Soledad's Fight for Recovery

Hey Everyone, Warning that this is gonna be a long one. So Greg and I have started our wedding planning. Our Date is May 29th 2009, we went and met with the hotel yesterday and we got the......wait for it......MENUS. We have to pick out food, the good news is I think it is actually going to be really good. Here is our tentative menu. Starter: Baby green salad with honey vinegrette. Entree of which guests have a choice of the following...can you guys guess which one I would die before I ate?: Supreme Chicken with Bosc pears and a cranberry-chile jus 6 ounce tenderloin something or other with Shallots and some sort of cream sauce Spinach and Herb risotto with braised root vegetables Dessert is wedding cake We are putting a bottle of red and white wine on each table. Coffee and tea. What do you all think? Good, bad, awesome???? Also, I am job hunting and fuck is this ever stressful. It is so stressful in fact that I dream about it. There are two jobs I have applied for that I would cut off my arm to get. One is as a Pr0gram Dir3ct0r for Y0uth at an int3rnati0nal cultural organization whose name I am not putting on my blog. The other is a counseling and 0utr3ach position for women who are escaping abusive situations. I should hear back today about the first one, I only applied today for the second. I feel like I am well qualified, but hell I thought that about PhD too and I didn't get in. There are two parts of me reacting to this job hunting. One is very excited about new possibilities, the other is terrified that I am too stupid to get a job. Each of these side of me make regular appearance throughout my day. And you will all say how smart I am and yes I realize I am relatively intelligent, but still, this PhD thing has really challenged my understanding of myself. For some reason I have a real insecurity about my intelligence. I am not sure where it came from, but when I look back on my actions throughout university and even in high school, it is crytal clear that I never considered myself to be smart.I SUCK at math and I really struggled with this in high school. I did reasonably well in everything else, but math sucked. I also sucked at music theory in music school because well, music theory is math. I did ok in University, but it wasn't until grad school that I started kicking ass. But I honestly think they just wanted to pass us and get us outta there. When i look at my relationships with teachers and professors it is clear that I enver considered myself to be intelligent. i did not think they would value or notice me for my brain so I always tried to win them over by being pretty, fun and helpful, very much a "woman's role". I never thought I would get noticed as a smart one, so I had to be the fun, polite, sweet, beautiful one. This was especially true around male professors, I craved male validation of my skills and since I thought I was dumb my skills were being sweet and pretty. nice to be around. Men respond to this whether we like to admit that or not. I was just starting to value my mind when I got rejected from PhD. It totally sent me into a tailspin 9read b/p). Outwardly I have coped just fine. inwardly I think I was more distraught, I AM MORE DISTRAUGHT, then I Let on. outwardly I am very much "oh well onward and upward" "I will reapply", "Can't give up". Inside I am feeling "WHY DON"T YOU WANT ME!!??!!! WHY AREN'T I GOOD ENOUGH?????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" The anxiety created by this feeling of rejection is hard. Very hard. It is just like being left alone at home after school when my paretns worked and I was alone and I knew when my Dad got home we would fight. So I b/ped. Same feeling of rejection, I am 12 years old screaming for acceptance from my parents. I don't understand their absence and I don't udnerstand why they want me to do so well in school, in music, in life generally. Nothing is good enough. NOTHING! Everything I do is a failure. I was not good enough as a daughter, in school, in sports, in music, in looks...NOTHING. AND I CRAVE the power of being beautiful. Being beautiful is easy, the reactions you get are instant, being smart and consistently nice is hard and being myself never got me the approval I wanted....no that I needed.