Since I was a small child, I have just wanted to be adored.
I remember always comparing myself to my sister, to the way people adored her, and thinking, “if they could only love me like that. If I were only that loveable.”
But I have always felt inherently unlovable. Unadorable.
I was in fact a cute baby. I was cute until I was about 5. I think two years of having a sister really ravaged me. I don’t know why I got fat. I just did. I was fat and had a bad haircut. I don’t think any of this was my fault. As a small child you can’t really determine your diet or your haircut. So, while I think I reacted poorly to my sister’s existence for whatever reason, I think my parents made me unlovable. And that my father, specifically, loved me less for it.
I can accept that people who aren’t my parents find me unlovable. But your parents, due to their unconditional love for you, should accept you, not contest every single thing you do, tell you you are “weird” or that they don’t understand you, and tell you how you just don’t try hard enough and that your accomplishments are not enough.
And so I feel worthless at my very core. My parents didn’t plan to have me, certainly not when they did. I was born at a bad time and I was delivered cesarean, so really they could have chosen another day to avoid the trauma of me being born a year to day after my paternal grandfather passed. My poor timing was only exacerbated by the fact that my father, in jest or not, has throughout my life claimed that he is not my father. The consistency of this claim in itself is hurtful. Or maybe I am just overly sensitive and self-loathing. My mother has suggested that much. Why else would I have so many problems when my brother and sister are so “normal.” They have spouses. They own houses. They have success in their lives.
I just want to be adored. To be adored is not the same as being in a relationship.
I am terrible at relationships. I will give myself totally to someone else–completely lose myself. And then one day, seemingly randomly, I will realize I am not happy being part of someone else’s life, because when I am part of their life, I am no longer adored. I am not a separate special thing. I am just there–with them, in them. Just a part of life. I don’t want to be part of someone’s life. I want to be a fantasy. I want to be the thing that can’t be had.
I want to be a thing so I can be a person on my own.
I want to be the thing that someone lacks. Being that thing makes me feel more complete in the recognition that others are incomplete because I can be the thing they think they need– that they continue to search. The thing they think they need cannot be held. I cannot be had. I cannot be contained. They just want to want the thing.
It is a fantasy. I want to continue a fantasy, not complete a whole. Because I can’t do that.
The best I can do is signify desire as a projection of the thing that someone thinks they desire, but can never really be had because to have me would mean resignation to the fact that I am just another incomplete being. I am a fantasy as a body. As an entity on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or FaceTime. I am nothing as Allison because I am more than an object, more than an image, more than a signifier.
I am frustrating in real time, because I can’t be everything by being less than a person. People are flawed. People are incomplete. I, unfortunately, am a person. I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could just be adored.
As a thing I can be adored. I can hold space. I can stop time.
When I become a person again, time passes, I age, I get tired, I get frustrated, I get lonely, and hungry, and scared. I get scared that I will lose the power to be adored, even in fleeting fake increments, when I can suspend my reality.
Being a fantasy is not being. It is meaning, but not in the same way as being a subject is to mean. It is to mean only through opposition to someone else’s subjectivity. The fantasy object is meaning as a tool to render the desiring subject momentarily complete. The fantasy object cannot be ever-present because the (desiring) subject can never be complete. He is always-already incomplete–this is what makes him subject. This desire is what constitutes his subjectivity in that it denies his wholeness.
If I am there– if I am in a relationship with you, you know I am not the thing that makes you whole. I am just another incomplete subject.
It seems most people can accept the fact that their adoration for their partner and their partner’s adoration for them is founded on basic humanity– that you love someone for their beauty and their flaws. You love them in their imperfection.
But when my imperfection is seen–not seen but exposed–I can no longer be adored. There is something missing in me that makes me unattractive as a human. I cannot be another subject; I have to be an object–and this terrifies me. This terrifies me because I am nearing 40, because I am unattractively recovering from a restrictive eating, compulsive fitness, and body image dysmorphic disorders (after years of strange eating practices and self-harm), because I am manic (mostly) depressive, because I like to be alone until I don’t want to be alone anymore. I want to be loved on my terms only, because when my love becomes expressed as care it is exploited, making me a banal feature of everyday life. I’m no longer exciting or worth impressing. I’m just there.
I’m terrified that I cannot be unconditionally loved because I so desperately want to be admired, adored, and desired. I’m terrified I cannot be unconditionally loved because I need to be adored and the only people who have loved me unconditionally don’t find me precious in the slightest.
When I started gaining weight in my self-imposed, unmediated, unmedicated eating disorder recovery, when I was freaking out about how unattractive and unloveable I am, my mother told me I was pretty.
Pretty is not adorable.
Pretty is not beautiful.
Pretty isn’t exceptional.
I want to be the exception.
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