Stunt Doubles

I’ve known for a long time that the only one I can unquestionably trust to protect myself is me—and I’ve learned that the most effective armor is indifference.

I taught myself to regard everyone indifferently, everyone important—everyone who could otherwise potentially hurt me.

But if someone has the potential to hurt me, doesn’t that indicate that I have an underlying concern for what they think?

Lately, I’ve begun thinking that my indifference is inauthentic. I think I have convinced myself to feel (or to not-feel) that way because it is so much easier than actually caring about what people think or say or do. At least they can never hurt me if I don’t care.

Take men, for example:

I always consider men replaceable. Like actors in a movie: if they fuck up, or ask for too much, it isn’t hard to find another. Until you start to let them in, and they begin to show you the things about them that aren’t so easy to replicate. When you begin understanding each other, when you can tell what they’re thinking when you look in their eyes. That’s the scary part. That’s the point of fight-or-flight—the point at which I usually run away.

The ones I kept around a bit longer were the ‘safer’ ones. They were the stunt-doubles for the ones who really mattered to me: the ones I pushed away with all of my strength before they could do so to me.

The extras were meant to fill the void in my soul. But how much of that gap can sex really fill? How much of that emptiness exists due to lack of sex? I’ve made love to one man in my life, and had sex with many. Sex is generally arbitrary.

I have no regrets. Really, I don’t. I think regretting the past is a waste of the present.

I don’t feel guilty for reducing those men to the placeholders they were for me.

I know I played a similarly marginal role in their pasts as well.

The roles women play are black or white, and generally, these are the characters we play over and over again.

We are the beautiful, angelic ‘mother archetypes’ men want to marry, but whom they will not fuck. Or, we can are the whores they fuck and then discard.

Of the latter, who among them doesn’t recall agonizing in high school over the boy who told them they were not ‘girlfriend material?’

‘Girlfriend Material?’

What the fuck does that mean?

Did he mean I couldn’t love him enough?

Because he could not be more wrong!

He can’t even imagine how much love I have inside me…

But it’s locked away so tightly…protected and shielded because if I don’t protect myself, then who will?

Because if I allowed him to see, how do I know he still wouldn’t cast me aside, kick me out of his way, stopping only to buff my tear stains out of his shoes…

So the truth is that I DO care. When I attempt to force myself to think a certain way, when the motive is not genuine, I fail every time.

The truth always becomes apparent, though usually only to me, when I cry by myself.

And then I dry my tears, re-shine my battle-scarred armor, and prepare to fight again.