(no subject)
Oh I love my Johnny boy. He's been so incredibly stressed. Last night he broke down. I'm glad therapy has done so much for me - I felt like I was myself last night, able to comfort him like I would anyone else. No judgment, just total compassion.
Life is a wreck. But I'm happy. I'm happy, I think, because Marilyn and I have started to touch on all of this stuff I've tried my best to forget about. Stuff from as far back as middle school, when I went from making a ton a friends the first month, to inviting everyone over for my birthday and having to tell select people not to jump on my parents furniture, to being ostracized so quickly - with such incidents as no one allowing me to sit on the bus, to being repeatedly picked on and talked about and hit in the head with every kind of ball in gym class. And it's something that still follows me - I still can't go to certain parties because certain people will be there.
All of this was bad enough, but apparently it was so devastating to me for a thousand more reasons: my family picked on the only friends I did make until I gave up on them, my mother picked on my appearance incessantly, I hadn't been in school for three years before that ("home schooled" - basically, I watched '60s television shows and read a lot), so I never learned any of the study skills everyone else did. We lived in the middle of nowhere in Arizona, without anyone my age in the town - no joke (one girl was two years younger than me: Chie - she was a brat and was always up to some lame practical joke, like filling my jacket pocket with toothpaste); I was still very personable when I came to Colorado, but I dressed like an Amish child on a milking excursion. I needed glasses, but my parents couldn't afford them, so my mother gave me her old, broken pair, whose frames were massive and whose lenses were constantly popping out. I was always being told I was becoming negative, and when they wouldn't let me sit down on the bus, I was first told that I should make the bus driver find me a seat. Thus began the first depression I ever experienced, a 40 lbs weight gain in four months, stage anxiety (I never had it before), a severe distrust of people whose loyalty hasn't been tested - I expect people to turn on me.
And there's more. But it's fascinating, like I have a team of forensics scientists working on my mental case. They're getting to the bottom of it, at long last. Well, Marilyn is, at least. She gets all the credit. But I'm catapulted into a state of wonder when she makes these seemingly simple observations, and all the dots just start connecting. And I've purposefully tried not to "waste my time" talking about middle and high school. But that's where it is. And, says Marilyn, apparently the way John was downright cruel toward me and trashed me behind my back, he and his roommates calling me anti-social (at a time in my life when I was the most social and confident) when they were mean to me and I couldn't think of a thing to say; and then having to deal with those same horrid, ubiquitous roommates whom i tried to talk to and was answered in one word answers without even being given the courtesy of eye contact; being downright ignored by his cold parents who often left me alone in rooms of their house when we were visiting, assuming I'd just follow them, and then also telling John that i was anti-social; and then Whitney spreading lies about me and making disgusting, pearl-necklace jokes with John, in front of me, and then taking my seat to play that stupid game "zones" that I could never understand anyway - I couldn't sit anywhere around the game after that - Marilyn equates this to the bus situation.
So, the thing is that I don't trust John. I'm starting to, finally, but it's been rough. I've had him apologize for a lot - recent things, not only his crimes during the miserable and desperate first year and a half of our relationship before he broke my heart for the most insensitive and selfish reasons, and boarded a plane the next day for Vegas with Mikey, 1st Class Commander of the Asshole Roommate Alliance.
Apparently, because of all this, plus having more than my share of bad luck with abusive people the previous year, on top of middle school that laid my foundation for a very very similar scenario, John seemingly could never apologize enough because he's the only one who ever apologized to me for any of that, so I'm subconsciously foisting all of my anger and hurt onto this image of him, expecting him to answer for it all, though he never could.
Just being aware of these connection has...imbued me with this ability to let things go. And I've never been capable of letting things go with him. And, consequently, I'm able to appreciate so many amazing things about him that I've always just viewed as objectively good character traits. I'm able to finally have compassion and respect for him. He's silly and funny to me. He's sweet. And his unfriendliness at times toward other people seems much less like unfriendliness now and more just obvious symptoms of stress and fatigue. And he's smart and driven, and he'll never give up when he sees something to fight for (has its positives and negatives...but way more positives!), including me. And I'm finally starting to love him the way I've always wanted to, though things can get rough and (like I said) life sucks for us right now.
But, god, it feels good to just take a breath of air. Even if I plunge back into the bog tomorrow, unwittingly, it's these moments of reprieve and lightness that make the world a bit more vibrant.
Life is a wreck. But I'm happy. I'm happy, I think, because Marilyn and I have started to touch on all of this stuff I've tried my best to forget about. Stuff from as far back as middle school, when I went from making a ton a friends the first month, to inviting everyone over for my birthday and having to tell select people not to jump on my parents furniture, to being ostracized so quickly - with such incidents as no one allowing me to sit on the bus, to being repeatedly picked on and talked about and hit in the head with every kind of ball in gym class. And it's something that still follows me - I still can't go to certain parties because certain people will be there.
All of this was bad enough, but apparently it was so devastating to me for a thousand more reasons: my family picked on the only friends I did make until I gave up on them, my mother picked on my appearance incessantly, I hadn't been in school for three years before that ("home schooled" - basically, I watched '60s television shows and read a lot), so I never learned any of the study skills everyone else did. We lived in the middle of nowhere in Arizona, without anyone my age in the town - no joke (one girl was two years younger than me: Chie - she was a brat and was always up to some lame practical joke, like filling my jacket pocket with toothpaste); I was still very personable when I came to Colorado, but I dressed like an Amish child on a milking excursion. I needed glasses, but my parents couldn't afford them, so my mother gave me her old, broken pair, whose frames were massive and whose lenses were constantly popping out. I was always being told I was becoming negative, and when they wouldn't let me sit down on the bus, I was first told that I should make the bus driver find me a seat. Thus began the first depression I ever experienced, a 40 lbs weight gain in four months, stage anxiety (I never had it before), a severe distrust of people whose loyalty hasn't been tested - I expect people to turn on me.
And there's more. But it's fascinating, like I have a team of forensics scientists working on my mental case. They're getting to the bottom of it, at long last. Well, Marilyn is, at least. She gets all the credit. But I'm catapulted into a state of wonder when she makes these seemingly simple observations, and all the dots just start connecting. And I've purposefully tried not to "waste my time" talking about middle and high school. But that's where it is. And, says Marilyn, apparently the way John was downright cruel toward me and trashed me behind my back, he and his roommates calling me anti-social (at a time in my life when I was the most social and confident) when they were mean to me and I couldn't think of a thing to say; and then having to deal with those same horrid, ubiquitous roommates whom i tried to talk to and was answered in one word answers without even being given the courtesy of eye contact; being downright ignored by his cold parents who often left me alone in rooms of their house when we were visiting, assuming I'd just follow them, and then also telling John that i was anti-social; and then Whitney spreading lies about me and making disgusting, pearl-necklace jokes with John, in front of me, and then taking my seat to play that stupid game "zones" that I could never understand anyway - I couldn't sit anywhere around the game after that - Marilyn equates this to the bus situation.
So, the thing is that I don't trust John. I'm starting to, finally, but it's been rough. I've had him apologize for a lot - recent things, not only his crimes during the miserable and desperate first year and a half of our relationship before he broke my heart for the most insensitive and selfish reasons, and boarded a plane the next day for Vegas with Mikey, 1st Class Commander of the Asshole Roommate Alliance.
Apparently, because of all this, plus having more than my share of bad luck with abusive people the previous year, on top of middle school that laid my foundation for a very very similar scenario, John seemingly could never apologize enough because he's the only one who ever apologized to me for any of that, so I'm subconsciously foisting all of my anger and hurt onto this image of him, expecting him to answer for it all, though he never could.
Just being aware of these connection has...imbued me with this ability to let things go. And I've never been capable of letting things go with him. And, consequently, I'm able to appreciate so many amazing things about him that I've always just viewed as objectively good character traits. I'm able to finally have compassion and respect for him. He's silly and funny to me. He's sweet. And his unfriendliness at times toward other people seems much less like unfriendliness now and more just obvious symptoms of stress and fatigue. And he's smart and driven, and he'll never give up when he sees something to fight for (has its positives and negatives...but way more positives!), including me. And I'm finally starting to love him the way I've always wanted to, though things can get rough and (like I said) life sucks for us right now.
But, god, it feels good to just take a breath of air. Even if I plunge back into the bog tomorrow, unwittingly, it's these moments of reprieve and lightness that make the world a bit more vibrant.