Just a small town girl …

How many people have you been in your life? This is just a thought that popped into my head, as I listen to my lame ass 90′s playlist that I used to cry my eyes out to, convinced my father didn’t love me and nobody else ever would.

They say we change every 7 years, but if that’s true, I would have only been 4 and a bit people in my time, and I feel that I’ve been so many more. The lives that I have led already have been so varied, and I am lucky for all the experiences I have known. Still, I can’t believe sometimes where I am today and I want to remind myself how I got here.

Here’s my journey …

• The chubby polite English girl who was top of her class, had a loving Mum & Dad and enjoyed life as an only child, nerding out on the piano.

I believed once

• The newcomer to Canada who suddenly was an outcast in a town of 650 people at age 8. She’d go home in tears as kids would make fun of her.
• The child of parents in the midst of a separation. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, living in a renovated barn, with two unhappy adults.
• The new stepsister to three boys all around the same age, trying to fit in. This girl tried desperately to get her father to pay attention to her and eventually realized she could never measure up. She enjoyed these new relationships and embraced living in two houses as much as possible, but definitely had to adjust to being one of four from being the only one.
• The new fat kid in Ontario, living at the Tim Horton Children’s camp. At 13, this girl again wanted desperately to fit in, but couldn’t bring herself to conform so she made friends where she could and let some abuse her just to keep their friendships. She’d be called a pig, or a whore and would just take it because some attention was better than none.
• The teenager who was convinced that her father hated her because they didn’t talk for a year and a half. She would listen to these 90′s songs and cry her eyes out. She had close friends, but they would never see her sad. She was the rock for all those that needed a shoulder to cry on and kept her sadness to herself. During this time she decided that being anorexic, bulimic and an obsessive exerciser was a good plan to lose weight because obviously if she was skinny someone would love her. Though she didn’t think that last part at the time, at least not consciously.
• The bitch teenager. This girl would deal with all of the above and lash out at her Mum. She wouldn’t know how to deal with her relationship with her dad, her own weirdness and the drama that seemed to find her with friends. She cursed and learned the guilt trip with great skill, something she was never proud of but felt powerless against.
• The prude who wouldn’t know what to do when her perv neighbor tried to kiss her or get her to give him head and would constantly wrestle with it because she was convinced that he didn’t really want to with her, but then he did? What?
• The pioneer who met her first real boyfriend on the internet in 1997 when she was 17. She spent more time than she ever had before chatting on the internet in chatrooms and eventually met him a few months later
• The loner with no place to go for Thanksgiving or other holidays as her mum moved back to England and her dad was still in Nova Scotia
• The girl playing catch up who put the moves on her boyfriend faster than he was comfortable with, but she couldn’t help it. She ended up being the happy girlfriend who would fly to New York for some fantasy trips and finally sex that deep down she knew would never last and eventually ended.
• The girl that needed to get laid. Paraded around by friends at a drunken college event, this girl needed a one night stand, according to her friends and so she found one. Then she found another, and another. Luckily she started to learn the difference between sex and love and was able to start discovering her inner slut without too much drama.
• The girl who knew that above last sentence wasn’t always true.
• The college roommate who never fit in completely because everyone else was on the volleyball team and she was a strange duck who lived in the basement; though she made lasting friendships and loves them all dearly to this day.

Fine, it looks a bit weird, but I love this pic of Daddy and I

• The 18 year old who went home to England for a summer and slept with the hottest bartender only to go crazy and have no concept of how to be a sane person with him, ruining most of the rest of her summer.
• The girl who discovered phone chat lines in addition to other chat rooms and had some weird encounters with some questionable men that she now thinks she was crazy for meeting.
• The new resident to Toronto who quickly made a new friend that she fell in love with, but never dated (turns out he was married and she never knew). So instead, she used online dating to meet another guy, thinking that maybe she could date and have a normal relationship like everyone else, but he just ended up only wanting sex or doing a piss poor job of expressing anything else.
• The accidental girlfriend who found Steph online and was instantly attracted to him. With a first date lasting 2 and a half days, things seemed to be on the right track. They were both self employed, spending all their time together in a cockroach infested apartment at Dovercourt and Dundas.
• The girlfriend that realized that maybe this relationship was a mistake. He was so negative and never wanted to do anything. The first year and a half of living with a pushover made her lose confidence in her own decisions and live a double life being always very happy at the same time as not at all.
• The lover of interior design shows and IKEA. Seriously, that’s all that was ever on the tv back in the day.
• The self employed failure who couldn’t really hold down a real job, but kept trying as hard as she could to succeed at business because she hated the idea of working in an office after her first real office job.
• The daughter who didn’t know how to handle the news that her dad who lived an 18 hour drive away had ALS and not much time left to live, so she did what any person would do and convinced her boyfriend to marry her.
• The girl who put on a strong face when her dad passed away a month after her wedding and didn’t learn how to grieve or tell anyone she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be for at least a few years after that.
• The woman, unhappy in her marriage, convinced that she was happy. Feeling like a best friend more than a lover, she would sometimes hold back tears when making love to her husband. With no knowledge of polyamory or what simple communication could do for their relationship, she continued along that way because she figured it made sense.
• The Starbucks employee at 25 who had to accept that her life wasn’t going along where she wanted it to. And then she got a note from a customer …
• And she became the girl who discovered fucking people. She discovered that her big ass wasn’t the end of the world, that people would still like her, want to be with her, even love her.
• The new polyamorist. She fell in love with someone, or the idea of someone and when things went ass backwards, she flew home to see her mum not knowing what else to do, wondering why she’d brought this upon herself
• The bad person who met a married man on okCupid – originally only as friends – who was, and still is cheating on his wife with her. This girl wrestles constantly with her desire to be open and honest, diplomatic and considerate of everyone but still enjoys a relationship with someone she’s now known for almost three years and considers one of the most valuable she’s ever had.
• The newcomer to BDSM who started to see how different people could offer her different things, and how it could help her marriage and not harm it.

And finally, the girl she is today. The girl who tries to be strong, but can cry and feel like a failure in an instant. The girl who believes she’s nothing special while also knowing she’s pretty amazing at the same time. The girl who is happy to finally say that she’s in the best relationship she’s ever known, surrounded by some of the most amazing people on the planet, who despite her best & sometimes worst efforts, still fucks it all up.