don't you dare let them make you feel little

This story has been coming to my mind over and over lately. It was in college and I was on a date with the kind of boy who just couldn't make up his mind about me (I encountered a lot of those). It was like... I looked really good on paper and there wasn't anything "wrong" with me that they could put a finger on, so they just waited. Hoping they would like me enough to be serious... eventually. And as you can likely guess, that eventually never did come. Not for any one of them.

So here I was on my umpteenth date with this boy. He was handsome and older than me and we were driving in his car going somewhere. The windows were down, so it must have been summer. Somehow (gosh I have no idea how) the subject came around to deodorant or things that tasted bad or who even knows. But I said, "Have you ever tasted deodorant though? It. tastes. AWFUL.". He looked at me like I was some kind of oddity in a museum and laughed at me like I was an idiot.

Then, he proceeded to make me feel little.
He taunted and teased and wouldn't let it go. He kept making me smaller and smaller.
He made me feel crazy.

I kept trying to defend myself, but he kept coming back to how on earth I would know what it tastes like. And I felt so small and belittled and and embarrassed and couldn't think of why.

Maybe I am weird, I thought (this is called gaslighting, look it up, and run if you are dating this person). I knew there was some logical reason I knew what I knew, but I felt so little sitting there in the front seat that I just awkwardly laughed and tried to hold back tears. 

I forgot about that conversation for a long time until one day I licked my finger and tried to rub off a spot on my shirt. But what I thought was toothpaste wasn't toothpaste- it was deodorant. And when I went to lick my thumb to get the rest off, that AWFUL taste came flooding back to my memory and I remembered the perfectly normal, very human thing that I had done to learn what deodorant tastes like. 

I was mad at myself for a long time over that. I had let him make me feel little when he had no right to. I could have said something, I should have said something!

Nobody ever has a right to your feelings of self worth, but there will be people who will take it and run anyways.  You know, maybe he was raised like that. Maybe that was a knee-jerk, nervous response to a comment that made him feel uncomfortable (because heaven help them, but some people are weird talking about hygiene?). Maybe he has grown out of it, or realized it...  I don't know. What I do know is this: I'm not little. I'm not worth a little, I don't shine a little, my potential doesn't equate to a little. And nobody holds the right to make me feel that way. 

And I should have known in that very moment that I didn't want to be on constant dates with someone who made me feel anything less. I didn't then, but I do now. And I got really lucky to get Jay who thinks I can do anything in the whole world.