I don't want to be that girl

This has been a good year for epiphanies.

Early this summer, I vacationed in Daytona Beach with my mom and some extended family. Our room overlooked the ocean and several pools. On the twelfth floor, we were high enough to see pelicans fly past our window at a regular basis, but not high enough to escape the constant noise from below.

Down on the beach and poolside, I marveled at how many different swimsuits the world produced. I have never seen so much skin in one locale. 

Now, most of my life has been spent negatively comparing myself to other women, and extrapolating from all those "men are visual" talks at church that I would only be a last resort candidate for any sort of romantic relationship. In the past, I might have seen some of these women on the beach as confirmation of this, and I would resent their existence and all the men who would doubtless pick them over me.

Perhaps it was the sheer over-saturation of skin that produced the epiphany: I don't want to be those women. Even if some of them have better-looking legs than I do.

And while I still don't believe I'm the fairest of them all, I did finally recognize that I do believe I am more interesting than most of them. There were a lot of women on the beach sunbathing, but I was one of the few out playing in the ocean waves. There were a lot of women around the pools, but I was the only one running around under the waterspouts at the kiddie pool with the kids accompanying her. I may not have been the only woman in the whole place who was irritated one afternoon when the music from the pool got loud enough to hear all of the lyrics from the twelfth floor, but I may well have been the only one irritated because it disturbed the reading of a book about North Korea.

The second epiphany came quickly on the heels of the first: I like being with me. I like being with people who like being with me. I wouldn't ever want to be with a man who was looking around him for the next best thing, I would want somebody who fell into that category of people who like being with me. And I don't want to waste any more of my life pining over men whose grass is greener on the other side of our conversations.

In the past, when I have been interested in guys, I have compared myself to other women and discounted all of my chances because I didn't measure up to them in one way or another. In Daytona, thinking of any future romantic interests, my attitude had shifted from "some poor guy could get saddled with me and my issues" to "some guy should be so lucky...and if none of them ever think so, I should be so lucky as to avoid entanglements with men with poor taste."

Underneath all that self-deprecation has been hiding a woman who believes she's pretty amazing, and that God is working on the parts that aren't amazing yet.

I write it down in case I forget.