Why couldn't he have just said, some of the time, you are beautiful.
I hear this from strangers on dating apps.
Some of the time, they might have agendas. To get into my pants, etc. But why? Why couldn't my lover, my ex, my husband have told me that he thought me beautiful? How do you never say that to someone you are married to for something like 17 yrs. I work through this shit, daily, perhaps. It's not that I want to be special, or extraordinary or model-esque or some kind of wonderful. I just want to be and feel some kind of normal. I want to feel like there is this one guy out there that thinks me to be great. Beautiful even.
I never got that from my narc. No. Rather, I was tolerable, at best.
Sometimes, he wasn't embarrassed to be with me. Like the time he told me to start using flash cards to memorize GRE words so that I might not sound so low brow, so midwestern, so uneducated at the Philosophy Grad Student gatherings. Sometimes, I didn't sound quite so dumb, to him.
I mean I was never enough. But sometimes, I was not quite as bad. Sometimes he didn't interrupt me or talk over me to tell my story to the philosophy wives standing in a circle around the mustard potato salad.
God forbid I open my mouth at a philosophy picnic and talk to the chair of the Department! Shut up.
I was always less than. Not enough of anything. One that ought be interrupted so as to minimize the damage of what the hell she uneducatedly said.
Never quite right. Just try harder. Be smarter, you dumb ass.
Speak to the philosophy wives about black bean dips. But never ever open your mouth to engage my professors. You are and will always be beneath me and them. You will never be....
But why not, beautiful, just the way I am? Without flash cards or GRE or words or scripts memorized? Maybe for a split second, I am enough. I don't know. Please. Thank you. Perhaps. In the future? Someday? Never?
