My life as a fictional character

Here we are again, friends. Cheaper than therapy, but less helpful. So I’ve been listening to this song a lot – Harbour Lights by A Silent Film (they’re British, thus the spelling). It’s not a super complicated song, it basically has one premise: a prolonged metaphor between a rock and a stepping stone. “You were my rock, never a stepping stone… She said I’ll be your rock when the water comes, don’t waste your life on the stepping stones.” Presumably the song is about someone specific, but there’s a pretty easy application of the metaphor to pedestrian, non-British listeners. I feel like the last couple of months I have run into a lot of people splashing around looking for their rock and getting caught on the stepping stones. It’s my blog, so I don’t mind airing my dirty laundry, but I’ll leave my friends mostly out of it. There’s a lot of you fuckers, though. I don’t know, maybe this isn’t a new development, but I’ve watched a lot of people who have been okay with casual dating shift into wanting something more solid – we’ll call them rocks for the sake of the extended metaphor.

There are, however, two cases that I can bring up because they’re 50% mine. Those of you who know me (and why would you be reading this if you didn’t know me) or those of you who’ve been following along are probably aware that the last six months have been important for me romantically. Emotionally, whatever. I had this one guy in my life for four years, and I spent an extra year being a little too hung up on him, and that sad experiment came crashing down around my ears middle of June. Clever readers probably also noticed (because I made no fucking secret of it) that I started dating a Czech gentleman in September. It was crazy, it was intense, it was tumultuous, but it served the very important purpose of putting me back on my feet, emotionally. When someone’s known you since you were 14, been your best friend since 16, boyfriend since 17, and then doesn’t have fucking thing to lose, they can do a lot of damage to your infrastructure. And apparently the best way to get the support beams back up to code is to outsource the labor to a foreign contractor. I mean, I’m over simplifying it, some other pretty important shit happened, but no matter what happens, that’s a pretty big take away for me. Yet one of the things I’ve been hearing since June from a couple different people (and not just these two males, mind you) is the general impression that I can’t be “real.”

Alright, there are some logical things behind that which I won't stick on the internet. Suffice it to say, I understand their logic.

Reality of the circumstances aside, I want to talk about why I keep being told I can’t be “real.” I might be nitpicking the rhetoric a little here, but isn’t there a pretty broad choice of words these people could be using to describe my apparent undatability? Can’t be “long-term,” can’t be “there for me,” can’t be “the mother of my children,” I could go on. No, I keep hearing iterations of I can’t be “real.” Seriously, all the permutations of this one I think I’ve heard. “I’m looking for the real thing.” “I want someone real in my life.” “He wants the real person he’s supposed to be with.” Blah blah blah. Does that strike anyone else as a weird term? I mean, I’m real. If you hit me with a car, do I not need to be taken to a hospital (that’s Shakespeare, fyi)? I’m flesh and blood and mucus and bone marrow and white blood cells and whatever the hell else makes up a human body. I’ve got a brain floating around in my skull that doesn’t like to let me sleep at normal hours and is a little chemically imbalanced which makes me prone to mood swings, but also has a good grasp on abstract thinking and can turn a phrase quite nicely. I am no more remarkable than any other human on this planet in that I am made up of the exact same stuff as everyone else, and by that same fucking logic, I am just as real as everyone else.

In case you can’t tell, I am real sick of being told I can’t be "real."

And before you tell me I’m over reacting, it’s not just in the context of relationships (though that pisses me off the most). I had a make-up artist tell me I have “unreal bone structure” in New York City this summer. In fact, I’m often told I look like an elf or a fairy or a gnome (thanks, asshole) or some other fantasy creature. I’m frequently told that the stories I tell about things that happen to me “don’t sound real.” I did a little digging into that, and the answer I got that satisfies me is that I tell stories in such a literary fashion (established characters, plot arcs, well established TV sitcom tropes) that subconsciously people think they sound too manufactured or some such nonsense to believe I really could end up on a stranger’s lawn at 3 AM in a Long Island hamlet about to hook up with a friend of a friend. I hear it all the time. I can’t be real because I like video games and comic books, and I understand them on an intellectual level and am also a girl. I can’t be real because my parents are still together and I have a good relationship with my family. I can’t be real because I bake pretty well, but can’t change the oil on my car without something catching fire. I can’t be real because I’m too funny, too intellectual, too witty, too honest with strangers in bars, too closed off with people I know, too pretty, too nerdy, and also too serious, too arrogant, too old for my age. I am apparently such an extreme combination of traits that I could only exist in a book, where I would apparently be a fairy or an elf or a gnome biting people’s ankles. And it didn’t used to bug me, because I thought it was funny, and on an instinctual level I knew it meant I would never be hard up for conversation. But now that I’ve heard it in a context that seems to imply I am going to die alone because I can’t be a real fixture in someone else’s life, it’s starting to piss me off.

So fine. This is me steering into the skid. I like my unreal traits. I might have unreal bone structure, but it’s beautiful bone structure – you could cut marble on my cheekbones. My stories might sound larger than life, but they are funny and well-told and by the end I have whole rooms of people focused on me. I like all these things about me that make me unreal, and I am not going to stop even though it apparently means I can’t be someone’s rock. I’ll be my own damn rock, in addition to the gnome underneath biting ankles.