And my bad y'all, this is a bit long:

So yeah, I've been on reddit for almost ten years, sans an account; a (super)longtime lurker. Love reddit; obsessed with reddit; gone on my little baconreader app probably literally every single day since 2012. Rarely felt an urge to comment, and never strongly enough to actually make up a username and password, let alone leave behind my comfortably distanced state of lurkhood and straight-up post something (gasp!).

Almost a decade on Reddit, and then it took maybe two weeks of me really delving into this subreddit's posts before I felt the need to say something here, post something here, so strongly that I found myself creating a dang Reddit account.

(And then I got kind of trashed watching the Bachelorette & forgot to submit this 🤦‍♀️😂 But thankfully I copied & pasted it into my Notes app, & so 36 hours later, here's what I meant to say:)

All of you awesome women posting here have helped me realize, at age 36, that I've been a dang Pickmeisha since the second I hit puberty 🤷‍♀️

That I'm the poster child for wannabe-cool-girl meets LVM 🤷‍♀️

That my standards have been low; that I keep letting myself be a doormat; that I might be kind of addicted to falling in love because a lot of the movies and books and general pop culture I grew up on wove together a rather tight fantasy/belief/expectation of a super-HVM finding a perfect version of me in some tower and completing me, a la puzzle pieces, soul mates, Nora Roberts, Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, etc. & this prince of a man finding me would really be the only thing that could truly make me happy, & so I've been bending over backwards and emotionally/mentally doing a Catherine Zeta Jones laser routine to try to sell two ideas to myself over & over again: 1) That that guy must be my Prince, & 2) That I've gotta do what it takes to become his Princess.

Ugh, in retrospect: 5 million vomit emojis

So yeah, I've just discovered that I'm a chronically habitual Pickmeisha with low standards and bad taste, and I feel so ---

Empowered by that knowledge! And free!

For the past two weeks, ever since I started reading through this sub, I feel more and more empowered, and free: free from settling for low-effort romance, free from perpetually pinning every relationship woe solely on me (crazy, emotional, female me).

I've never gotten into feminism really (too busy being "not-like-the-other-girls," a.k.a. just happily, easily, people-pleasingly tagging along with the current boyfriend's boyish activities). I've felt a mild general support of my fellow women over the past few years. Women empowerment? Not really my cause.

But as I've been reading through y'all's posts, I've been feeling more & more empowered, as a woman. Makes me want to look for opportunities to empower other women. And at the very least, makes me want to say THANK YOU -

Thank you all for helping to educate me, & empower me! Y'all showed me a big problem that I've been not quite seeing - "Pick me! Pick me!" - and now that I see it, I'm ready to try to go about fixing it. (And just a sidenote: a lot of Reddit is wrong about y'all; this isn't a place of man-hating bitterness. Sometimes, sure, lol, but most of the posts I've read don't leave me feeling bitter or resentful toward men; they encourage me to be more cautious, and to value myself more. And the fact is, my track record clearly backs that up 🤷‍♀️ I need to be more cautious & I need to value myself more!)

& so now I'm done with lurking, done with being passive; I'm ready to join the conversation, I'm ready to speak up a little; I'm just feeling so freaking empowered & this subreddit did that for me!

I'm no princess; I'm a dang QUEEN!

5 million heart emojis!!!!

TLDR: Y'all are awesome, & I'm so happy to leave my passive/lurking/Pickmeisha/princess days behind me

Edit: I really need to figure out how to space paragraphs on here 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️😂😂😂