Topaz & I started a 21-day relationship break / relative cost of meeting strangers / social ventures
icon: "progressing (a deeply, vividly green forest of thick vines and trees, with a tunnel running through where unused train tracks lay)"
It's 5 days into my relationship break with Topaz (I friends-locked my post about the reasons and such because it's a raw topic for them). I'm sad but I know it's the right idea. I just haven't been doing things like making plans with people I don't know, partly because time with Topaz takes less effort and gives more reward than most other situations.
Meeting with someone I'm not intimate with means I have to use energy on 1) initiating plans 2) working out a place and time 3) spending money and stress on driving at least 30 minutes if not an hour 4) pushing away the idea that they are not going to bother and any future interactions will require more effort from me than them 5) guiding the conversation 6) pushing myself to volunteer information because they don't ask questions 7) spending energy on being in public because I can't just invite myself to their house and no one wants to come to mine usually and 8) driving home again often while feeling more drained than I was when I left. Even people I am intimate with are difficult to spend time with because they all are very busy, have chronic pain that interferes with driving, and/or live more than 30 minutes away. In contrast, going to Topaz' involves only very low-key planning and a short drive, often shorter than driving home. And then I get cuddles most of the time and get fed delicious raw veggies or beautifully cooked meals. It's no wonder I have been spending too much time with them.
Add to all that the fact that my anxiety has been getting worse and worse, and you have a recipe for my social time being 90% focused on Topaz. But now I have been on anxiety meds for a month, and I have another 16 days which will be spent sans Topaz. I am planning to use these days as wisely as I can. Thus the coffee with new person yesterday (I had only had a 5 min conversation with them before) and three social plans for this weekend, possibly another on Monday. I met with my psychiatrist earlier this week and in the course of the conversation they said, "we'll know you're back at a good place when you're having crafty parties again." I had been working on plans for two of them this month! and when I went looking through fb events to grab the text from the last, I realized that I hadn't had one for literally a year. I set one up for May but cancelled it because no one was attending. So last March was the most recent one. I just couldn't handle the let-down if no one attended, because with my anxiety it would take like a weeks' worth of energy away from me. I feel like I could handle it now.