Borderline Successful: Better On My Back

Content warning: dating fatigue, sex, stigma, emotional overwhelm, mental health spirals, rejection sensitivity, and feeling reduced to your body.

Moon: Gemini

Sun: Cancer

Mini playlist:

First 100 days

The first 100 days with someone are usually enough to know if they’ll stick around for another 100. That’s just over three months—dating, hooking up, meeting each other’s friends at casual get-togethers. Making out in bars or on museum steps. Telling your friends, “This one is really nice; it feels different.” Around day 100, you look at them and think, yes, we’re seeing each other. Yes, I’ll leave an extra hair bonnet at your place.

Just a heads up: people who get infatuated with me tend to fall hard and fast. I know it sounds strange, but it feels like a curse. They fall, get swept up, and end up a little dazed, almost surprised they’re even into me. Still, they ignore that gut feeling, that old survival instinct, and decide I’m worth the risk. Sure, I’ll sleep with this intense, talkative girl who’s chatting about everything at the bar. It makes for a good story. The group chat will love it.

In the first week, they text back fast. They call me “forward,” “direct,” and smile. Later they’ll say I’m “pushy,” “rude,” but I digress. For the first 90 days, they might even bring me around a friend. They might even bring me up to a sibling. They may refer to me by name to someone they speak to daily. Because if there’s no title, why does your auntie know my name?

It’s around day 100 that I wear off. And if you just started talking to me in the last couple weeks, I’m so sorry, baby, but you’re about to get the ick. Something massive.

This is all in the build-up: the trailers before the big feature film; the part where I am still auditioning to be a part of your life. I want to be someone’s baby so badly that sometimes I ruin it before it has even started. I lean into a position of desperate yearning. What if they leave? What if they meet someone else? What if I’m deluding myself, and 60 days is already pushing it for them?

I worry about wanting to be picked, because I know it is not very cute, girlypop-coded to be a pickme. And still, if someone stood firm in what they wanted with me beyond the day after tomorrow, I would go weak in the knees. I want to be a certain choice, not a consolation.

What people want

I fear people want to keep me around mostly for my sex. When I was younger, and maybe had less to offer a relationship, I was sure people stayed with me for sex, or the food stamps card, or the rent I was splitting. People have stayed with me because I let them try things on me and with me, and rarely safe-worded. I know that is ugly to say out loud. I know it makes me sound like I am still standing in the middle of old rooms.

At what point is being forward being aggressive, and when is it love-bombing? Is texting a lot love-bombing? Am I spiraling because I sent you “Wet Vagina” by Doja Cat unprovoked at 2 am? Am I a villain because I like it when you call me pet names the day after I’ve been to an actual orgy? Who is to say.

But unsurprisingly, people love crazy girls. They call them crazy bitches, but they love a crazy bitch. Just the same, they love me when I’m a crazy bitch, at least in those first 100 days. It’s sassy, fiery, vivacious, confident, fearless, and bold. How long before you call me callous and ill-tempered? When does my confidence read as vanity? How long before I’m too loud and too sexual and too aggressive?

I hate the word aggressive. It’s always used in moments where there is nothing I can do to defend myself that will not come off as aggressive. So I don’t react. I silently exit people’s lives. Because if I scare you, I don’t want to cause you that stress, and I will leave. It will be very odd if you ask for a hug after saying I was aggressive and scared you, but hey, maybe I’m just bitter. Who. Is. To. Say.

Taking up space

I can be intense. I’ve worked on it: toned down, softened, filed into shapes people can actually hold. I try to be heard at a certain volume and timbre. I try to be understood. And I carry this specific fear when I’m interested in someone: that I will spill too much, too fast, bombard them, overwhelm them, ruin it. Like my affection is a chemical spill and I’m one wrong text away from an international incident.

The funny part is: very rarely has anyone said “you’re too much” to my face. It’s happened, sure. But mostly people let the group chat do the verdict. Most people disappear. Mostly, people rewrite you as “a lot” so they can feel like they’re leaving a fire, not a person.

And then I have the opposite fear: that I’ll police myself so hard I disappear altogether. That I’ll sand down every sharp edge that makes me me, and I’ll end up trapped in my own hell writing Bravo fan fiction just to feel alive again. (I’m behind on RHOA and didn’t even KNOW about RHORI, but I’m a binge watcher. Don’t rush me.) (I also should absolutely write Bravo fan fiction. Fantastic idea. My brain is so big sometimes.)

Weather problem

Catching people up on my lore is a process. A lot has happened, so yes, I am a lot. I don’t mind telling people. I’m open, and I actually want to be honest without making everything weird. But some of my origin story is a bummer, and sometimes even I’m like: okay, let’s pivot, because I did not come here to be a walking trigger warning.

It gets especially weird when I’m dating someone who seems like they had a well-adjusted upbringing. You can’t really know what someone’s childhood was like, but you can feel it sometimes. Like: do your eyes cut to the door when it opens? Do you panic when you make a small mistake? Do you apologize like you’re about to be executed? Or do you just… fix the thing, self-soothe, and keep living? Must be nice.

And then I have one “bed-rotting” incident, just one: locked in my room, binging American Dad, or Hoarders marathons if I’m especially in my feelings. Surviving off candy and granola bars, trying to make as little sound as possible. Trying to climb into my own mouth feet first, hoping that instead of flipping inside out, I slip into a void entirely and disappear. And suddenly they’re looking at me like I’m actively sinking into the earth by my hair.

Let me be clear: I have a scale. It is not science. It is just the weird little weather system I use to explain myself to myself. It’s technically a ten-part scale, but I am dramatic, so sometimes it goes to 11. A level 7 is pretty fine. Not great. Not cute. Not brunch-ready. But not an emergency.

The actual problem is not that I have weather. Everyone has weather. The problem is that people enjoy the thrill of being invited into the storm until they remember weather is not a theme park. I am not a haunted house you can brag about surviving. I am a person whose life continues after the anecdote gets boring.

Script underneath

“Sometimes I act crazy” is an incredibly reductive and unfair thing to say. It also absolutely sums up a lot of what I’ve dealt with. I’m not around people who bring that out of me anymore. I don’t feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I don’t clench at footsteps on the stairs. I am not wound up so tight I’m on the verge of snapping more often than not. I have never been crazy for no reason. And emotions are not evil. Actions after emotions can be, and that is where the work comes in.

People love the part of me that enters the room hot and loud. They love the immediate intimacy, the directness, the sexual confidence, the bit, the chaos, the story they can tell later. They love it until they feel implicated by it. They love “forward” until it becomes “aggressive.” They love “bold” until it becomes “too much.” They love “sexually liberated” until they remember liberation means I still have preferences, boundaries, expectations, and a memory.

That is the thing I want to keep centered here: I am not better on my back because I am easier to manage there. I am not better when I am quiet. I am not better when I am useful, sexy, funny, grateful, available, or impressive. I am better on my back because sometimes the world understands me best when it thinks I am not taking up space. And I am angry about how often that has felt true.

Why I’m “better on my back”

The title is a joke, but it is also the whole point. There is a version of me people find easiest to love when I am horizontal: in bed, in crisis, in confession, in someone else’s apartment, in a role they understand. Desired, but contained. Honest, but not too mobile. Vulnerable, but not in charge of the room. That version of me gets called sexy, honest, brave, intense, unforgettable. Standing up, the same traits become loud, aggressive, erratic, too much, hard to place.

I know because I have watched it happen in real time. I can be the same person with the same mouth and the same history, but if I am touching you, you can call it chemistry. If I am asking for accountability, you can call it conflict. If I am telling a story in bed, you can call it intimacy. If I am telling the same truth over brunch, maybe now I am oversharing.

Contempt isn’t chemistry. Punishment isn’t recovery. Management isn’t love. And being desired is not the same as being understood.

I want to be wanted standing up, too.

Atila Martin

Blog: https://atilacore.pckt.blog/

Bluesky: @atilacore