confusion

Oh dear Gods, how did I become Miss Popularity? I mean this quite seriously. If you'd told me two years ago I was going to have to plan out the next week by Tuesday the week before and share my calendar with at least six other people, I'd have said you were nuts. But here I am, two years later living a life I am not sure I ever imagined. Well, maybe imagined but most certainly never really thought this might happen.

So, let's backtrack a bit. It's December 2006. I weigh 376 pounds and stand 5' 3". I'm short, fat, and completely sexless. How so? Society strips fat girls of their sexuality and make them friends, sisters. Sure, sometimes similar things happen to men, but it seems to always happen to women. Anyway, I decided to have weight loss surgery - Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. I chose to permanently change my digestion to give me the tool for successful and long-term weight loss. And on 12/26/2006 I did just that.

And it worked. Well, mostly. I'm still considered obese but I lost about 200 pounds and have been pretty successful at keeping it off. Most of the time I really don't care that I'm not a size six. I'm a comfortable 14-16 and I love that I can wear dresses and heels and buy clothes off the rack that fit more times than they don't. I shop in thrift stores and count myself lucky to be able to walk and move, and stretch, and lift weights, and all those things that most people get to do and never think about it.

Here's the odd thing. And it's something I heard from almost all of the other women. We lost weight and regained our sexuality and gender. People saw us as women; as sexual beings. And we were confused. I can't tell you how many times we discussed in support group how weird this felt and how we were confused at how to respond. And as time passes, I remain confused.

How did this happen? How did I become Miss Popularity? Who needed either a paper calendar color coded to keep my social life straight or the integration of a Google calendar shared with at least six other people.
And synched to my (new) Android phone so I can keep track of stuff.

When my 40s started, I was married to a lovely woman, who was perfectly nice, if you define nice as conventional and straightforward. And not one for a lot of sex. Yeah, we had a great and emotionally intimate relationship, but not a sexual one. One day my sex drive woke up. One thing led to another and we ended up splitting up. I decided to embrace the lifestyle that I wanted - the polyamorous lifestyle. And I did.

It started out simple enough.I started having an emotional and physical relationship with a married man. Yes, his wife knew and gave her full support to us. We are still seeing each other. Then I started seeing Erika. And Will. And Lloyd. No, I don't see all of these people still. Erika is happy with her girlfriend and trying to be monogamous. Will, although a lovely man, is just someone with whom I'm pretty casual with and meeting Lloyd kind of pushed him out of the scene for me. Then I started seeing Mark and Brittany (yeah, lots of Marks in my life) with our plan to merge households and try building a tribe, a family unit, something. And that doesn't count Joseph, David, and Ellen, not to mention my sisters in my coven, and other friends like Holly. And I still have a bunch of folks emailing me on OK Cupid. Before I commit to any date, I need to check in with my Google Calendar to make sure I'm not already committed to seeing someone else.

Oh, dear Gods, how did this happen? On one hand I love the attention from Mark, Lloyd, and Mark and Brittany. Not to mention the attention from David and Joseph and anyone else who wants to meet me. But it's still just wildly confusing that I went from wallflower to Miss Popularity. Lloyd says that I deserve lots of love and sex and good times because I'm awesome. It's so hard to believe sometimes. And yet it's constant that people are attracted to me and want to be near me.

Wow.