A love song for the love that helped me learn to forgive myself. When I met my boyfriend, my life was falling apart.
I hated myself quietly.
At first I wrote “I secretly hated myself” but perhaps I wasn’t as good at keeping that secret as I thought I was. I made a lot of self-depreciating jokes that revealed the depth of how I really felt about myself. Do any girls my age feel beautiful? This is a sincere question.
I remember when an adult told me that there was something wrong with my eyes. Jarring information for a three-year old to process. Turns out some people really do watch so many damn Disney movies that they will tell a toddler that she has THE WRONG EYES for having GREEN eyes instead of blue.
Human beings are social creatures. We learn from the world around us. A trusting girl like me believes what she hears.
Some day I will write a song with the most hurtful ways people have called me ugly. I‘ll edit in my college self-portrait into the music video. You’ll be able to see that I believed myself to be so ugly that I turned away from the camera, wore a black shirt to hide my flabby arms, used black-and-white coloring to hide my hideousness, and edited in a black censor bar over my eyes.
Here’s a file of that project. That’s a portrait of how disgusting I felt inside. I’d been heartbroken so many times, disgraced for every mistake I made, and shamed for how my father died. In fairness to people I asked out, they often let me down gently. In college I’d only had one committed relationship and - well, if you want to define virginity according to the “Was Britney Spears A Virgin At 17?” debate I was a sad and lonely virgin.
😿Lexie Martin, who deadass hated herself this much
behold, my digital art project from my sophomore year in college. so moody and sad and clearly a souvenir of self-hatred which isn’t really naturally learned by that age.
featuring my garbage self-esteem and the top-secret forbidden form of autism - girl autism! (Spoilers: autism = social anxiety related to trauma! not always sexual trauma but that‘s a very common cause.)
I was in my reckoing a lonely virgin. However - that depends on whether or not rapes are included in a person’s “body count.”
If so - well, fuck, I don’t know my body count. Right now America is such a sham of a nation that any pedophile with a phonebook can single out a cute kid based on his/her/their parents’ license plates or legal name. I therefore have no idea how many people raped me using various legal (and VERY HOSPITAL-RELATED)💉 loopholes.
For me, it was as simple as one pedophile paying a doctor to deafen me. Then me and my family were in a terrible position: let a child go slowly deaf in a way so painful that it would likely cause permanent brain damage at age three, render me unemployable for life, and likely die of addiction peddled by pedophile doctors? Or was the least terrible option on the table to hope that I would eventually escape my lifetime sentence of hospital-rapes, somehow? At least I’d get my rapes over with when I was young. RIP MY CHILDHOOD, THANKS AMERICA!
Were there multiple pedophiles on the Rolodex? Presumably, yes, but a woman/girl/child/toddler has no idea how many people fuck her under anesthesia. My family networked and defended me against as many rapes as possible. It was and is still impossible to protect a child fully from being raped because our medical, state, court, and family welfare system enable pedophiles to abuse our systems.
(For the childhood I never HAd)
(Who done it? A mystery for us all)
(BEING RELATED TO A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO BELIEVED IN CIVIL RIGHTS DOOMS A FAMILY FOR APPROXIMATELY FOUR GENERATIONS. WELL, SHIT.)
Here is a song about how love sets you free.
My take on a classic song featuring some excellent contemporary artists. No doubt you’ll recognize the voice of Johnny Cash. Featuring Raghav, Tesher, and Rihanna.
My version is called “2 sweet 4 me”
I wrote these lyrics based on several miserable diary entries I wrote a few months after my apartment building caught fire. (That happened! I don’t blame any of my exes or friends or whatever. I don‘t think that anyone who knows me hates me enough to burn me and my neighbors alive. It‘s more likely that people who rape children treat living bodies as walking crime scenes.) The official cause of the fire is unknown. My now-boyfriend remarked that the burn marks appeared to be more severe outside the building. Since the fire was on the first floor, it seems possible to me that someone who doesn’t live in the building dropped a cigarette into the garbage near the window of one of the oldest residents of the building. No one who lived in the building would knowingly drop a cigarette near our neighbor Leo’s window: he was a sweet old man who was always polite to everyone. We all knew that he couldn’t walk very quickly at his age. I suspect that whoever started that fire knew a man his age might not move quickly enough to put out the fire.
Whoops! That’s a lot of exposition to a song. Here are some photos for evidence that somehow my apartment building caught fire. Interesting that the same theme showed up in a classic Peggy Lee song. It’s almost like artists know that their entire families will be hunted like animals because yes, generally, great artists and scientists happen to be hot people. This often produces beautiful children. In a reasonable world adults would LEAVE THE CHILDREN BE but I was raped all the damn time in hospitals.
Never raped by a partner who dated me! If someone met me while I was conscious, got me to go over to their place or mine, ayup! Sex was consensual. My body count if you only include that kind of fuckin’ is a bit lower than the American National Average Body Count, because I’m clingy and prefer long-term relationships. (There were a couple of years where I was pining over my best friend who had boyfriends. I was celibate for a long-ass time because I thought maybe she was going to get over -- you know, boyfriends. So, I don‘t believe in slut-shaming people but IF WE ARE GOING TO BE PETTY I AM NOT EXACTLY PROMISCUOUS I‘M AN AVERAGE BITCH WHO GOT VERY UNLUCKY IN LOVE A BUNCH. Made mistakes, yes! Don‘t think I deserved how bad things got.)
Ouch, a fire!
01
Ouch, bedbug bites and chemical burns!
Please don’t shame me and my neighbors. It’s possible for someone to start a building fire and infect a building with bedbugs from outside a rent-stabilized unit.
People who don’t have enough money to move suffer because someone else decided that these-here RENTERS deserve TO BE DEVOURED BY FLEAS IN THEIR BEDS. Americans live with this level of rights! yay.
02
wow, fire damage is still there! we get a lot of lead paint and asbestos warnings every year.
Sadface. Renters don’t deserve cancer just because we rent.
Damn, i felt like hell the night my apartment building caught on fire.
I’m not going to name names. It’s not a crime to refuse to commit to a woman you’re having sex with. I’ve moved on - didn’t date again until I’d finally fallen out of love with the man. My friends would have never let me live it down if I’d gone over to his apartment again after he ditched me.
Still, no point in lying. Some of the best friends I ever made showed up in my life after I cried on the internet about how heartbroken I was. The man in question was nicknamed 💥“The Situationship of Doom” or 💐“Hinge Guy” or 🍑“Hinge Dude Who Ruined My Stupid Miserable Life.” All of these nicknames were jokes that also weren’t really jokes.
Situationships suck ass. Hopefully we can agree on that. Google a real banger of a song by Chapell Roan called Casual. It details how it feels to fuck someone for months who says that they don’t love you. It’s awful to love someone who’s fucking you but won’t give you the commitment you think is reasonable at that point in your relationship. Don’t try to figure out who The Situationship of Doom is, if you started an investigation on every man in New York City who situationships sad women you’ll run the NYPD out of business. By the way - it’s going to look bad if, hypothetically, my song gets some attention and tons of men claim to have fucked me. I was in a groupchat of witnesses, my lads. Don’t lie and say you hit it if you didn’t. Are you a dude I’d call “The Surgeon I Didn’t Sleep With Because He Took Me To A Really Awkward Halloween Party?” - we didn’t fuck, we made out but I was too weirded by how all his friends’ wives looked like me out to go home with that man.
If you’re not a guy I’ll politely call “Nick from Mumbai” (not exactly his name but sounds similar) then: You’re Not The Situationship. (BY THE WAY THE LAST EUROPEAN-LOOKING MAN I DATED WAS A FRENCH MAN NAMED VINCENT WHO TOOK ME ON THIS HORRIBLY AWKWARD CRUISE WITH HIS PARENTS, AND HE LIVED IN COLORADO SOOO... YOU PROBABLY DON‘T WANT TO LIE ABOUT HAVING HAD SEX WITH ME! Vincent nagged me about threesomes and anal - never forced anything but good god. That man discussed those things on every date and I eventually dumped that guy.) 🇫🇷
When I met Josh, I had to learn how to like myself again.
I won’t lie on the internet and say I love myself now. It’s a journey and I ain’t there yet. It wasn’t possible for me to even entertain the idea of liking myself, after years of hearing all the horrible things other people told me.
Sometimes I get these little sparks of hating myself less. Forgiving myself? Maybe? Anyway. Being raped and tortured and blamed introduces a timbre of self-hatred into a person’s soul. Being broke in the United States of America renders a person’s life desperate. So! Title of the song is Desperado: 2 Sweet 4 Me.
Right now I am living out of an AirBnB. My grad program recommended a year’s leave because I was late for class too much. Long commute, tech job, and walking with a godawful limp from a terrible case of achilles tendonitis. Late for class too much. Sick too often because I was sitting at the back of the class in a wheelchair sometimes. I quit my job to attend more professors’ office hours. Nevertheless: A YEARS’ LEAVE RECOMMENDED FOR ME! Because fuck my life, I’m a cripple.
Nevertheless - I keep hearing myself called a “GENTRIFIER.” May I correct the record?
I am a 🎃Pumpkin Spice Flavored Homeless Woman. A bitch must never “LOOK” homeless. Trust me! When I was walking around with a cane I was mistaken for homeless and um... aaayup! People know that homeless women are “no fee needed” prostitutes!
(YOU THINK THE COPS DON’T KNOW THIS?!)
living as a
girl be like
editing song now
