Lover

journal entry — Sunday, November 24th 2024

I deserve to be loved by someone who loves me. I don’t want to have to wonder if he’s flirting with other girls when I’m not around, if he turns into a bad person when he drinks, if he’ll wake up one day and decide to leave me, if he doesn’t really mean the sweet, stupid things he says.

I’m like Izzie Stevens. I’m tall and I’m assertive and I’m going to be a doctor and I have so much love in me it genuinely borders on being a flaw. Like my emotions are causing inflation in the feelings economy. Mansa Musa bringing gold to Mecca. I don’t know where all the love comes from, but it makes me worry I’m going to settle for someone who just isn’t for me, with my stupid open heart keeping me from realizing I can have more, I need to have more.

But I’m like Cristina Yang. I want someone who will make me better. I hold myself to the highest standard (or I did, before I was on dizziness-imposed heartbreak bedrest), so I really can’t love someone who doesn’t hold themself to a similarly strict rigor, because I wouldn’t understand them. I wouldn’t get how they don’t care enough not to try to be better, and then I’d resent them for not pushing me forward, and that would make them hate me, the elitist bitch.

But the truth is, I deserve someone who likes themself enough to love me.

I’ve been Addison Montgomery (Shepherd), not realizing until long after that the reason it didn’t feel right, the reason I felt so far away from the man I wanted to plan my whole life with, was because he just didn’t love me that much.

There is a fine line between the type of connection that is far too close and unequal, an ionic bond, one worshipping the other and it makes sense but it’s not enough for either one of them, and the ephemeral hydrogen bond, one who is beautiful and worthy and kind losing herself in pursuit of one who doesn’t care about her. He keeps her moving, but he’ll never let her rest. Not for long enough for all the growth to kick in. She’ll die of exhaustion and he’ll never learn how to love her.

I love Meredith Grey. She’s all dark and twisty inside and she nearly drowned herself in the bathtub and in the bay. I have high hopes for myself, and I have low self-esteem and rampant self-harm urges, some that I don’t even recognize until after I’ve followed through, and I’m broken and bleeding on the ground. I’m still learning how to stop hating myself, how to differentiate between honesty and arrogance, self-love and self-obsession, self-respect and self-idolization. But I’m going to figure it out because I am a good person and I deserve not to settle and I am going to grow up, and I’ll be a girl but I’ll be a woman and I’ll be tall and I’ll be skinny but I won’t have an eating disorder and I’ll be eccentric and memorable and well-behaved and a good judge of character and I’ll be sparkly and glittery inside where right now it’s all black.