Princess of Livid

Bridesmaid dresses were kind of wild back then!
Or maybe the ladies in my family are just weirdos?

 It seems like the dumbest thing I've ever been mad about, but I think it's important. Week before last, on a Sunday morning, I was figuring out what to say to Mr. Breakfast and feeling jangled about some other stuff, when I heard The Guy Next Door talking in baby voice to whoever his date was:

"...and I treat her like a princess. I treat you like a princess, too. No fetish is ever gonna..."

Now, I'm pretty lucky for someone who lives next door to her onerous unrequited kryptonite crush. I've only run into him once since our break-off conversation, and I don't overhear anything blush-inducing. I almost always have white noise or music on, there's only just a sliver of space where I can hear anything at all. But there he was in that sliver of space. I wasn't eavesdropping, I just heard it.

I'm sure he wasn't saying it for me to hear, he was just saying stuff. I know him well enough that I'm pretty sure he's not treating anyone like a princess, but that's not how it landed.

The message my tangled heart heard was that I wasn't good enough, that other women deserved to be treated like princesses and I'd failed some mysterious test. This is one of my oldest and loudest and most destructive intrusive thoughts: "You're not as good as other women, they know something you don't and can't know."

Why my brain appointed him the designated arbiter of my worth is a question for infinite Codependents Anonymous meetings, but in that moment, I felt like I winked out of existence, the woozy, drowning feeling of being not there. If they were the princesses, if they had somehow gained his fleeting and sand-castle-like attention, then there was no reason for there to be a me at all. 

(How am I ever supposed to date men when I have thoughts like that? Makes me want to get myself to some kind of non-denominational anti-Fascist nunnery where I could garden and call congress and read books and forget that men ever were.)

He wasn't saying it for me to hear, but he knew it was a pet name I loved. I'd showed him my Feeld profile mentioning being a princess. (In fact, when he read the part about me looking for a sweet dom who's good with ropes, he said "Well you found him." That motherfucker could really SAY STUFF.)

Anyway, the morning of the overhearing, I was LIVID. I'M the princess, goddammit, how could he take even that away from me?

(The 30 Rock joke about "sexually transmitted crazymouth" comes to mind, although I guess it was transmitted via weird nebulous friendship instead.)

(Semi-platonically transmitted crazymouth?)

Anyway, it made me want to think about why the word "princess" feels so important to me.

I remember a moment, not too long after my teenage sexual assault, dressed up for Halloween in the above bridesmaid dress and looking in the mirror. The lipstick I'd just applied looked like clown makeup to me. All of me felt false, artificial, foolish, absent. I had some nerve dressing up as a princess, I was barely even a woman. I was barely even anything. I wiped the makeup off but wore the dress.

The next time I wore that dress, I was in my very early twenties and part of an art happening. My project was to create a pink-themed pyramid of everything about me, and let people take home anything that spoke to them. A stranger went home with a box of my love letters and I can't say I regret this choice! My brother got livid with me because I gave away the Barbie he'd given me the Christmas before.

After the show, when most of the pink pyramid was gone, I felt empty but also less alone. If I couldn't figure out how to be close to people, at least I could get them to take a piece of me home.

After that night, the friend who ran the art show started calling me Princess (My Name)--he even wrote a song about me! I LOVED being Princess Me. These were my raver years and also my shoplifting-at-my-friends'-mall-stores years, so I was never without shiny too-short dresses, manic panic hair, and Urban Decay makeup. And glitter. So, SO much glitter. And sometimes bubbles that were also candy. It was a magical time.

One time a guy I flirted with at the coffeehouse told me I looked like I was from space, and that felt like the highest compliment.

Between the mid-Nineties and whenever I made my Feeld profile, the Princess persona got less plasticky, but never lost its glitter. It morphed from a costume to a gender expression, a femme way of fiercely, adamantly claiming womanhood in a world that was never gonna declare me to be womaning properly.

Calling myself a princess was a way to give myself what I felt like no one else was ever gonna give me, a way to treat myself like a magical treasure, the way I saw (or more likely imagined) other, smaller, quieter, more conventionally beautiful women being valued, being attended to. It was a way to attend to myself, a skill I'm still trying to learn.

In the weeks following my unfortunate overhearing, I have been treated so, SO kindly. 

For example:

Sweet Valentine: What song is this?

Me: I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses.

Sweet Valentine: And you are!

I've been treated kindly by my friends, too, and my Higher Power, and by the gently-thawing weather. And most importantly, by myself. People are welcome to join me in my princess-ness, but I have to treat myself that way, and keep doing it.

Right in this moment, I feel the truth: No one can decide whether I'm a princess, or any other pet name, except me. Right now, I feel like I'm up to the challenge of self-love.