Dec 15, pt 1
I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want out of my return to journaling. Picking where I want to journal is one thing I'm thinking about. I have an account on Icarus, one on DeviantArt and of course one here. The only real appeal to Icarus for me is that Desirae is on there and she joined after I linked to it. That's not really an issue though. I don't have any sort of community on Icarus and I don't really cruise the site as much as I initially did. I like the idea of journaling on DeviantArt because of a small artistic community that I'm part of, and my art is intricately woven into my ego as a person which kind of gives me the option of creating a better more unified picture of myself. One of the things holding me back from DeviantArt though is that Desirae watches my account there, which is one reason I'd rather journal here, and though I think journaling in two places is a hassle I may end up doing it anyways. Run on sentences much?
I think it's a totally legit feeling to want somewhere separate to write about what's going on with me in regards to her since my relationship with her is one of my more intimate ones and as such I need to protect certain boundaries of mine. She said she's got a Xanga that she uses too. So I'm willing to journal in both. I do like the opportunity to be part of a community so I can bring my shit up and get helpful responses to things that I may be struggling with, so I think I may make an effort to find people I know on line who have live journals that I may not have known about and friend them. I've learned in my recovery that asking for help is okay sometimes.
Before I really go into our relationship, I'll give a little back ground about each of us. We are both addicts and we are both bipolar. We are both sober. I am on medication and have been for more than two years now, and during the portions of time when my disease was in remission (aka: relative sobriety) I a little bit stable. Being sober and medicated now, I am more mentally stable than I believe I ever have been... that's changed within the last week for reasons I'll go into later. Wallflower is bipolar as well, and has just as a tumultuous emotional past as I have and then some probably. It's not super constructive for me to compare situations with her, but I look at myself in relation to her and her in relation to myself a lot, so sometimes it's unavoidable. I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that she is not on medication, she needs to be, and she knows it. She is going to see the p-doc soon, so I'm going to pray (something I think I should be getting into the habit of doing) that said doctor helps her. I only want the best for her.
So... I guess I'll move on to what's been going on. It was a little more than a week ago that she had her break down. I knew she was having trouble to some degree from what she told me and to some degree from the way that one bipolar addict understands another, and to another degree the intense connection and feeling of familiarity of emotion that I experience with her. I think that that may be something she doesn't completely understand or is able to accept. The first month we were together was euphoric and we were both happy with each other all the time. This isn't to say that we're not now by any means. What I mean to say is that she seemed pretty stable at the time. She was hypomanic a lot and sometimes a little overbearing which was totally cool with me and not something that weirded me out at all like it may have weirded out a lot of other people.
I totally fell in love with her. I think it's hard for most people to understand the full range of emotions that accompany people like Desirae and myself. Falling for each other as quick as we did was exhilarating and also really scary. Love has a way of doing that. It was especially... significant is I guess the best word how different it made me feel. I'm the medicated one here, and I don't know. I think, no I know I've felt emotions as strong as I feel for her, but not as continuously as I did at first and really still do though we're both I think making an effort to keep at least a little distance to keep our selves healthy and focused on our own recovery and mental health.
This brings me back to last Saturday night. There had been a little tension between us for reasons that didn't really know about until she clued me in on later.
Okay. Wait a minute. This is where I start playing doctor, and it's not healthy. Seeing the way I act with Des, I've noticed a pattern of the way I interact with girls I've dated. I've been catching on to something that I hadn't noticed before lately. Des is the fourth girl I've dated who I get the opportunity to play fixer with. I get to be the understanding boyfriend who is totally there for his partner and be selfless and shit, but this also affords me the luxury of ignoring my own problems and thinking that I'm the normal one. This has back fired on me twice already, with Sarah and then with Hannah, and when it ends I finally realize what has happened and am real fucked up over the situation, not really knowing how to feel.
Maybe it's from my lifespan and development course or maybe I'm just in an analytical mood this afternoon, but this is the kind of relationship with women that I learned as I was entering adolescence. My mother and I moved out of our house when I was 12? 13? In any case, and my memory of my childhood and adolescence is spotty at best, I recall us both being emotionally unstable. I remember always trying to calm her down after she got in a mood of some sort. I would do something. She would go off, and I would try to calm her down. I'm pretty sure that was the routine. I know that divorce has negative impacts on children's abilities to learn how to maintain healthy relationships. I haven't yet used this information to try to figure out what my deal is. So that's interesting. There is of course more to the story, but I'm not willing to push myself further in delving into that part of my psyche yet.
So after she tells me Friday night that she was in a very bad place emotionally and thinking about using all day. Luckily she has a new sponsor and was talking to her a lot that day. Des had invited me to a party on Tuesday night that I had agreed to go to, but she told me Friday that it had been moved to Saturday night. The significance of the party is that there will be alcohol at the party and though Desirae doesn't always want to accept it by nature being addicts, we both are alcoholics too. I never really had any illusions that alcohol was any different than any other drug because of my history, but most people tend to think that there are drugs and then there is alcohol. I can't make Saturday. She finds another friend to come along with her to be her sober buddy. Lori bails the day of, and Desirae texts me. I ask her if she's still going and she says yes. Here's where my vyvanse plus a lot of coffee fuels my emotional reaction to her telling me this. I call her up and yell at her over the phone asking her why the hell she is considering going alone to a party with alcohol the day after she's talking to her sponsor the whole day about how much she wants to use.
Desirae is a stubborn chick. Let me just put that out there. I'm pretty damn stubborn too, which is why I need people to slap me in the face every once in a while with what's really going. Meg does this for me when I talk to her sometimes, and it's really helpful to me. Sometime it works and sometimes I get defensive. So I think on the one hand maybe she got some of the message and on the other hand...
No now I understand. Chain of events real quick before I jump to my epiphany. Desirae calls me back and tells me that she's not happy in the relationship. She says that it's gotten so serious now that she's not having any fun. She says she just wants to have fun again like the beginning. I agree. That's a great idea, so I drive over and we go to the party. It's a goodbye party for a friend of hers and we stay for a bit. She finds me and wants to leave right away, and I don't know why. She walks briskly to the car as I try to catch up, and ask her what's up. Her son's father is there. I don't know the full story there but I understand now at least that there is a lot of scar tissue surrounding her relationship with the guy. We get in the car. I start driving. She starts crying. She's sobbing. She curls up in a ball and faces away from me, crying and shaking. She doesn't want to be touched. She feels helpless. I feel helpless, and then we get to her house. Give me a second... She says she doesn't want to break my heart, but she can't be with me right now. She says she can't take care of herself right now let alone me. I wasn't aware I needed taking care of, but she must feel as protective of me as I feel over her.
I've never felt for another human being what I felt for her after she kissed me and got out of the car. I waited for her to walk in her door and sat in front of her house for a second, a little bit in shock before I backed out and started driving home. I got as far as the second stop sign when I felt the flood coming. I pulled into a parking spot and let my forehead drop onto the steering wheel as tributaries of salt water streamed out of my eyes. My nose stuffed up right away and got runny. I just couldn't make sense of it. I was feeling pain but not mine. I was feeling pain only for what she was going through, and it's one of the strongest emotions I've felt in my entire life. My only question was, "why?" I couldn't even think beyond that... just, "why?" I was screaming it. Asking God directly, "Why? Why?!" Why what? I had to take off my over shirt to blow my nose on it and just laid against the console of the car.
A very dear friend of mine, Luke talked to me about selfishness and selflessness one time, and what it means. What love means. I wrote a journal entry in Boulder on my journey to the conventions recreating as best as I could what I understood from what Luke taught me. "I'm describing is not the rejection of self, but the rejection of self as a legitimate entity," I wrote. "What it means to me is the realization that self is actually indistinguishable from everything." This part of the concept I understood. What understood theoretically, but hadn't experienced was what it feels like to be part of the web when someone else is in pain. This is the best I can do to explain it. I felt genuine and pure selflessness. What I had thought to be selflessness before was wrong. I thought that selflessness meant, self-sacrifice, masochism, and martyrdom. These were just what I understand now to be expressions, and tragic ones, of what I felt that night.
I felt her pain and her pain only. I just couldn't understand it. I still don't. It perplexes me. I don't think any amount of writing can truly express what this feeling is, but it lets me know that I love her. It lets me know that I love her in a way that I'm not sure I've loved anyone before...
I think it's a totally legit feeling to want somewhere separate to write about what's going on with me in regards to her since my relationship with her is one of my more intimate ones and as such I need to protect certain boundaries of mine. She said she's got a Xanga that she uses too. So I'm willing to journal in both. I do like the opportunity to be part of a community so I can bring my shit up and get helpful responses to things that I may be struggling with, so I think I may make an effort to find people I know on line who have live journals that I may not have known about and friend them. I've learned in my recovery that asking for help is okay sometimes.
Before I really go into our relationship, I'll give a little back ground about each of us. We are both addicts and we are both bipolar. We are both sober. I am on medication and have been for more than two years now, and during the portions of time when my disease was in remission (aka: relative sobriety) I a little bit stable. Being sober and medicated now, I am more mentally stable than I believe I ever have been... that's changed within the last week for reasons I'll go into later. Wallflower is bipolar as well, and has just as a tumultuous emotional past as I have and then some probably. It's not super constructive for me to compare situations with her, but I look at myself in relation to her and her in relation to myself a lot, so sometimes it's unavoidable. I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that she is not on medication, she needs to be, and she knows it. She is going to see the p-doc soon, so I'm going to pray (something I think I should be getting into the habit of doing) that said doctor helps her. I only want the best for her.
So... I guess I'll move on to what's been going on. It was a little more than a week ago that she had her break down. I knew she was having trouble to some degree from what she told me and to some degree from the way that one bipolar addict understands another, and to another degree the intense connection and feeling of familiarity of emotion that I experience with her. I think that that may be something she doesn't completely understand or is able to accept. The first month we were together was euphoric and we were both happy with each other all the time. This isn't to say that we're not now by any means. What I mean to say is that she seemed pretty stable at the time. She was hypomanic a lot and sometimes a little overbearing which was totally cool with me and not something that weirded me out at all like it may have weirded out a lot of other people.
I totally fell in love with her. I think it's hard for most people to understand the full range of emotions that accompany people like Desirae and myself. Falling for each other as quick as we did was exhilarating and also really scary. Love has a way of doing that. It was especially... significant is I guess the best word how different it made me feel. I'm the medicated one here, and I don't know. I think, no I know I've felt emotions as strong as I feel for her, but not as continuously as I did at first and really still do though we're both I think making an effort to keep at least a little distance to keep our selves healthy and focused on our own recovery and mental health.
This brings me back to last Saturday night. There had been a little tension between us for reasons that didn't really know about until she clued me in on later.
Okay. Wait a minute. This is where I start playing doctor, and it's not healthy. Seeing the way I act with Des, I've noticed a pattern of the way I interact with girls I've dated. I've been catching on to something that I hadn't noticed before lately. Des is the fourth girl I've dated who I get the opportunity to play fixer with. I get to be the understanding boyfriend who is totally there for his partner and be selfless and shit, but this also affords me the luxury of ignoring my own problems and thinking that I'm the normal one. This has back fired on me twice already, with Sarah and then with Hannah, and when it ends I finally realize what has happened and am real fucked up over the situation, not really knowing how to feel.
Maybe it's from my lifespan and development course or maybe I'm just in an analytical mood this afternoon, but this is the kind of relationship with women that I learned as I was entering adolescence. My mother and I moved out of our house when I was 12? 13? In any case, and my memory of my childhood and adolescence is spotty at best, I recall us both being emotionally unstable. I remember always trying to calm her down after she got in a mood of some sort. I would do something. She would go off, and I would try to calm her down. I'm pretty sure that was the routine. I know that divorce has negative impacts on children's abilities to learn how to maintain healthy relationships. I haven't yet used this information to try to figure out what my deal is. So that's interesting. There is of course more to the story, but I'm not willing to push myself further in delving into that part of my psyche yet.
So after she tells me Friday night that she was in a very bad place emotionally and thinking about using all day. Luckily she has a new sponsor and was talking to her a lot that day. Des had invited me to a party on Tuesday night that I had agreed to go to, but she told me Friday that it had been moved to Saturday night. The significance of the party is that there will be alcohol at the party and though Desirae doesn't always want to accept it by nature being addicts, we both are alcoholics too. I never really had any illusions that alcohol was any different than any other drug because of my history, but most people tend to think that there are drugs and then there is alcohol. I can't make Saturday. She finds another friend to come along with her to be her sober buddy. Lori bails the day of, and Desirae texts me. I ask her if she's still going and she says yes. Here's where my vyvanse plus a lot of coffee fuels my emotional reaction to her telling me this. I call her up and yell at her over the phone asking her why the hell she is considering going alone to a party with alcohol the day after she's talking to her sponsor the whole day about how much she wants to use.
Desirae is a stubborn chick. Let me just put that out there. I'm pretty damn stubborn too, which is why I need people to slap me in the face every once in a while with what's really going. Meg does this for me when I talk to her sometimes, and it's really helpful to me. Sometime it works and sometimes I get defensive. So I think on the one hand maybe she got some of the message and on the other hand...
No now I understand. Chain of events real quick before I jump to my epiphany. Desirae calls me back and tells me that she's not happy in the relationship. She says that it's gotten so serious now that she's not having any fun. She says she just wants to have fun again like the beginning. I agree. That's a great idea, so I drive over and we go to the party. It's a goodbye party for a friend of hers and we stay for a bit. She finds me and wants to leave right away, and I don't know why. She walks briskly to the car as I try to catch up, and ask her what's up. Her son's father is there. I don't know the full story there but I understand now at least that there is a lot of scar tissue surrounding her relationship with the guy. We get in the car. I start driving. She starts crying. She's sobbing. She curls up in a ball and faces away from me, crying and shaking. She doesn't want to be touched. She feels helpless. I feel helpless, and then we get to her house. Give me a second... She says she doesn't want to break my heart, but she can't be with me right now. She says she can't take care of herself right now let alone me. I wasn't aware I needed taking care of, but she must feel as protective of me as I feel over her.
I've never felt for another human being what I felt for her after she kissed me and got out of the car. I waited for her to walk in her door and sat in front of her house for a second, a little bit in shock before I backed out and started driving home. I got as far as the second stop sign when I felt the flood coming. I pulled into a parking spot and let my forehead drop onto the steering wheel as tributaries of salt water streamed out of my eyes. My nose stuffed up right away and got runny. I just couldn't make sense of it. I was feeling pain but not mine. I was feeling pain only for what she was going through, and it's one of the strongest emotions I've felt in my entire life. My only question was, "why?" I couldn't even think beyond that... just, "why?" I was screaming it. Asking God directly, "Why? Why?!" Why what? I had to take off my over shirt to blow my nose on it and just laid against the console of the car.
A very dear friend of mine, Luke talked to me about selfishness and selflessness one time, and what it means. What love means. I wrote a journal entry in Boulder on my journey to the conventions recreating as best as I could what I understood from what Luke taught me. "I'm describing is not the rejection of self, but the rejection of self as a legitimate entity," I wrote. "What it means to me is the realization that self is actually indistinguishable from everything." This part of the concept I understood. What understood theoretically, but hadn't experienced was what it feels like to be part of the web when someone else is in pain. This is the best I can do to explain it. I felt genuine and pure selflessness. What I had thought to be selflessness before was wrong. I thought that selflessness meant, self-sacrifice, masochism, and martyrdom. These were just what I understand now to be expressions, and tragic ones, of what I felt that night.
I felt her pain and her pain only. I just couldn't understand it. I still don't. It perplexes me. I don't think any amount of writing can truly express what this feeling is, but it lets me know that I love her. It lets me know that I love her in a way that I'm not sure I've loved anyone before...