of...and how deep the things I had had vague inklings of were. It hurt in a way that made me realize my reaction to her words would take a while to really process. There were chapters I'd hoped were behind me and didn't want to revisit. I knew to revisit would make me realize what I'd missed and what I'd done...and that I for all the things I've unearthed in my past...the way those comments stung me indicated that I hadn't gone deep enough everywhere.
Well, my first trying to post about this? It didn't go so well. My defenses were still up, I was dancing around the core of the issue (my responsibility and my actions) , using humor poorly, and in doing so I wrote something I knew wasn't the whole story...and sent it out there as a start...but it wasn't packaged as a first draft. It came off cocky, insensitive, and incomplete.
In doing so, I opened old wounds...wounds that had never fully healed. I came off as someone who was still as insensitive as me in my college and post college days...to paraphrase the friend who ripped into me, if I still thought that way I've be downright pathological.
It's a testament to my friends, and to something in me, that I was that way and they are still my friends...but it's also a testament to the monster I could be that my old friend didn't send one punch of "did you mean to say XYZ?" and wait for a reply. He kept on punching. He enumerated and illustrated the old-days me in grotesque but accurate detail, from the outside.
I read his reply and promptly spent the day crying. Now, It should have hurt but it shouldn't have hurt that much, that was a disproportionate reaction that signals to me the truth that I tend to get a final depression wave around this time of year...I checked the backlogs of journals and its not fun but it's the demon I know.
Knowing I was also dealing with work stress and a depression fueled reaction disproportionate to what he'd written I fought to keep the defenses down and to answer him the best I could...and we got back on the path to normal. Bruised normal, but normal.
He wasn't wrong to lay into me that way. I saw how what I meant to say had been garbled...and not even clear in my head...and how my history with him and our friends would give him ample reason to take the worst reading as my intended "pathological" one. I'm glad he did lay into me. I needed more of a wake-up call from my past, to dive further...and to make more amends directly and write this more clearly.
I don't think drama "just erupts around me" anymore. I understand my role (and that that role is not always as an innocent, toasty, bystander) and try to not let thing reach that point.
There are still parts of who I am that can be risky at any volume but are so central to my personality. I do have a sharp sense of humor...sometimes I do fire too directly with it. I do hope I have grown to a point where those wounding shots are fewer in nature and, when they happen, I am quick to realize my error and make amends. Good friends have seen me the second after I KNOW I have stepped to far, when I look aghast at myself,, clutch my hands over my mouth, and squeek my apologies. I suspect there are those here, from "those days" who still have wounds from words I didn't try to shove back in my mouth...that i probably didn't even realize I'd hurt.
To those folks. I am sorry. If there something specific you'd like some clarity on, or a more direct apology on, you can message me.
So many of you know me from those days, but haven't seen me face to face for years, or for any amount of time that would give us an understanding beyond the words we share here. I may read better to you now, but you may still be wary. If my words can be taken poorly, you may default to assuming I am still a mean girl and not bother to ask for clarity or have reason to give me the benefit of the doubt. Please do. Please call shenanagins if you want to, or scream bullshit if that's what you think it calls for.
Still, like I said the first time...I often mention that Japan has been nice because I when I moved here I learned how to blend in, pass by unnoticed and without drama, in a way I never seemed to be able to do in the states…Japan gave me a breathing room I needed.
Maybe it's closer to the truth to say it gave me the quiet I needed to reset my volume...to first dial it way down and then to find a natural place for it to remain...a level at which I can still hear my own insecurities at times, but can hear and respond to those around me, those I care about.
I don’t keep my dial as low as I did in my first few years in Japan..not 24/7 like I once did. I’ve come back out from behind the devices I used when I first got here to keep blending and avoiding attention. I am back to being in my skin and my eccentricities...but it's a comfortable place to be now.
Rook kept commenting on how happy I seemed…how even more comfortable I looked than the very comfortable with herself person she’d met years ago. Many friends back home have noted this. Friends in Japan they do comment on the shift over the years. While they don’t have a screamingly me to compare it to..my struggles with depression have given them a taste of what I'm like when the levels are all askew...but that's not what they think is the norm for me.
I've got good friends...most of my new friends are female and I've managed to keep a few from the past, despite my cock-ups. I have a wide range of beautiful, smart, artistic, caring female friends and I've gone beyond a point where I see that as unusual for me.
I do still have times with friends here, or girls are workshops excited to see me, or when faced with smiling teachers who worry about me, or when talking intimately with some of you on-line (in posts and emails and filters) or when giving pep-talking to fans of my costumes about how this is stuff they can do too...that I stand back amazed. Sometimes the insecurities gnaw at me and I fear I'll fuck this up...but most of the time I am just thankful for the wonderful women in my life: teh new and the old.
My first post asked why it's taken so long...but I knew the answer, even if I didn't care to admit it.
Thanks.
And special thanks go you to C&M. Love you.
The point is that KIKI saw me and ran up to hug me. She's the second women in two days to hug me (the first was on a tour of schools). It felt good. It feels too to greeted with joy by other women.
That's not what is prompting this revisiting of a post I recently deleted, but it helps me do it. Hang with me...some of this will read familiar, but I think I need to be clearer about where my post about female friends came from...and what I meant to say. I knew when I posted it that I'd gotten it wrong, and that I might be unleashing some shit...but I hadn't thought long enough to know what to write. and I hadn't anticipated the wounds I would open.
My female friends...well my historical the lack of many female friends…is something I’ve avoided writing about much.
Last week I Skyped (for the first time) with my friend Rook.
I met Rook years and years ago…or should I say I met Robin years ago. She, like me, has multiple names, although our reasons for having them might not all be the same. Rook is more outgoing than Robin and it was Rook I was talking to…but for the first years I knew her…I knew Robin and saw glimpses of Rook only through the eyes of others and from stories she told.
She’s Rook now. Rook comments on my FB…and perhaps it was through re-meeting me on FB and LJ, with many years of growth behind her, that she worked up to being herself in person aorund me, if only on Skype. It seems I intimidated the Rook right out of her for years. She decided quickly that near me, she was Robin and that’s about all she could be. She mentioned more than once the intense jealousy and insecurity I used to trigger in her and how she’d worked through it. She assumed I always knew about how she felt. I had twinges of it, sure, but no clue it was as large a thing as it was.
I knew that, like some of the other female friends I had at the time, she wasn’t completely comfortable around me. I saw the distance. I sometimes felt the barbs. I used to get the clearest window into what these female friends of mine held back around me when I introduced them to each other. I’d watch the speed at which they would sense each other like-minded equals and share more with each other than they would with me alone. It would make me sad, but I didn’t know what could be done. I honestly didn't know if it was me, or them, or a combination.
When we Skyped I laughed at the thought of her being shy about dancing around me. I didn't mean to laugh at her, but to laugh at what a parody I was on the dance floor then. I did lose myself in the music. I did dance for myself...I also would think nothing of, when I got hot, checking to make sure I was wearing a bra before I tossed off my shirt. It wasn't to be sexy, it was for my own comfort. I didn't think about those around me. I wasn't ramping up the sexy in those moments, or thinking about how it would look that way and make people, men and women, uncomfortable and wondering of my intentions. I just wanted to be comfortable. I didn't think beyond that. I didn't consider how it would affect others and how that would reverberate back to me.
And that would be the root of the problem. I didn't think beyond myself as often or as well as I should have.
Robin met me near the middle of my college years. I'd had a few close friendships in high school and a cast of friends (mostly male, some female) that represented a good cross sections of the groups I was in. and those groups skewed heavily male (geek groups)...but Rook met me in my college years. In my college years my social groups became more fractured,separated now not only by interest and age, but by distance. There were fewer cross-overs and constants.
I spent many of those years in motion, in constant motion: To class, to home, to Madison, to my studio space, to the art that shows me the pain I am just now dealing with, to the art that shows me the love I won't deal with, to a con 16 hours away by car, to this group of friends, to that group of friends, to these arms that held me, away from those arms I'd left, away from those arms who'd embraced another, into arms I shouldn't have been in, to class, to home...
Old friends (male and the few female) could pick up a narrative thread and follow it through the absences, or the distractions I presented, lovers who saw me weekly could find it too. My school was small, 400 students, and we saw each other and the numbers, time, and the art made us intimate in a way (which I sometimes literally drove screaming away from) the other girl in the drawing department and I grew close because we saw each other's work and writing and what we were like stripped down on the paper....but Mel is a huge exception.
In those days friends probably found me disjointed and sometimes hurtful because I was such a jumble of places and storylines that it could be hard to make sense of all the me they were getting...but they knew me in a way that encouraged them to stick with me, and we got through things. I am thankful for those who have stayed.
I didn't stay in one place for very long. I often didn't stay long enough to really see the impact my words and actions had on people. I wasn't looking. if I'd wanted to look at something I would have slowed down.
I didn't see the pains I caused when I caused them. I didn't get the obvious signals being relayed back to me, unless they were shouted. If I'd seen that I might have understood my own role in creating distance, fomenting barbs, isolating myself. I wasn't deliberately mean, just thoughtlessly...but that difference means nothing to people who get hurt.
I also avoided looking sometimes. You can't stay in motion if you look too closely...lest you get charged with fleeing the scene of a crime knowingly.
I knew there were things about me people they weren't liking, but I didn't know exactly. I wasn’t making the right connections or getting the big picture. There were things like my confidence, the way I talked, the way I viewed my body...that I knew were and issue but I didn't know how to change those things without losing myself.
It's this thought thread I really messed up the first time, so hold with me.
I never meant to say that men liking me, or my confidence, or my body, or my being opinionated, made women wrongly dislike me and boo hoo. But...my confidence, my relationships with men, my body, and my opinions were a good deal of how I managed to fuck up a good amount of friendships.
I was confident then and confident now. It is too simple a thing to say my confidence then was manufactured and now is genuine...but back then, my confidence was disproportionate. I had a slew of insecurities I was working through, and in working through them and learning about myself, I'd started to have the glimmers of a me I liked, or wanted to like, or wanted to believe in. In an attempt to nurture that newfound (and regained) confidence...well...I dialed that shit up to 11.
Much like the dance floor, I wasn't doing it for others, I was doing it for my own comfort...once more I was not seeing the impact it had on others, not understanding the reactions I was getting back.
You want confidence in a friend, a constantly insecure friends drains you, a confident friend can bolster you up and inspire your own confidence...but that's not the sort of confident I was. My confidence was being broadcast at a volume at which it smacked people and smothered them.
You can take my relationships with men, my body display, my wit, my smarts...and they are part of me...and at the right volume they can each be an asset to me...the glimer of them, or even the steady flow of them, are not bad things....but if you take me "back when"...you can turn that dial back up to 11...and they become monsters.
I was aggresively me.
It is hard to see when you've dialed things up too much. It's hard to crank that dial down when you've still got the insecurities gnawing at you lest the devour you. You fear turning it down will extinguish it all. You fear they will see the loser you really are and then you'll be alone.
And, thus, when at my worse...I went....well...Alpha. It wasn't my intention (if I can even be said to have had any goals) but I turned everything full blast not to hear my own doubts, not to slow down, not to lose everything...and in doing that, I hurt people.
I'm not sure it would be fair to paint me as an Alpha Female. I was an all-gender Alpha. In my hopes to prove to myself than I was smart enough, confident enough, good looking enough...it wasn't just females who felt hurt by me. They weren't the only casualties...but they were the absences I felt more and they were the people around me my brand of insensitivity hurt most.
I did not intend to build myself up by tearing them down, but in trying to stand tall I stomped those around me.
Over time I hope I've dialed things down. I know better how to see those around me, how to read how my actions affect others, and when the things I pride myself on are getting amplified beyond what is reasonable.
There are female friendships I regret have faded, those I regret I lost due to my actions, those I am not sure what happened, those I know better now, those who had reconnection, and those I am very close to. There are also those I had had to leave...and those I have forgiven
I say forgiven because, for all my blame, there were some friends who, for their own reasons, hurt me disproportionately in ways I still don't fully understand...there was a particularly messy friendship in those years that I have yet to write about, although it forms the core of females I alluded to the first time I posted about this. That wasn't my best call in my first time posting this, as it shifted the pain I felt from one former friend widely over the general catagory of "females back in the day" and it wasn't females back in the day who should shoulder the bad blood that bloomed between me and one other girl. The fall out from that relationship probably made me harder on other females back in the day, wrongly so.
When Rook and I talked it hurt to hear how often she said comments like “Hell, SHE really had that looking up to you hating you thing!” I think she might have been overstating it…but my gut knew she wasn’t imagining it.
It hurt because it made me aware of how much I had been ignorant of...and how deep the things I had had vague inklings of were. It hurt in a way that made me realize my reaction to her words would take a while to really process. There were chapters I'd hoped were behind me and didn't want to revisit. I knew to revisit would make me realize what I'd missed and what I'd done...and that I for all the things I've unearthed in my past...the way those comments stung me indicated that I hadn't gone deep enough everywhere.
Well, my first trying to post about this? It didn't go so well. My defenses were still up, I was dancing around the core of the issue (my responsibility and my actions) , using humor poorly, and in doing so I wrote something I knew wasn't the whole story...and sent it out there as a start...but it wasn't packaged as a first draft. It came off cocky, insensitive, and incomplete.
In doing so, I opened old wounds...wounds that had never fully healed. I came off as someone who was still as insensitive as me in my college and post college days...to paraphrase the friend who ripped into me, if I still thought that way I've be downright pathological.
It's a testament to my friends, and to something in me, that I was that way and they are still my friends...but it's also a testament to the monster I could be that my old friend didn't send one punch of "did you mean to say XYZ?" and wait for a reply. He kept on punching. He enumerated and illustrated the old-days me in grotesque but accurate detail, from the outside.
I read his reply and promptly spent the day crying. Now, It should have hurt but it shouldn't have hurt that much, that was a disproportionate reaction that signals to me the truth that I tend to get a final depression wave around this time of year...I checked the backlogs of journals and its not fun but it's the demon I know.
Knowing I was also dealing with work stress and a depression fueled reaction disproportionate to what he'd written I fought to keep the defenses down and to answer him the best I could...and we got back on the path to normal. Bruised normal, but normal.
He wasn't wrong to lay into me that way. I saw how what I meant to say had been garbled...and not even clear in my head...and how my history with him and our friends would give him ample reason to take the worst reading as my intended "pathological" one. I'm glad he did lay into me. I needed more of a wake-up call from my past, to dive further...and to make more amends directly and write this more clearly.
I don't think drama "just erupts around me" anymore. I understand my role (and that that role is not always as an innocent, toasty, bystander) and try to not let thing reach that point.
There are still parts of who I am that can be risky at any volume but are so central to my personality. I do have a sharp sense of humor...sometimes I do fire too directly with it. I do hope I have grown to a point where those wounding shots are fewer in nature and, when they happen, I am quick to realize my error and make amends. Good friends have seen me the second after I KNOW I have stepped to far, when I look aghast at myself,, clutch my hands over my mouth, and squeek my apologies. I suspect there are those here, from "those days" who still have wounds from words I didn't try to shove back in my mouth...that i probably didn't even realize I'd hurt.
To those folks. I am sorry. If there something specific you'd like some clarity on, or a more direct apology on, you can message me.
So many of you know me from those days, but haven't seen me face to face for years, or for any amount of time that would give us an understanding beyond the words we share here. I may read better to you now, but you may still be wary. If my words can be taken poorly, you may default to assuming I am still a mean girl and not bother to ask for clarity or have reason to give me the benefit of the doubt. Please do. Please call shenanagins if you want to, or scream bullshit if that's what you think it calls for.
Still, like I said the first time...I often mention that Japan has been nice because I when I moved here I learned how to blend in, pass by unnoticed and without drama, in a way I never seemed to be able to do in the states…Japan gave me a breathing room I needed.
Maybe it's closer to the truth to say it gave me the quiet I needed to reset my volume...to first dial it way down and then to find a natural place for it to remain...a level at which I can still hear my own insecurities at times, but can hear and respond to those around me, those I care about.
I don’t keep my dial as low as I did in my first few years in Japan..not 24/7 like I once did. I’ve come back out from behind the devices I used when I first got here to keep blending and avoiding attention. I am back to being in my skin and my eccentricities...but it's a comfortable place to be now.
Rook kept commenting on how happy I seemed…how even more comfortable I looked than the very comfortable with herself person she’d met years ago. Many friends back home have noted this. Friends in Japan they do comment on the shift over the years. While they don’t have a screamingly me to compare it to..my struggles with depression have given them a taste of what I'm like when the levels are all askew...but that's not what they think is the norm for me.
I've got good friends...most of my new friends are female and I've managed to keep a few from the past, despite my cock-ups. I have a wide range of beautiful, smart, artistic, caring female friends and I've gone beyond a point where I see that as unusual for me.
I do still have times with friends here, or girls are workshops excited to see me, or when faced with smiling teachers who worry about me, or when talking intimately with some of you on-line (in posts and emails and filters) or when giving pep-talking to fans of my costumes about how this is stuff they can do too...that I stand back amazed. Sometimes the insecurities gnaw at me and I fear I'll fuck this up...but most of the time I am just thankful for the wonderful women in my life: teh new and the old.
My first post asked why it's taken so long...but I knew the answer, even if I didn't care to admit it.
Thanks.
And special thanks go you to C&M. Love you.
