It wasn't a karmic curse, it was a self-imposed hair shirt.

[aimercat]

(NOTE for non-regular readers or readers outside of Livejournal: this week's topic for the writing contest I'm in is "hair shirt". A hair shirt is a shirt made of very rough cloth that some religious people wore in the past to punish themselves for things that they had done wrong.)You would think I would know what a hair shirt was. After all, I

Comments

[itsjustc]

Aww that's lovely that you and Brendan are happy. I'm glad you managed to remove the shirt after all those years.

Great read x

[n3m3sis43]

Yeahhhhh... I lived more or less on my own after age 18, and I didn't get married until age 30. And I spent a good portion of those years not dating because omg, dating sucks. If anything happens to me and my husband, I am going to be single, probably forever, and I'm going to like it. Because fuck dating, seriously.

I thought it was my fault, too. Except I hadn't really done anything specific that I could think of that was wrong, so I figured I was just broken. Well, first I was on the chubby side so I thought it was that, and then when I starved myself into oblivion I got tons of dates but they were all the worst people so I was like, "yep. guess I'm just broken."

And the worst are the ones who call you fat. I was wearing a size 2 (mind you, I'm short, but not THAT short) when a guy I was on a date with told me how I'd look so great if I lost 10 or 15 pounds. From where, fuckhole?!

[tonithegreat]

I think it's really good juju to keep it real with your exes as much as possible. I myself never dated much and I don't envy you the bad years of that. But it sounds like you are on solid ground now.