The Weight of the World
It's such a good thing that children aren't aware of the lion's share of what awaits them as they march toward adulthood. Oh sure, there's the simple fact that trying to sit a child down to explain the vast and complicated concepts of life just wouldn't click by virtue of their sheer innocence.
But what if some sadistic parent was like, "Son, here's the deal. Adulthood's a bitch. You think you're hurting for allowance money now, just wait till you have to work your ass off for it. Oh yeah, work, well you'll know what that is soon enough, heh. And if you think the kids can be mean at school, you have no idea how fuckin crazy and douchebaggy plenty of adults are, often for no good reason. I know you don't like it when we take dessert away as a punishment, but get this, you won't ever have to worry about that when you're in charge of putting a roof over your own head and buying your own food. But you wanna know a secret? This is the real hilarious part. Even if those things go great for you, there's this safety switch that keeps everyone on the same playing field, and it's called love. Love's gonna make you feel alllll kinds of things, haha. But we'll talk about that one more later, you've got enough to think about without going into that right now..."
There'd be such an upswing in kids saying "Fuck it, I'm staying in fifth grade for a few more years."
This last month and a half I had the joy of dealing with two of adulthood's most fun 'privileges'; housing and (of course) love, although admittedly one of them was a debacle I had a hand in myself, so I can't just wryly rail against the adversity of maturity entirely.
Mere days after the girls and I sent off another year's lease agreement, we received a notice informing us that the owner's of our current house had decided to move back in, rendering our desires and complacency moot. A few weeks of frantic, irritating, frustrating house hunting ensued, with the results of our searching taking the form of a cute 1920's Victorian house not a couple miles east of us. While I would definitely prefer to stay in our current place, a part of me is looking forward to the novelty and "adventure" of discovering and customizing a new home. I just wish one could enjoy that "adventure" without the searching, moving, and monetary loss aspects of the whole process, hehe.
While all this was going on, and after some time apart, I made the mistake of giving Austin my heart yet again, like the good-natured blinded-by-love idiot man-child that I am. He held my heart tenderly this time, just long enough to inadvertently lull me into a false sense of security. Small wonder that I was so ready to believe things were going well; after a year and a half of him being a histrionic bitch things were completely different these last several weeks. There was peace, stability, enjoyment. Hardly any fighting or disruption. A sense of true romance and closeness, and the glimmer of a bright wonderful future together. Buuut it turns out that it was just me perceiving all that, since he told a remarkably different tale. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a dozen or so times, fuck you.
After all, this is the person who cheated on me twice, and broke up with me another three to five times (it's easy to lose track after awhile you know), always with the crux of it being that he didn't have the ability or desire to examine himself and simply grow as a human being by exercising patience, sacrifice, etc. Given that, it's hard for me to feel much self-pity or wonder how this could've possibly gone wrong yet again, lol. /sarcasm. I guess when the histrionic behavior ebbed severely, I thought we'd finally made it, that all the crap had been worth it, but that's the classic essence of our relationship; my role as the patient, blind optimist who had eternal faith that we could overcome anything together, his role being the malcontent who could never just enjoy the sum of our parts if this one or that one wasn't perfect here and now.
One would think that the sheer familiarity of this situation would rob it of its impact, but being rejected by someone and broken up with blows regardless of the circumstances. I've lost my best friend, the person who the last 600+ days of my life have centered around. The reason and manner in which he quit this time are what will truly sting for some time to come too, because as usual there was no overtly fatal flaw, just a problem that he didn't want to cede could be solved with more patience, willpower, and hell, even good-naturedness. As he put it, 'his feelings were changing negatively for weeks but he didn't want to hurt my feelings by being more direct and confrontational about the matter at hand'. Well congrats, you still hurt my feelings but fucked the relationship over to boot. For someone training to become a therapist, bottling one's feelings up until they're irreparably damaged and toxic in order to avoid conflict seems about the most asinine advice one could dispense, so I sincerely hope that if you ever read these words my conflicted paramour, you'll take them to heart.
It makes me think of how often we'd darkly joke about the saying "physician heal thyself!". If I know him half as well as I think I do, he'll now be looking at the relationship with a keenly revisionist stance. Alllllllll the ails and woes of his life will be attributed to it, and he will cite a resurgence of positivity and peace, as though it were the only thing holding him back from being his 'true self'. Unfortunately, in doing so, he shortchanges himself yet again because he is looking at everything but himself. The concept of genuine selfless love will remain that much further beyond his ken, but because he's been 'freed from the shackles' of having to give a damn about how his actions affect another human being, he will feel energized and optimistic. Until of course, he takes the exact...same...baggage into his next relationship, because he never grew by learning to value patience and sacrifice.
As friends have reminded me though over the last couple of days, you can't own someone's else baggage, you can only constructively remind them that it's there. And although I'm furiously resentful and hurt right now, it's not like I want to see the person I love suffer or face adversity. He is one of the smartest, most engaging, attractive, humorous guys I've ever met in my life, he's just also got a long way to go before becoming a mature, solid partner. With 3+ years age difference between us, I guess that shouldn't be so surprising, but it's easy to dream when you're in love. Someday, I hope to be able to enjoy those wonderful attributes of his as a friend, without all the venom and drama that currently share space within him, but for the time being, for as much as I lament the demise of this relationship yet again, there is an increasingly large part of me that realizes it's for the best. Even an eternal optimist has to acknowledge reality when all is said and done.
I'm doing my best to remember that although the last major chapter of my life centered around Austin, there's a vast wide world out there that keeps spinning regardless, and that joy, sadness and everything else in the world is not tied into how this one person is causing me to feel at this moment. It's hard of course, but what's adulthood without a little trial by fire?
But what if some sadistic parent was like, "Son, here's the deal. Adulthood's a bitch. You think you're hurting for allowance money now, just wait till you have to work your ass off for it. Oh yeah, work, well you'll know what that is soon enough, heh. And if you think the kids can be mean at school, you have no idea how fuckin crazy and douchebaggy plenty of adults are, often for no good reason. I know you don't like it when we take dessert away as a punishment, but get this, you won't ever have to worry about that when you're in charge of putting a roof over your own head and buying your own food. But you wanna know a secret? This is the real hilarious part. Even if those things go great for you, there's this safety switch that keeps everyone on the same playing field, and it's called love. Love's gonna make you feel alllll kinds of things, haha. But we'll talk about that one more later, you've got enough to think about without going into that right now..."
There'd be such an upswing in kids saying "Fuck it, I'm staying in fifth grade for a few more years."
This last month and a half I had the joy of dealing with two of adulthood's most fun 'privileges'; housing and (of course) love, although admittedly one of them was a debacle I had a hand in myself, so I can't just wryly rail against the adversity of maturity entirely.
Mere days after the girls and I sent off another year's lease agreement, we received a notice informing us that the owner's of our current house had decided to move back in, rendering our desires and complacency moot. A few weeks of frantic, irritating, frustrating house hunting ensued, with the results of our searching taking the form of a cute 1920's Victorian house not a couple miles east of us. While I would definitely prefer to stay in our current place, a part of me is looking forward to the novelty and "adventure" of discovering and customizing a new home. I just wish one could enjoy that "adventure" without the searching, moving, and monetary loss aspects of the whole process, hehe.
While all this was going on, and after some time apart, I made the mistake of giving Austin my heart yet again, like the good-natured blinded-by-love idiot man-child that I am. He held my heart tenderly this time, just long enough to inadvertently lull me into a false sense of security. Small wonder that I was so ready to believe things were going well; after a year and a half of him being a histrionic bitch things were completely different these last several weeks. There was peace, stability, enjoyment. Hardly any fighting or disruption. A sense of true romance and closeness, and the glimmer of a bright wonderful future together. Buuut it turns out that it was just me perceiving all that, since he told a remarkably different tale. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a dozen or so times, fuck you.
After all, this is the person who cheated on me twice, and broke up with me another three to five times (it's easy to lose track after awhile you know), always with the crux of it being that he didn't have the ability or desire to examine himself and simply grow as a human being by exercising patience, sacrifice, etc. Given that, it's hard for me to feel much self-pity or wonder how this could've possibly gone wrong yet again, lol. /sarcasm. I guess when the histrionic behavior ebbed severely, I thought we'd finally made it, that all the crap had been worth it, but that's the classic essence of our relationship; my role as the patient, blind optimist who had eternal faith that we could overcome anything together, his role being the malcontent who could never just enjoy the sum of our parts if this one or that one wasn't perfect here and now.
One would think that the sheer familiarity of this situation would rob it of its impact, but being rejected by someone and broken up with blows regardless of the circumstances. I've lost my best friend, the person who the last 600+ days of my life have centered around. The reason and manner in which he quit this time are what will truly sting for some time to come too, because as usual there was no overtly fatal flaw, just a problem that he didn't want to cede could be solved with more patience, willpower, and hell, even good-naturedness. As he put it, 'his feelings were changing negatively for weeks but he didn't want to hurt my feelings by being more direct and confrontational about the matter at hand'. Well congrats, you still hurt my feelings but fucked the relationship over to boot. For someone training to become a therapist, bottling one's feelings up until they're irreparably damaged and toxic in order to avoid conflict seems about the most asinine advice one could dispense, so I sincerely hope that if you ever read these words my conflicted paramour, you'll take them to heart.
It makes me think of how often we'd darkly joke about the saying "physician heal thyself!". If I know him half as well as I think I do, he'll now be looking at the relationship with a keenly revisionist stance. Alllllllll the ails and woes of his life will be attributed to it, and he will cite a resurgence of positivity and peace, as though it were the only thing holding him back from being his 'true self'. Unfortunately, in doing so, he shortchanges himself yet again because he is looking at everything but himself. The concept of genuine selfless love will remain that much further beyond his ken, but because he's been 'freed from the shackles' of having to give a damn about how his actions affect another human being, he will feel energized and optimistic. Until of course, he takes the exact...same...baggage into his next relationship, because he never grew by learning to value patience and sacrifice.
As friends have reminded me though over the last couple of days, you can't own someone's else baggage, you can only constructively remind them that it's there. And although I'm furiously resentful and hurt right now, it's not like I want to see the person I love suffer or face adversity. He is one of the smartest, most engaging, attractive, humorous guys I've ever met in my life, he's just also got a long way to go before becoming a mature, solid partner. With 3+ years age difference between us, I guess that shouldn't be so surprising, but it's easy to dream when you're in love. Someday, I hope to be able to enjoy those wonderful attributes of his as a friend, without all the venom and drama that currently share space within him, but for the time being, for as much as I lament the demise of this relationship yet again, there is an increasingly large part of me that realizes it's for the best. Even an eternal optimist has to acknowledge reality when all is said and done.
I'm doing my best to remember that although the last major chapter of my life centered around Austin, there's a vast wide world out there that keeps spinning regardless, and that joy, sadness and everything else in the world is not tied into how this one person is causing me to feel at this moment. It's hard of course, but what's adulthood without a little trial by fire?