a breakthrough on my "TYPE"
surprise: there's more to it than I'd thought.
A friend brought up a great discussion that led me to some thoughts on attraction and TYPES. For context, I’d said physical attraction (what I referred to as an “innate carnal charge) cannot be helped. Another friend then asked if I could draw a through-line between when and with whom that charge has appeared.
My almost response: “Ummm, nope! The heart wants what the heart wants! La la la la—oh! Siri, play that one Selena Gomez song NOW!” My defensiveness was enough to make me sit with her question anyway.
That was about two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been laying out each of my loves (and heartbreaks) as if they were tarot cards. Maybe more like Pokémon cards—comparing and contrasting their physicalities, backgrounds, strengths, shortcomings, even their voices.
(Of course, the best way to remember is to forget. The best way to see is to stop staring—you’re going cross-eyed, Cara!)
And now here is the through-line, the breakthrough, the thread running through them all.
My “type” isn’t physical, emotional, or even aesthetic traits. My type hasn’t even belonged to adult me. It’s been Little-Cara running the show, picking the guys the entire time.
Her type (*ahem* our type) has been men in the center. Men who’d confirm that everything I knew about myself—that I was worthy of being seen, validated, witnessed—was true.
That is who I’ve been drawn to.
a quick blast to the past
I’m coming to terms with how my childhood has shaped my approaches to love.
This kind of work is a dance—step to the left with my retrospective despair. Pull back. Step to the right with, “I mean, you’ve gotta admit that’s pretty absurd.” Pull back. Step forward two times with, “Okay I see it, let’s fucking do this!” Now pull it all together. A melody of insight! Bah-dah-dah-dah!
So, what have I been dancing to before writing this?
Some lyrics and melodies:
I was raised on a very strict and punitive NO BOYS policy. A combination of a stringent Catholic upbringing and a very conservative culture (my parents are both immigrant and first-generation Samoan), in which shame and corporal punishment are the default devices of control.
*When you’re doing this kind of digging, you MUST allow yourself to laugh at the irony and the ways you squeezed yourself out of certain things. For me, this is the open window, the reminder that I was, indeed, resilient through it all.
My parents had HOPED they’d scare me into fearing boys. Instead, I became comically, almost pathologically boy-crazy and lovesick. Over real-life people and utter strangers.
I almost fainted and fell off the bus when I found out my crush had made out with my friend… all my pads came tumbling out of my backpack. I could not eat when the cute boy at my church, whom I had seen just twice, moved away. I penned SEVERAL Jonas Brother fanfics, and when Tiger Beat told me Taylor Swift was dating Joe Jonas… I was bedridden for days.
You have to laugh. Just a little.
I always felt ugly, out of place, last picked (if at all), and unseen. In our officer-Marine Corps communities, I was the only one with brown skin, wild and curly hair, a big, flat nose, and a name no one could say right. School dances and Valentine’s were nightmares because I knew I wouldn’t be asked or even considered. And IF, by some divine grace, I were to be asked… I would not be allowed to go. And I’d be severely punished for someone else giving me the attention I wanted.
The conundrum was always this: in the deepest part of me, *I’ve* always seen myself as cool, smart, and beautiful. I used to think, “My stories are so great. Look at all this cool music I find ALL the time. My Myspace page is the shit. My hair is going to be okay.”
I lived in those beams of hope. I felt like I had a secret, magical fountain I was drinking from while everyone else sipped on the shitty-generic-commissary coca cola. This I carried with me: the idea that I was someone whom anyone should want to be friends with or have a crush on.
And yet it was also a delusion. If that was the case, why did nobody else reflect this? Affirm this?
I began to believe I was dreaming, hallucinating, spinning in an imaginary world that needed only one thing to become real:
somebody to see me.
That’s all I wanted.
As I got older, I began to hope for someone from the CENTER who could bring me into the circle of acceptance, reverse the story, and help me make up for lost time.
Little-Cara finally gets a stage
THEN came college. Someone somewhere in the Universe lifted the veil for me.
Not only was I noticed, but I was remembered, sought out. I received tokens of all the things that told me I was attractive, interesting, and worthwhile. Finally, I was given a stage to dance upon, an audience to see me and adore me.
But there I was, childishly hungry but illiterate in restraint, reflection, and discernment. Everything was registered as the thrill and the drug of being chosen, no matter how superficial or fleeting. I now had a stage, but I kept singing and dancing to the same old song. I spun with any boy, any friend, any opportunity that approached me. My feet were tired, but I kept going.
It wasn’t enough. I still wanted to be in the center of everything.
Enter my college boyfriend. My most formative experience in love, and my most intoxicating.
Not only was he intelligent, thoughtful, cool, and funny, but he was also popular, wealthy, and from Boston, a place classic and well-known, unlike my rootless-military-brat origins. And of course, he was remarkably handsome, a unanimous agreement by every girl in my orbit.
Then he picked me so publicly, so decisively, so FERVENTLY in front of everyone who knew us and those who didn’t. My delusion was materializing before my eyes—everything I’d wanted, plus a million dreams more. I was lovesick again, but my hours were spent looping how perfect it all was. I felt as if I’d never have to feel alone or unseen again. Little-Me was both vindicated and dusted under the bed with my old fanfics and diaries.
I forgot that lovesickness is exactly that: an ailment.
For every Odesza or Bonobo-streaked night, every body-melting climax, every perfect afternoon in the park eating sandwiches and drinking beers from the deli we’d picked together…
there were cracks. Wobbles. Signs of this world’s instability and eventual demise. Reminders that this boy who, despite his love, still lived outside of me.
He brought me to a family weekend, and at first, it seemed perfect. But when I got there, everything began to sweat into a fever dream. Staying in Tiburon at a home that was nicer than anything I’d ever seen. His whole family, a group of tennis champions trained across lifetimes at the country club. An entire box to ourselves at the Giants game. I was nauseous through it all. I’d sneak away to sit alone outside or hide in our room, watching the Golden Gate stretch into the fog.
I didn’t get it. How could I be back where I started—feeling so alone and ugly when this wonderful person picked ME?
It confused me. It just didn’t feel the way love was supposed to feel.
the reckoning
Last week, I found the final piece of the puzzle: my last and greatest heartbreak back in 2018, who would also become my son’s father.
He was, on paper, nearly the same as my college boyfriend, so I went after him with everything I had. Except I soon learned that he wasn’t generous, thoughtful, or kind. He wasn’t even fucking funny. He was manipulative, dishonest, arrogant, cold, and in our final exchanges, pointedly cruel.
Many say that shame is the most isolating emotion, and I’d agree. There is a sticky, leaky quality to it that people will evade and put distance between, as if it could seep under their door and into their own worlds. My mother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, and everyone needed me to be brave. They loved seeing me strong. Nobody wanted to hear that I was bleeding on the inside.
I’d been cut deeply by my double-edged shame. First, by the disappointment that I’d failed to have my inner hopes and world confirmed. I’d been sorely wrong. I wasn’t smart enough, good enough. I’d been crazy the whole time.
Then, I was sliced again. This time, I was humiliated by my sadness, black-hole fury, and my abandonment. It was embarrassing to be so heartbroken. I felt like a gaping wound that everyone wanted to cover, embalm, and forget.
Since then, I’ve baby-stepped my way back into hope. I healed enough to let love become a distant land. I watched my cousins get married, my two college friends move in with their boyfriends. Another flew to Spain to sip vermouth with dark-lashed men. One more left her deadbeat boyfriend to run for Arcteryx with chiseled, bronzed LA boys.
I wanted to dance again, so I watched them. I memorized their notes, their steps. Then I dreamt, and I dreamt. I combed through my diaries, my playlists, holding my ear to what I thought had worked, but the melody was lost.
I placed myself in pulsing environments to find that same attention, but tumbled my way into more reminders of how offbeat I’d become. A few more attempts on dating apps, here and there. A desperate Hail Mary (I just wanted to be NORMAL!) with a blob of a guy who couldn’t even make himself lunch—enough for me to go, “I’d rather alone and without fucking a single other person than ever do THAT again. Is THIS what it’s come to for me?!”
All just reminders that I needed and wanted to find my way. Still stumbling, but against it all… never letting go of hope.
I’ve wanted to figure out what’s going on, here in myself, for so long. It’s been hard for me to follow the stories, the origins.
I often feel like I’m tracing through a pile of tangled strings, all of which are knotted, braided together, and threaded to so many different places within my heart.
And here it is. Here is where everything leads.
I was asked what my type was… and there it was, all along.
And now, here I am. Thank you.
There is indeed a grief for my younger me, for all of Little-Cara’s wanderings and searchings.
But I remember that in our deepest griefs, we can find doorways back into the folds of time.
I close my eyes, and I am there with her, through all the whisky-streaked pleas to that boy to PLEASE take her back, slamming gates, closed-eye kisses, and the sleepless nights listening to the rain.
She is no longer alone in her marathon-groundings, in that Japanese hair salon pressing her hair straight, in her boyfriend’s giant home, or that time she saw him at Beauty Bar for another girl’s birthday right after they broke up.
I am lying on her bedroom floor, reading her fanfics, asking her for the next chapter. My hand against her forehead in the throes of her feverish lovesickness, giggling and crying alongside her, through it all.
I choose HER as my number one spot on my Myspace Top 8.
Something has changed! I am no longer alone!
A new era of bright sides. Not the kind I’ve forced for everyone else’s sake, but the kind that feels like a natural spaciousness. A chance. A new and true hope that I’ve never felt before.
I’ve always been a dreamer, a dancer, a lover. Maybe I’ve never been lost, but all along, I’ve been reweaving my beliefs in self-worth. Building up my faith in myself as the wonderful person I am. Praying to the gods that one day, my existence will be untethered to whether or not some guy picks me.
I SEE ME, so I exist. I choose myself, so I am infinitely chosen.
So now! The real breakthrough and the revelation: I don’t know what my type is!
In this incredible, open, bright way. Like, holy shit.
Without that standard and STRIVING, an old question finds new life.
Who do I like? What do I prefer? Who would I choose to be in my world? Who is deep enough, vibrant enough, sturdy enough for me? Who will I allow into my center, my orbit? Who will be lucky enough to want me for me?
(All those itches I wanted to scratch. All the gaps I was hoping to fill. Scratched, lotioned, and moisturized. Filled, spilling over the brim. A jar of milk and honey. )
It feels like a really beautiful blank slate, to be honest.
~ To Little-Cara: I’ll take the wheel when things get rough. We’ll have some fun along the way. Have your crazy crushes, because I will pull you out of bed, listen to you, and hold you through them all. Your hair is great. Take care of it. It won’t be thick like that forever, trust me.
Love will never rank us, overlook us, bring us anywhere we can’t go ourselves, or give us something to “complete” us.
We are everything we thought we’d be. We dreamt it because it was the truth. ~
