PERSPECTIVE FINDING YOURSELF

BY JILL LANGHAM

Hello everyone and happy Summer! I will be celebrating my 68th birthday in three weeks which happens to the first day of Summer. With these years comes a form of wisdom that allows me to be so grateful for all that I have in my life. One of the biggest things that I am grateful for is all of you. You have given me so much in the last 19 years that I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like had I not heard those powerful words which said, “Move to Palm Springs and train Gay Men!” It was to be both my epiphany and mission statement and has forever changed my life.

Part of that change is my ability to be up close and personal with all of you. This takes on many forms whether it be in conversation, a hug, a touch on the arm, an embrace (a longer hug), a kiss or just a smile. I say this because I had recently read an article about a young influencer, whatever that really means, who is a 21-year-old girl, who with a team of experts made her into an AI. She advertises that she will be your girlfriend for $1. To date she has already made something like $72K!

I find myself being appalled by this notion. Human touch is the one last thing that separates us from the BOT world and now for just $1 you can have a girlfriend who will tell you anything you want to hear and supposedly you will be better for it. Look, I have spent the last 10 years as a single woman having only had 3 dates during that time, so I know what deprivation feels like. Prior to that I was in a marriage of 13 years that left me feeling alone, a five-year relationship that was sex-less and a brief 18-month marriage that was not satisfying, so I know loneliness. But I have never stopped believing that there is and will be someone out there who is my equal and I’m afraid that if I were to go the way of AI that I would lose that hope.

For me a world without hope is doomed for destruction and there is enough of that message everywhere I look. In reflecting on the three relationships that I mentioned above, I now see how unprepared I was to have a true and intimate connection with a man and needed all three of those experiences and examples to move towards a more meaningful co-mingling with the opposite sex, my preference, not particularly yours! :) LOL

I grew up in a family filled with loneliness even though I had 2 brothers, a sister and both parents living under one roof. But we were not close. Family dinners which were mandatory were anything but pleasant and I’m sure were the source of my eating disorders. I did not learn how to communicate at home as we were told that children were to be seen and not heard. I did not learn intimacy from my parents as they had not learned it from theirs’s. We are a total of all the experiences that we grew up around and sadly in my case, I grew up being bullied.

I then became a Bully in school, without having any understanding or appreciation for why I did what I did. I relentlessly bullied one boy, whom I hope will be at my 50-year high school reunion later this year. I owe him a huge apology and only hope that he will find it his heart to forgive me. Deep inside I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I really did not know how to stop myself. And when all the other kids around were laughing at what I was doing, I guess it gave me the permission that I needed to continue my behavior.

The bullying then became self-directed and turned into selfloathing. You see I had so much inside of me to fix that there was no way I was going to have a successful relationship with anyone else until I had one with myself. So, for the next 40 years, I began the process of learning about myself, which of course continues today.

Most of you know that I was sober for 10 years in an attempt to find and understand myself and to begin to deal with not only issues of incest and rape, but also a relationship which included being physically abused. Can you say self-hatred? I was so lost and so empty that there was no way I could have had a successful relationship with anyone else. I needed to fix me first. I think that if there had been an AI for me to have had a “relationship” with at any point along the way it would have prevented me from finding the authentic version of myself. But that’s just my perspective!

What’s yours?

XOXO, Jill, your non-AI Dancing Queen

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