Today, I came across words about tattooed women that cut far deeper than I ever would have expected. The sentiment was essentially that women who choose to tattoo their bodies are somehow worthy of less respect, that being heavily tattooed says something negative about the woman herself. It went beyond simply finding tattoos unattractive. It reduced a woman’s character and worth to a choice she made about her own skin.

And those words hurt me more deeply than I want to admit. I’m not angry. I almost wish I were. Anger would be easier. I could get pissed off, call someone an asshole, throw up my middle finger, and move on with my day. Instead, I am incredibly hurt. The kind of hurt that makes me want to pull away from everyone for a while. The kind that makes me want to hide myself, cover myself, and stop letting people see the parts of me they might find something wrong with.

I know that sounds like an enormous reaction to a few cruel sentences. Maybe it is. But words don’t land in empty places. Sometimes they land directly on top of every other word that came before them.

I got my first tattoo when I was 46 years old. There was nothing impulsive about that decision, and there is nothing impulsive about any of the tattoos on my body. The front of my right arm has become this dark, elegant piece that feels incredibly representative of one part of me. On my left arm are three vivid watercolor tattoos that represent other pieces of who I am. Every one of them has meaning. Every one was thought about and deliberately chosen. There is darkness in me and there is color. There is softness and intensity. There are pieces of myself I spent decades discovering, and eventually I chose to put some of them on my skin.

And my tattoos make me feel sexy.

Even writing that makes me feel vulnerable because feeling sexy has never come easily to me. I have been judged for my weight for as long as I can remember. It began before I was old enough to understand what was happening. Some of those messages came from my own mother. Others came from society, from boys, from men, from clothes that weren’t made for bodies like mine, from movies and television, from jokes and looks. I learned very young that my body was something I was supposed to be ashamed of.

When it came to men, I learned another lesson. I could always be the friend. I could be funny, smart, easy to talk to, dependable, and one of the guys. And sure, sometimes a man might want to play around with the fat girl. Privately. There could be attraction behind a closed door. There could be touching and sex and desire when nobody else was looking. But owning that attraction in the light of day was something entirely different. In the light of day, I was the friend again. One of the guys. Someone they could talk to, laugh with, and confide in, but not necessarily the woman they wanted everyone else to know they wanted.

You learn from that. You learn to question attraction even when someone tells you it is there. You wonder whether they would still want you if someone else were watching. You wonder whether they would reach for your hand in public as easily as they reach for your body in private. You begin wondering whether you are actually desirable or merely acceptable when nobody else knows.

And then people wonder why you overthink.

I have a lot of feelings. I know that about myself. I feel things deeply, I attach meaning to things, and I can overthink at the drop of a hat. Sometimes I wish I could switch that part of my brain off. But it didn’t appear out of nowhere. When you spend enough of your life being taught that there is something fundamentally wrong with the body you inhabit, you become very good at waiting for the moment when someone else discovers it too.

And somewhere along the way, I learned that my body wasn’t the only thing about me that could be too much. My feelings could be too much too.

There seems to be this strange expectation that a woman should be emotionally available enough to nurture everyone around her, but not so emotional that anyone has to actually deal with hers. She can be compassionate. She can listen. She can soothe. She can understand. She can make space for someone else’s fears, insecurities, frustrations, desires, bad days, and complicated feelings. But God forbid she comes with a full set of her own.

I do.

I am not emotionally detached. I don’t know how to care about someone casually once I genuinely care. Things matter to me. Words matter to me. Changes in behavior matter to me. Connection matters to me. I need communication. Sometimes I need reassurance. Sometimes I need someone willing to sit with a feeling instead of immediately trying to fix it, minimize it, or run from it because now there is an emotion in the room that requires something from them.

And I know that counts me out for some men too.

I have heard enough variations of men saying they don’t want “drama,” don’t want to “manage someone’s emotions,” or want a woman who is “easygoing” to understand what is sometimes hiding underneath those words. Certainly there are unhealthy emotional behaviors nobody should be expected to manage. But having feelings isn’t inherently unhealthy. Needing emotional reciprocity isn’t drama. Wanting someone to care that they hurt you isn’t asking them to manage you.

Still, sometimes I wonder whether being a plus-size woman with a soft heart is simply two strikes before I ever step up to the plate. My body can be too much to openly desire, and my feelings can be too much to openly love.

So you learn to make yourself easier. You try not to ask for reassurance. You swallow the question. You tell yourself you’re overthinking. You pretend something didn’t hurt because you don’t want to be difficult. You become incredibly understanding of everyone else’s circumstances while quietly wondering whether anyone will ever extend the same patience toward yours.

And the cruel irony is that I spend my professional life understanding emotions. I know feelings don’t make someone weak. I know vulnerability is not pathology. I know emotional needs aren’t character defects. I can explain all of that beautifully when I am talking about someone else.

It becomes much harder when the woman needing that grace is me.

That is why words like these can still find me. Because somewhere underneath everything I know intellectually is a much older lesson: there will always be something about me that makes me too much and somehow still not enough.

Too fat. Too emotional. Too independent. Too sexual. Too opinionated. Too complicated. Too tattooed, apparently.

And when something happens that seems to confirm one of those old lessons, some little part of me quietly says, There it is. I knew it was coming.

That is where those words landed.

It wasn’t simply someone saying they don’t like tattoos. People are allowed not to like tattoos. People are allowed not to be attracted to my body. People are allowed to look at me and decide I am absolutely not their type. I can accept all of those things. The cruelty is turning a preference into a judgment about the woman underneath the ink. Believing less of women who choose to tattoo their bodies isn’t a preference. Deciding that their appearance somehow makes them unworthy of basic consideration isn’t about attraction. It is about deciding that something about a woman’s appearance diminishes her value as a human being.

Because underneath the therapist and the writer, underneath the woman who can stand in front of a room and speak confidently, organize things, advocate for people, and get shit done, there is still a woman who sometimes looks in the mirror and struggles to see what other people tell her they see. There is still the girl who learned she was supposed to be ashamed of her body. There is still the young woman who learned that she could be wanted privately and ignored publicly. There is still a part of me that is terrified that no matter what else I become, my body will always be the thing someone eventually uses to decide I am not enough.

I wish I had thicker skin. People sometimes mistake being strong for being difficult to hurt, but those aren’t the same thing. I have survived plenty. I have accomplished things I am proud of. I can advocate fiercely for other people. I can tell another woman that her body doesn’t determine her worth and believe every fucking word of it. But I am soft-hearted. I feel things deeply. Sometimes another person’s words get through every layer of strength I have built and find the part of me that still remembers every reason I was ever given to feel ashamed of myself.

Maybe tomorrow I will look at the dark elegance covering my right arm and remember why I chose it. Maybe I will look at the vivid watercolors on my left and remember what each one represents. Maybe I will remember that at 46 years old I finally started making choices about my body based on what made me feel beautiful instead of what might make my body more acceptable to someone else. Maybe I will feel sexy again.

I hope so.

But tonight I am simply acknowledging that someone’s words hurt me deeply. Not because their opinion defines me, and not because I believe what they said is true. They hurt because they sounded just enough like all the other voices I have spent a lifetime trying to silence. The voices that taught me my body should embarrass me. The voices that taught me I could be desired, but perhaps not claimed. The voices that taught me to expect friendship in the daylight and desire only behind closed doors. And now, perhaps, the voices that tell me even if someone can accept the body, eventually they may discover that the woman living inside it comes with too many feelings.

I hate that those voices still live somewhere inside me. I hate that a handful of words can wake them up again. And right now, I don’t have a beautiful ending for this. I don’t have a lesson or some perfectly packaged declaration about loving every inch of myself regardless of what anyone thinks.

Tonight makes me want to be away from other people. To retreat into myself, bury myself under the covers, shut everything out, and hide away from everyone for a while. Not because I want someone to come looking for me. Not because I am trying to make some dramatic statement. I just don’t want to be seen right now.

Because underneath all the complicated explanations for why this hurts, there is also a painfully simple truth.

Not being wanted sucks.

It sucks to feel passed over. It sucks to feel like you can offer intelligence, humor, loyalty, affection, sexuality, softness, depth, and every other complicated piece of yourself and still somehow be the woman who isn’t chosen. It sucks when you have spent so much of your life wondering whether your body makes you undesirable, only to reach an age where you have finally started finding pieces of yourself beautiful and discover there are apparently still new reasons you can be disqualified.

And sometimes I get tired of trying to convince myself that it shouldn’t hurt.

It does.

Tonight, it hurts enough that I want to hide. Maybe being honest about that is enough.

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