The Ambrosia Project.

I blame you. Source

*August 13, 2017: (very brief) AUTHOR’S NOTE AT THE END*

Hey.

So, I’m back.

I’m not going to talk about where I’ve been. Mostly because it involves TMI about my uterus and the fact that I write an awful lot of fan fiction.

What I do want to talk about is the fact that last night, the season two finale of “The Mindy Project” aired. It was wonderful. I laughed. Out loud. I also cried. Quite a bit. There was screaming. The good kind. I love the show and wish very much that my life mimicked it somehow.

I mean, I wish that about a lot of media. I’m an intelligent only child; like, 75% of my life has been spent daydreaming and inserting myself into television, film, and book plots. And half the time, I’m not even the star. I’m the wacky, foul-mouthed side-kick with a heart of gold. That’s usually because in these dreams of mine I’m too busy with a successful pop/soul/R&B career to commit to being the star and head writer of a hit sitcom.

It has recently dawned on me that in my elaborate fantasies, I am Justin Timberlake. Well, I have Justin Timberlake’s career. Unlike him, I’ve embraced my curls and I can’t see myself settling for Jessica Biel.

Anyway, with all the daydreaming and fantasizing that I do, you’d think that I’d realize that sitcoms and movies and novels are just that: someone else’s daydreams and fantasies brought to life. In other words, these aren’t stories to measure one’s life against. They aren’t even real.

So why do I feel so horrible to have made it to almost 35 years of age without ever having been told “I love you” in a romantic context?

If all that stuff is fake; if it’s just a bunch of made up stories, it shouldn’t really bother me so much that I haven’t had that particular experience. I mean, I love the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” franchise. I don’t curl up in my recliner and weep inconsolably after the midnight viewings because a gang of dwarfs still hasn’t shown up unannounced at my door to recruit me to be their robber so they can take back their mountain kingdom from an evil dragon. That’s just as made up as a sitcom about a chubby, almost 35 year-old, dark-skinned, Indian-American OBGYN living and searching for love in NYC.

The answer is obvious; one is based on some version of a totally plausible reality, and the other is the stuff of legend and religious allegory and maybe a metaphor for World War II (I don’t know; I haven’t read the books yet, okay?).

No one is expecting me to go off on an adventure with Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield (He’s been mentioned twice on a single black woman’s blog. That’s got to be a record or something. And that was probably racist? Eh.). But people do wonder why I don’t date. And by people I mean me. I’m even wondering if I could at this point. It’s been almost fifteen years since I’ve been in what I thought was any sort of committed relationship or had sex. At this point, I’d be less surprised if Bilbo Baggins invited me over for Elevenses than if I was involved in a sexual relationship with a man.

And that’s not normal.

I don’t know what to do to change this. I’m in therapy. I’ve been in and out (but mostly in) therapy for the last fifteen years. I’ve gone on dates with two men, the last time around the summer of 2011? 2012? And they were both terrible. Pretty sure they felt the same way about me, but we all thought “Well, he/she went to college, and is a sentient being, and I don’t know. This is what people do, right?” That’s it.

There’s nothing normal about any of that.

From what I’ve gleaned from my mass consumption of media involving interpersonal relationships, one either dates around unsuccessfully until finding the one that was always there all along or finds the one at just the right moment or some shit; or is tragically knocked up or widowed and walls their heart off to protect against any future heartbreak, but they’ve got the tragic story or the dumb kid, so there’s that. Or there are the lucky ones, who find someone and it works out and they go along on the suggested path of mortgages and wedding registries and baby showers and date nights and blah blah blah.

There are no stories about weird freaks who got maybe a little bit raped in college and then got fat and then woke up and realized they were 34 and infertile and crying hysterically because Mindy Kaling and Chris Messina just have so much chemistry and overhear some girl – hardly even 21, for fuck’s sake – refer to 35 as being “kinda way up there” and said that a different 35 year-old woman needed to “hurry up and get on the boy thing” while you think to yourself “I wouldn’t even know how and every time I’ve tried the guys have literally run away in the other direction” and you wonder what the hell is wrong with you if every form of media featuring people your age shows them either married with kids or in some weird friend-group-living situation or dating all the time and you don’t have anything, nothing and you can’t even have a one-night-stand because you don’t know how and even if you did what about AIDS and sexual assault and your gross body?

But you’ll always have your – hopefully quirky? – knack for stream-of-consciousness run on sentences on your semi-abandoned blog, right?

I don’t even know what the hell I’m trying to say anymore. It’s almost 5:00am. I’m almost 35. There is something terribly, terribly wrong with me. Please don’t tell me that there isn’t. The number one wrong thing is that I am not Mindy Kaling, for starters.

I mean, look, I’m at the point where I’m thisclose to consulting an astrologist? Astrologer? I don’t fucking know. And this sort of wacky, desperate bullshit would make for wonderful prime-time sitcom television, but the depression and self-loathing and blackness and fatness and fact that men find me absolutely disgusting makes it super hard to pitch my “story”.

Shit, I don’t even want to watch it and I’m the showrunner.

*Aug. 13, 2017: For Very Important Reasons, I stopped watching the show, and being a fan of Mindy’s, about two years ago. I was going to take this post down, but re-reading it provides me with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia which almost drowns out the embarrassment.

Triage.

My needs have not been met.

I feel like a jerk for dwelling so much on the fact that a big part of the life that I dreamed about may not come true, which is weird, since I haven’t even had two weeks to process it. I suppose I feel this way because I’ve been under the impression that I’m to just suck it up and move on when it comes to the little tragedies and heartaches I’ve faced.

It has started to dawn on me that I’ve been trying to function for years and basically failing and beating myself up about it. I just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t simply be normal and thin and do laundry and put on makeup and make my bed and pack a lunch and be on time and take showers and not scream at my parents and stop fantasizing about killing myself until I finally realized that I’ve been wandering around throughout life for the last decade plus three years with a gaping, festering wound that hasn’t been properly dealt with while adding other wounds around it that don’t fully heal and it truly is a wonder that I’m anywhere at all.

I’ve tried to make people understand the screaming void I feel inside, going without any sort of physical intimacy or love for more than a decade. And it isn’t just about the lack of sex. I see single people who’ve gone without sex for a very long time but have children, and perhaps I’m making a huge and incorrect assumption, but I don’t believe that they suffer in the same way because they can hold their child and kiss their child and feel that incomparable parent/child love and know that they are needed and wanted. I imagine that this is not the case for everyone, but it is still something that I do not and possibly will never have.

To never have been held out of romantic love, to go without feeling someone’s lips against mine, a hand in my own; to not feel the pleasure that another’s body can bring mine and to not know if my body can do the same, to continue to go on without these common human experiences year after year after year and to be expected to feel okay and to function normally? I’m starting to figure that that may have been an expectation too great for me to meet.

Perhaps it would be different if we were talking about three years instead of thirteen. Maybe if there had been a kind and gentle lover or two for me to look back on and fondly remember instead of one man-child whose pleasure was derived from the pain he caused me.

How do I make anyone understand what it does to my feelings of self-worth to admit that the only man to see my naked body mocked it? The only words he uttered were meant to criticize and deliver his displeasure? “Find your beauty from within!” everyone screams! “No one is going to love you if you don’t love yourself!” “There is more to life than sex and relationships! By the way, did I tell you all about the fabulous sex I’m having in my feminist, kink-positive, poly-amorous relationship?”

I would just like someone, for once in all this time, to acknowledge my wounds. I don’t want to be handed anymore band-aids or children’s Tylenol in the form of “Well, let’s redo your Match.com profile!” or “What you need to do is organize your closets.” I need wound care. I need stitches and sutures and cauterization. I need major treatment.

I don’t want to hear that no one knew what was going on; that they couldn’t have helped me because I didn’t say anything. The Ambrosia most people knew died 13 years ago and a zombie has been walking around in her place. I don’t know if there’s anything that can bring her back. She’s probably a long lost cause. But I’m here. Try with me.

When I was around, I don’t know, 22, 23 years old, and the wounds were far more fresh, before the gangrene had started to set in, I went to a counselor on my college campus. A black woman. She’d understand me. She’d see the blood, the tears in my flesh, how the wound wasn’t clotting even after two or three years. I don’t know how far how I got with my story. I was telling her about Christmas, about the gifts he’d demanded, and how I’d nervously driven all over the state to make sure I found each thing on the list, worried about what psychological trauma he’d inflict on me if I failed. I might have even told her about my visit to the emergency room in the middle of the night that he wouldn’t take me to. “If you’re gonna go, you’re going alone” he’d growled. She’d rolled her eyes and thrown her hands up in the air. “He was a 19 year-old boy” she interrupted. “That’s how 19 year-old boys are. I mean, really, what did you expect?” That I years later dated and was rejected by her son only added insult to injury.

Though I don’t want the focus to be all on him, I do want it to be understood how hard it is to feel normal and unbroken when the last relationship you’ve had and the only physical intimacy you’ve known is with someone who was so cruel to you, no matter their age. I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out that this has been the black cloud I’ve been under for so long. And every time someone said that boyfriends and sex were overrated and that I didn’t want one anyway and did I really want children and that I had to focus on loving myself and that I wasn’t trying hard enough to meet people and maybe it was because I went natural or put on weight or didn’t smile enough or lived in the wrong city, they dug their dirty finger deep into my wound when they should have wrapped their arms around me and said “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. You need to heal. You need to rest. ”

In the meantime, does it mean that while I heal, I must still go without physical, emotional, and sexual intimacy? Do I have to continue to starve? When you starve a thing it dies and I’m afraid that my ability to give and express love and intimacy is in fact dying.

In the meantime, while I heal, can I be brought back to life?

Same boat.

Yeah. . . I wouldn’t want to be in that boat either. Source

Dictionary.com, one of my favorite websites (seriously), defines the idiom “in the same boat” as “in the same circumstances; faced with the same problems: The new recruits were all in the same boat.”

It’s a common phrase that those of us with some mastery of the English language probably throw around a lot. I’ve used it countless times I’m sure, but lately I’ve found its use towards me to be disturbing rather than offering the comfort that I think was intended by the speaker. If I am in the same boat with certain people, somebody pass me a life preserver and I’ll take my chances out at sea.

The first time I had to stop myself from audibly screaming out “You ain’t trapping me in a sinking ship with you!” was several hours after a family gathering. A relative was sharing the news of another’s engagement as we drove her home, and as I do with so many things, I made the conversation about me. I was happy for my family member, but felt like I was being once again left in the dust when it came to the milestones indicating a normal, healthy adulthood. The relative who shared the news with me has never been married. When I expressed my bittersweet feelings on the subject, rather than offering me the usual empty encouragements that a very single girl over 30 is bound to hear, my relative said the following: “You want to get married? I never married. Do I regret it? Well, yes, I suppose, when it comes to things like having to carry heavy packages or eating meals alone, but we’re smart, educated women. You and I are in the same boat. It may never happen for you, but so what? You’ll be just fine.”

I think I gagged a little when she said that. I didn’t want to be in the same boat with her. Her boat was leaky and lonely. She only had one broke-down oar to paddle with. The sails wouldn’t. . . sail (If you haven’t noticed, I know nothing about boats, ships, and/or sailing.).  I wanted her to tell me that I was on a jet ski racing off to the Island of Eligible Bachelors, not that I’d be “just fine” when and if I ended up like her. I’m pretty sure I cried after receiving my relative’s declaration. Those tears must have tasted particularly bitter because so far, my life is most like hers than anyone else in the family. The possibility of my being over 60 and still alone is creeping near; my relative is holding out her hand to me while I stand unsure and scared on the dock, ready to help me sail off into a lonely sunset.

Most recently, an old friend repeatedly mentioned that she and I were in the same boat. My old friend does not date and makes no effort to. In fact, she is contemplating swearing off any attempts at or offers of romantic relationships for the foreseeable future. My old friend isn’t one to talk about s-e-x, but I assume that if she did, she’d mention that she’d be just fine with never having it again. Ever. With anyone. Ever again. Forever. Yikes.

When she told me that she and I were in the same boat, at first I chuckled. Yeah, poor us. So unlucky in love. She’s the only person I know that is my age and knows what it’s like to go more than a decade without knowing the gentle touch of a man. It’s been years since she’s even been on a date. I yukked it up with her. Hell yeah we’re in the same boat! But the more she said it, the less funny it became. Did I really want to be in the same boat with someone who has given up on love? My old friend has plenty of justifiable reasons for her decision to swear off the opposite sex, but still. To not even try? And wait a minute. I’ve been trying. I’ve done online dating, I’ve gone speed dating, I’ve tolerated mediocre dates with men I wish I could forget. I’ve embarrassed myself by asking for sex because TV and well-meaning friends tricked me into thinking I’d get a ‘yes’ if I did. I can’t show my face in my local YMCA because I’ve tried (It’s not what you think, I swear!) so hard!

It’s not fair to be shoved into a boat where the captain (Skipper? Admiral? I don’t know.) has given up. The boat hasn’t even capsized, it’s just aimlessly meandering around and around, like a bathtub toy circling the drain. I understand that my old friend doesn’t want to halfheartedly row her ass to nowhere by herself, but that’s like telling a kid who studied for a test and failed that he’s just like the kid that didn’t even crack open the book. “I don’t know that shit. And you did just as bad as me.”

Maybe to some people I deserve my place in that boat next to my friend. I found myself having yet another bitch fest about my loneliness and frustration with Dick and Jane over dinner and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dick was annoyed or bored or disgusted with me and what he perceives as my lack of effort. When I told them that a dating guide I’d stumbled across online read that women ought not rule out the bar scene after all, Dick asked me when I was going bar hopping. I stumbled and stuttered as I told him that I was afraid to go alone; I’ve seen way too many episodes of “Law and Order: SVU” to be okay with that. He rolled his eyes and muttered something about my making excuses. He found my outrage at being an unwilling passenger on the SS Pusty Dussy humorous, maybe because to him it’s exactly where I belong.

I like the water, but I’ve always been wary of boat rides, probably because that first one ended so well. I don’t want this post to seem as though I am claiming to be better than my never-married relative or my old friend who has (Temporarily, please let it be temporarily!) given up on love. I’m not. I know that I’m not. But what I do know is that I want to keep trying to swim to shore on my own. I’m not resigned to either fate; neither boat can take me where it is I so badly want to go. I’m going to keep floating alongside lots of different boats, waving at the people on board while I try to keep my goggles from fogging up. Could I try to swim harder? Of course I can. And I probably will.

But be patient with me. Just by being in the water at all I’m bucking a stereotype.

Cockblocked by God.*

After my grandmother died, my dad went nuts and found religion. That’s probably not how he’d tell the story, but that’s basically my interpretation of it in a nutshell. My dad is far from crazy, but he did pick a religious denomination that is a favorite of crazy people. I blamed my parents for years for all of my various eccentricities (bat shit crazy behavior), neurosis (being looney tunes), and short comings (I suck). It very recently dawned on me that I’ve been raging against the wrong machine. My issue ain’t with ma and pa, it’s with three other equally terrifying people: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I grew up in the Pentecostal church. I’d specifically name the large and powerful denomination that had a big part in shaping me into the standup individual that I am today, but a). I’m trying to stay as incognegro as possible and b). I’m pretty sure they have enough money to put out a hit on me. Let’s see; what’s the best way to describe growing up Pentecostal to people who had a normal different upbringing? I think listing the various things that were off-limits to Sexy Kid Ambrosia might give you the best glimpse of what I was dealing with:

• I have never seen an episode of “The Smurfs” as my church called for a national boycott of the program for including “real magic spells” in the show. I just never got around to it as an adult because honestly, the show seems pretty freakin’ lame.
• I was not allowed to have a unicorn My Little Pony action figure as unicorns are magical creatures and MAGIC IS REAL AND EVIL.
• I was not allowed to listen to the radio or secular music in general until middle school, with a few notable exceptions.
• I was groomed to wait until marriage to have sex, probably starting in third grade.
• I was also groomed to expect the Second Coming of Christ, i.e., the Apocalypse, from about the same time as I was groomed to keep my legs closed. I found the idea of Jesus coming back absolutely terrifying and not comforting as I expect my parents and Sunday School teachers intended. I’d talk about it kind of a lot at school and couldn’t understand how my other friends hadn’t heard about this event that was coming to destroy. . . most of them.
• I went Trick-or-Treating once at three-years-old (I was an angel, complete with a halo magically suspended above my head. Dad is a very talented guy.) and then again at 13 after begging and crying and explaining to my parents that they were ruining my life. What happened during those other 10 years you ask? Oh, didn’t you know? Halloween is EVIL. It is from THE DEVIL. It is DEVIL WORSHIP (Basically. It’s kind of a long story, actually.) So Halloween was off-limits for families that really loved Jesus. Instead, we dressed up as fruit or Bible characters and had “Harvest” parties in the church gym. I apologize to the few friends I was able to convince to come with me to these parties over the years. I owe you a pillow case filled with candy.
• I never, ever believed in Santa Claus. EVER. I had to look up how to properly spell homey’s name, that’s how much I have never believed in him. Santa Claus was a pagan “secular” distraction from the True Meaning of Christmas: Jesus dying for our sins. Oh, you thought Christmas was about a sweet baby being born and Mary and angels and sheep and really mean motel owners? No, fool! EVERYTHING is about Jesus dying for our sins and don’t you forget it. Even if you are a little girl who takes things very literally, probably because you are highly intelligent, and the thought of Jesus dying makes you feel terrible and cry. (The Resurrection was of little comfort to me because it meant that yeah, Jesus was alive, but he still cryptically peaced out on everyone who ever loved him and was never seen or heard from again. . . if you’re not a good enough Christian, that is.)
• This isn’t something that was banned or off-limits, but I feel like I ought to mention that probably ’till the age of 15ish, I was a staunch pro-life Republican. Thank God for giving me a liberal Democrat grandpa who steered me left. Get it? Oh, and my dad is totally a Democrat too, don’t let him fool you. My mom is a lamer; she’s registered as an Independent. Ugh.

So, getting back to my issue with God actively cockblocking me: it’s kind of hard to have a healthy attitude about sex when you’ve been trained to believe that having it before you convince some sucker to marry you makes the Holy Spirit cry-cringe-die a little on the inside. I wanted to be a good Christian, I truly did. Even though Sexy Kid Ambrosia had doubts, even as a sexy little kid. Even though Teenage Ambrosia burst into tears so hysterical that her mom had to pull the car over because she couldn’t understand how or why a loving God would send her BFF to hell for being gay. I tried, dammit. I tithed. I studied the Bible. I went to soul-crushing youth retreats and services. I dragged friends and boyfriends to church at every opportunity. I was very prepared to be a bride who really deserved to wear white. Until I met He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Laying out the gory details of my dealings of HWSNBN is for another post that I may never write as that junk is deeply personal, (Not like this stuff isn’t; it’s just mad different.) but here’s what you need to know: I met him when I was 19. I was going through some thangs. He is probably, in my professional opinion**, a sociopath. He was certainly an alcoholic and just abusive enough to pretty much destroy me, but not abusive enough that anybody thought anything was wrong with me dating him. He was a mastermind of f*ckery! And he convinced me to do it with him. I was 20 when he managed to break down my resolve. He was the first, last, and only man male human being I’ve had sex with. I haven’t been 20 for 12 1/2 years, so yeah.

After the smoke cleared from my “relationship” with HWSNBN, I was too damaged and fat and androgynously dressed for sex to be a factor for a long while. And then, eventually, I became somewhat less damaged (Or maybe just learned to stuff down the damage with delicious cheesecake. Have you tried the mango keylime cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory? You can eat some feelings with that bad boy, I tell ya!) and slightly less fat and let my hair grow back and started caring about looking like a girl. I declared that I was ready to date again and would give the sex thing another go with a man who was kind to me and not mentally disturbed after making him wait for 90 days (I had that idea before you did, Steve Harvey!) and was met with crickets.

I believed that my complete fail at finding anyone to do sex with was really a problem with multiple causes, but the biggest one was that I was actively planning to SIN and God HEARD me planning IN MY BRAIN. I was already pretty convinced that my awesome time with HWSNBN was divine punishment for the sin of teh sex, and here I was, DARING to not only sin AGAIN, but planning out my sin IN ADVANCE! How dare I? I went running back to church with my tail between my legs and made a loud vow of chastity to anyone who’d listen and bought way too many books on the topic of not having sex and waited for God to bless me with a husband.

As you can tell by the title of this blog, God did not magically supernaturally deliver me a husband. I figured it was because I wasn’t a good enough Christian. So I tried harder. I prayed louder and longer. I cried more tears of repentance. I spent more and more time at church. I gave more money. I volunteered more of my time. I studied the Bible like I was gonna be quizzed on that shit. Until one day, during a church membership class, I said “Fuck it.” (Not out loud! I’m not that awful! YEESH!)

I was tired. I had given up. I’d had enough. I gave church and evangelical Christianity a few more tries until I just sort of shrugged my shoulders for the last time ’round early 2011. “So Ambrosia, you mean to tell me that you threw away your faith in an almighty, omnipotent god because you couldn’t find a date/get laid/get married??” Um, sort of? It was more complicated than that, believe me. But if I’m going to be honest, that was a huge piece of why I currently identify as a super doubtful person who had been indoctrinated into a Judeo-Christian worldview from birth/semi-agnostic. I can’t call myself a Christian. That’s a lie, at least at this point in my life. I can’t say I don’t believe in a god. Life is too. . . everything to have been accidental. There had to have been some magic involved. Yeah, I said magic.

I realize how ridiculous it is to shake my fist at a god who might not even be there because I’m bummed that I can’t get a date. But the thing is, I tried so hard to believe, to do what I thought and was taught and told that he wanted me to. I wanted to give my thanks to him with a marriage that would honor him, with children that would learn to love him and hopefully, not fear him the way that I did do. And that prayer, that desire of my heart, went more than unanswered. It went unheard. I felt like God wasn’t even acknowledging that I had asked, that he was throwing other people and situations in my face to mock my plea for love. And because once you’re trained up in the way you should go, it’s hard as hell to depart from it, I still believe that because I am determined to have a loving, intimate relationship with a man who I may not be married to, God hears that shit and is all like “Nuh-uh, bitch! How many times do I have to tell you, you are not getting any booty! Not up in here. NOT UP IN HERE!”

So, now you know. I think I’m being cockblocked by God. The worst part is, I can’t just give in and let him and go join a nunnery. Not because I’m filled with doubt and disbelief, but because I’m not a goddamn Catholic! Just my rotten luck that my dad had to turn on the station that aired Fred Price‘s sermons and not the Pope’s (The Pope has televised sermons, right? If he doesn’t, what is he waiting for?) when he was grief-stricken and couldn’t sleep and searching for An Answer.

Eh. It could have been a lot worse. We could have ended up as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Man, those guys are really messed up.

*According to urbandictionary.com, the proper term for preventing a lady from having sex is called ‘Box Blocking’ or ‘Clam Jamming’, but I didn’t like either of those and the word ‘cock’ is both funny and dirty.

**I am not a medical professional, but I know crazy when I see it. I’ve worked in public libraries.