Kryptonite
I thought I was past this.
I thought that, having rebuilt my personality from the ground up, I had managed to avoid a bunch of the structural issues that caused me pain for so many years. I've improved things tremendously, to be sure -- I don't crave approval from anyone anymore, I have a real self-esteem (not just an "I deserve better" mantra), and I've traded constant emotional pain for everyday calm. I am now the person that I foresaw myself becoming, and it's good.
There's one thing it didn't erase, though. I may not rely on anyone else for my emotional health any longer, and I'm (reasonably) content being single (though I could stand to get laid more often). But it turns out that there's one harpoon still embedded in my side, and his name is Matt.
Michelle reminded me that I'm far from alone. She's in the same boat. So was Seanan, something I'd forgotten. I don't know how many others there are, but all of us have found that no matter how much time and distance we put between us and him, no matter how many relationships we have or things we fill our lives with, there is no way to get him out of our hearts. And oh, how we wish we could sometimes.
I used to think that people who were truly bad for you had to be toxic in some way. I'm having to revise that assumption. He's actually completely benign: intelligent, sensitive, warm, sincere, steady... Michelle said that he's a hard person to love, but I had to disagree with her. He's actually very, very easy to love. He has some minor flaws, but I've always known them, and they're not dealbreakers -- not, in fact, anything that would drive me up the wall in close proximity. He's extremely perceptive, which is rare. He's sexy in some inexplicable fashion. He's a whole lot of things I look for in a partner, and always has been.
That he doesn't include me in his life is not a terribly unusual circumstance; I've had lots of crushes or relationships where there just wasn't room for it to expand. It wouldn't be a big deal if I could just mourn and move on. But I can't let go. It's not that I can't bear to -- it hurts enough that I think I could bring myself to cut ties even with our history (I've done it with Rey and Wayne and Seanan, among others). It's that I don't think it's actually possible.
I've tried everything. Regular contact makes it a dull ache. Less contact reduces the ache, until it surfaces with stabbing pain at infrequent intervals. Cutting off all contact leads to periods of peace and quiet... until something serves as a reminder and rips a bleeding hole in my emotional well-being. I spent close to fifteen years with zero contact and rare mentions of him, and I'm *still* hung up on him as much as I ever was. I go for a few years and then I dream about him, sometimes for several nights in a row. He's one of only about three people I dream about whom I haven't been in a long-term partnership with. (I rarely see people I know in dreams.)
I thought Sam would be different. This weekend proved me wrong. Instead of reducing my attachment to him, the personality shift seems to have left it completely untouched. I'm not used to having this level of emotional pain anymore; I know how to cope with it, but it's as agonizing as anything else I ever had to deal with. I had to lean on Michelle to get me through the worst of it Sunday night, and it's still a brooding ache at the back of my mind. It's enough to send me into depressive fits, complete with urges for self-harm, if I focus on it too much. It catches at me in unexpected moments.
I can't solve it, either. Either I don't have the tools, or there is no solution. Whatever it is that he is for me, whatever niches he fills, I suspect there are too many factors for me to find a substitute or shift myself to compensate. He satisfies me on so many levels that I can't quantify them all. And for his part, he's an antisocial introvert who doesn't see any way to fix it either, so he tends to ignore it and lead his life until one of us starts banging on his door to let us in again. I don't know how much responsibility he has, here: whether it's a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing, or it's just a twist of fate that's put him at the center of so many people's lives. How much is he obliged to address how other people feel, even if it is something that they can't seem to control?
I'm already at the "very little contact" level, and it really hurt when I found out this weekend that I was the last to know about a couple of major things in his life. I'm going to see whether I can coax him into more regular contact, perhaps a phone call every week or something; at the very least I wouldn't feel as left out, and maybe it would lead him to think of me when he has spare time. I just don't know what else to do.
I have an account as Torquill on Dreamwidth, and that's where I posted this. You can sign in with OpenID to comment on the original post, or you can go ahead and comment here; either way works.
I thought that, having rebuilt my personality from the ground up, I had managed to avoid a bunch of the structural issues that caused me pain for so many years. I've improved things tremendously, to be sure -- I don't crave approval from anyone anymore, I have a real self-esteem (not just an "I deserve better" mantra), and I've traded constant emotional pain for everyday calm. I am now the person that I foresaw myself becoming, and it's good.
There's one thing it didn't erase, though. I may not rely on anyone else for my emotional health any longer, and I'm (reasonably) content being single (though I could stand to get laid more often). But it turns out that there's one harpoon still embedded in my side, and his name is Matt.
Michelle reminded me that I'm far from alone. She's in the same boat. So was Seanan, something I'd forgotten. I don't know how many others there are, but all of us have found that no matter how much time and distance we put between us and him, no matter how many relationships we have or things we fill our lives with, there is no way to get him out of our hearts. And oh, how we wish we could sometimes.
I used to think that people who were truly bad for you had to be toxic in some way. I'm having to revise that assumption. He's actually completely benign: intelligent, sensitive, warm, sincere, steady... Michelle said that he's a hard person to love, but I had to disagree with her. He's actually very, very easy to love. He has some minor flaws, but I've always known them, and they're not dealbreakers -- not, in fact, anything that would drive me up the wall in close proximity. He's extremely perceptive, which is rare. He's sexy in some inexplicable fashion. He's a whole lot of things I look for in a partner, and always has been.
That he doesn't include me in his life is not a terribly unusual circumstance; I've had lots of crushes or relationships where there just wasn't room for it to expand. It wouldn't be a big deal if I could just mourn and move on. But I can't let go. It's not that I can't bear to -- it hurts enough that I think I could bring myself to cut ties even with our history (I've done it with Rey and Wayne and Seanan, among others). It's that I don't think it's actually possible.
I've tried everything. Regular contact makes it a dull ache. Less contact reduces the ache, until it surfaces with stabbing pain at infrequent intervals. Cutting off all contact leads to periods of peace and quiet... until something serves as a reminder and rips a bleeding hole in my emotional well-being. I spent close to fifteen years with zero contact and rare mentions of him, and I'm *still* hung up on him as much as I ever was. I go for a few years and then I dream about him, sometimes for several nights in a row. He's one of only about three people I dream about whom I haven't been in a long-term partnership with. (I rarely see people I know in dreams.)
I thought Sam would be different. This weekend proved me wrong. Instead of reducing my attachment to him, the personality shift seems to have left it completely untouched. I'm not used to having this level of emotional pain anymore; I know how to cope with it, but it's as agonizing as anything else I ever had to deal with. I had to lean on Michelle to get me through the worst of it Sunday night, and it's still a brooding ache at the back of my mind. It's enough to send me into depressive fits, complete with urges for self-harm, if I focus on it too much. It catches at me in unexpected moments.
I can't solve it, either. Either I don't have the tools, or there is no solution. Whatever it is that he is for me, whatever niches he fills, I suspect there are too many factors for me to find a substitute or shift myself to compensate. He satisfies me on so many levels that I can't quantify them all. And for his part, he's an antisocial introvert who doesn't see any way to fix it either, so he tends to ignore it and lead his life until one of us starts banging on his door to let us in again. I don't know how much responsibility he has, here: whether it's a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing, or it's just a twist of fate that's put him at the center of so many people's lives. How much is he obliged to address how other people feel, even if it is something that they can't seem to control?
I'm already at the "very little contact" level, and it really hurt when I found out this weekend that I was the last to know about a couple of major things in his life. I'm going to see whether I can coax him into more regular contact, perhaps a phone call every week or something; at the very least I wouldn't feel as left out, and maybe it would lead him to think of me when he has spare time. I just don't know what else to do.
I have an account as Torquill on Dreamwidth, and that's where I posted this. You can sign in with OpenID to comment on the original post, or you can go ahead and comment here; either way works.