Last night after getting home from seeing Zombieland with a friend (so fun, go see it now!), I check my email and see a message from someone I never expected to hear from again. Why? Well, she was the most recent of women from whom I received The Look. Thus, getting that message was surprising.

So, I start reading it and it’s like I’m in the middle of a conversation. Eventually, I realize that I wasn’t the “Matt” she’d meant to write. How did I realize that? Well, she talked about a “fat bore” she went out with a while back and how “at least I got a free meal out of it. ha ha.”

A-Yup. That’s me!

I sent her a note saying she had the wrong Matt (and how!). My only guess as to why she’d sent this to me-Matt and not real-recipient-Matt is that she’s using Gmail and so she started typing in “Matt” in the To: field and the autocomplete picked me first due to our previously having emailed each other. I know I’ve done that (though the message was a “Look at this link” sort of email).

You know, it kinda hurt last night getting that. Hearing someone’s unvarnished truth about yourself usually does. But, this morning, I’m more laughing about it. If nothing else, I can hope she’s learned the lesson of making sure autocomplete is giving you what you want. Hee.

ETA: In case you’re thinking it, it really is me she was talking about. She mentioned both the restaurant for the “free dinner” and the general date of the date as well. I’m pretty damn certain it’s me she is referring to.

What I’m going to blog on about today is probably going to be rambling, long and boring.  But, I find, sometimes, I need to write things out to get them off my chest, so to speak.

Alright, if you’ve stuck around, you’re either me, a masochist, or Google’s spider.  Don’t say I haven’t warned you.

First off, from the title of this post, I wanted to talk about “the look”.  What I mean by this is probably something a good 70-80% of people have seen. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m the only one it’s happened to, I’m not, but, well, I’m writing this, so there.

“The look” is that look I–almost invariably–get to see on a woman’s face the first time she meets me.  It’s a look of disappointment, a look of  “oh…he looks like that…he’s that fat…oh”. Most of the women I’ve met here in DC, I’ve met online. And, yeah, they’ve seen my picture online, but those pics don’t really convey my size.

Yep, it’s a “I’m fat” whine.  And, yes, I know, it’s my fault I’m this size and I have no one to blame but myself. I guess it gets to me because of a few things. First, I suppose being a large man since, oh, ever, I’m never had the “luxury” of being able to judge people by their looks or size. If I’d have done that, I’d have had very few friends in high school, and I’d have missed out on some damn good friends.

I guess I get down when I see that “look” more because it discourages me from the progress I have made.  I am big right now, no doubt. Fat, and way too fat at that.

But compared to my biggest size? I am petite.  I am down a good 15, 16 inches on my waist from my most inflated-ness.  I currently wear 2XL/2XLT shirts. Hell, I damn near cried the first time I realized I was getting near to buying shirts from a “normal” section of the store.

Plus, this year, I’ve lost about 10 pounds. I know to most people that is a pretty sad number, but it takes effort for me to lose weight, and when I do, I tend to keep it off permanently. So I am proud of every one of those. Proud of the effort I put in and…just proud.

I suppose, thinking it over, the reason why “the look” hits me so hard, is that it makes me feel bad about me. Odd that. It should make me feel sorry for her and yet, well, my brain just can’t do that. I operate from a base of “every person is fundamentally a damn good person” and so I see any look of disappointment or feeling of failure or whatever as something I’ve done wrong.

So, when I see that disappointment, I feel disappointed in me. Disappointed that I’ve only lost that 15 inches. Only lost that 10 lbs. Only down to a 2XLT. I start to feel that I was a damn fool to think that someone as beautiful as the woman with “that look” would ever want to be with me. The fact that I now see she feels that way is no solace, I just can’t seem to shrug it off.

But this was something I had to get off my chest. Something I had to write down. It’s a hard process for me to accept I’m not a bad person, after many years (and counting) of being shown I’m not every time I see that “look”.