Regarding the Ten Year Challenge

[Warning: super long, boring rambles ahead!]

Have you heard of the 2016-2026 challenge? It's simple: post a pic of yourself from 2016 side by side with a current photo. Celebs are doing it. Normal people are doing it. Naturally, I want to do it too. Welp, I thought it was simple until I could not find a photo of myself from 2016. Not one! I had loads from prior years, especially 2014 when I was apparently taking daily selfies in hopes of getting that perfect shot for dating site profiles, and I have tons from 2017 going forward ~ from my daughters' weddings, with Gatsby, with friends, etc. What the heck was going on in 2016? Did I even exist? And it's not just zero selfies ~ I have no photos from 2016 whatsoever. I checked every possible source, all the clouds, backups, etc. There's nothing.

So, to begin at the beginning... I don't remember the beginning. I think 2016 started with one of my usual vows to quit the dating sites because of prior bad experiences. I think I had been hanging around with one of my exes and going on "friend dates" with him as he tried to meet a new love and asked me for advice (talk about the blind leading the blind!). I'm pretty sure that I was a little bothered by this "situationship," but it wasn't upsetting enough to stop. Then I had the bad poke bowl. Please bear with me here because I am getting to the point (eventually). 

I took a day off in early August for doctors' exams and such, and afterwards I treated myself to a poke bowl. It was the middle of the afternoon, so it's possible they didn't give me the freshest fish. By the evening, I was extremely ill. Unlike prior tummy troubles, this one lasted weeks, and even when it was over I barely had any appetite. One graham cracker would fill me up for hours. A normal person might have considered seeing a doctor, but we're talking about me here. I had lost a whole bunch of weight and was feeling fabulous about that. Around the same time, friend-date guy had met someone. He was all giddy with happiness, no longer going on the friend-dates with me, and posting lovey dovey pics on FB. I thought maybe it was possible for me to find someone too, especially now that I was thinner. This is how my mind works: I didn't necessarily believe that men found me too heavy before the bad poke (in fact, some ventured to say the opposite), but that I felt good about myself at the lower weight. I felt confident. I felt that I could be loveable. My mind had been warped in this way as a child/ teenager by the media we had then and the romance novels I devoured to the point where I believed that only slim women were worthy of love. 

So, I rejoined a dating site and snapped a whole bunch of cute selfies to post. I vividly remember this because I stood in front of my tuxedo cat print poster from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was wearing my favorite turquoise shirt. (I am also positive I had pictures from earlier in the year of places I went and cupcakes I nommed.) The usual replies trickled in: liars, scammers, con artists, married men, "separated" men still living with their wives, yada. I met one guy for coffee at the mall, and we literally had nothing to say to each other, which was so weird. Usually, there's something to talk about with any person, but nope. I met another guy, whom I thought was OK, until he revealed that he was a religious nutball. He sent me a very complicated astrological chart. It went on like that for a bit until I met Michael on 09/25/16. The date is memorable because (1) it was the best first date I'd ever had, and (2) the numbers are all squares.

You remember Michael, don't you? I had gotten over my ex-husband and TMW ("the man who broke my heart"), and I didn't think anyone could affect me so deeply again. I was wrong. IMO, there is no logical reason why we immediately fall for someone, unlike the reasons we don't like someone, which are usually clear. Hormones? Pheromones? I don't know. He was handsome, sure, smart, funny, all the things, but so were other men, and I didn't fall for them. There were men much better suited to me: writers, creative types, men who lived closer, men who loved cats, men who were more into me, and I had met a bunch over the years since my divorce, but meh. They didn't jumpstart my heart the way this guy did. Our second date was as wonderful as the first one. You probably remember the story of how he acted like a jerk when I had a problem, then apologized, took me on another great date, ghosted me at Thanksgiving, texted later on complaining that I had never baked him cookies and that I was a couple years older than him, etc. After that, I slid into a depression that lasted about a year and a half.

I'm not worried about using his real name because there have been so many Michaels, and if he reads this and wants to jump up and down yelling "Yes! It was me! I'm the asshole!" then that will be very entertaining for us, won't it? Is anyone besides Keera reading this blog? I keep getting hits, so maybe I have other readers who aren't commenting. HI HI HI! [waves madly] As I've said before, I'm fine that this is a diary open to the public that no one actually reads. Anyway. I think that at some point in 2017, I began deleting everything to do with 2016, hoping that would make me feel better. I know I deleted the poetry I wrote about him (later I wrote other, better poems), the selfies, the dates on my G-calendar, etc. I deleted my Google location history, so that the few places we'd gone together would disappear (they have not yet faded from my memory however). I learned how to be thorough from past experience with my ex-husband: I deleted all my trash, hosed out my clouds, wiped my backup laptop "book," on and on. Probably some forensic expert could retrieve stuff even so (my current laptop and phone are post 2016 though, and the old ones have been electronically wiped and recycled). I have wasted enough time on this already.

If you're wondering about Facebook/ Instagram (like anyone cares!), I deleted them in 2018 and started over in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. I had backups in zip files, but they don't have any pics of me from 2016, or if they did once, I have since deleted those too. There's one more option, and that's to ask my daughters/ friends if they have any pics of me from that year, but I'm not sure I want to. I prefer to think that perhaps I was a ghost in 2016. Maybe that's why I fell so hard for a ghost; I sensed an otherworldly connection... 

Bottom line: I won't be participating in that photo challenge.