(no subject)
So some man went and stomped all over my heart again the other day. But to his credit, I asked for it, and had been for quite some time. Second time I've really been heartbroken, the first of course being over that toxic waste of humanity Schad, may he burn in hell. After Nate I was pretty disappointed; I'd been crushing on him for five years, after all, but it turned out that we just didn't have the chemistry I hoped we would although I still consider him a worthy human. Can't really call it heartbreak, though.
This trainer I dated briefly last summer, though, was different. Been a long time since I really let anyone in. Two years, at least. Still don't really know how that happened; I sure tried not to let it. Mainly cuz I know that historically, it's always been catastrophic to my career-focus.
Catch-22. Never would've happened if it hadn't been for my injury sidelining me from work, but then, if it had happened when I hadn't been injured so I hadn't been STUCK here to rot when the season ended and everyone moved on, maybe something lasting could have come of it.
I spent the day after talking to some friends who were kind enough to each lend me some pity for my party. (Notably not my best friend, though, as I've apparently raised her hackles by focusing too much on my own life recently.) I was wallowing in misery, about the same amount as I've been wallowing periodically anyway throughout this long-period of being strung along, wishing I was dead, seriously contemplating at least letting some blood out which I haven't done in over 3 years, and one of my friends said to me, "If you want tomorrow to be the same as today, then do nothing."
And it got me thinking, that's exactly what I've been doing for six months. Nothing. Refusing to make a decision that would move me forward in my own life because I thought that any day, he was going to ask me to come be with him. Essentially. Although there have been financial and logistical setbacks too, plus this really wierd hangup I'm having about my dad and not being able to leave him. I wonder if that explains my natural gravitation toward unavailable men. If there isn't some semblance of safety or at least familiarity in that for me, or if I'm trying to work out these issues I can't fix with my dad with another subject because my little perfectionist brain, in spite of the evidence that each one is making me worse instead of better, can't just accept that I'm not responsible for that nor in control of it and move on. I've been emotionally crippled. My feet frozen to the spot where I'm standing.
No one's gonna move me but me.
Why am I like this? Am I that afraid of being alone, even though that's pretty much what I've been pretty much forever? Am I that afraid of getting out there again, having failed and come crawling back home a few times already? Is it the humiliation? Is it like the book, lent to me by the best friend who's no longer speaking to me. suggested, that if I actually feared failure, I'd be running away from it as fast as I could, but since failing is basically what I'm doing right now by doing nothing, it must be success that I fear? Fear that even if I realize all my dreams, those who matter most to me will disapprove of me as much as ever? Belittle and reject me and everything I care abut even harder?
Whatever it is, it gets me so gridlocked in my mind and heart that I can't move. Like I want to go after two things that lie in opposite directions, and one thing is what I really want, and the other is what all the people I'm trying to please have convinced me is what I should want, and it's got me so mixed up that I don't even know which is which anymore. I can't make a decision in this environment. I need to get far enough away that I can clear my head, remeber who I am and what I set out to do, and decide whether that's still really what I want, or if I want to be in love even more.
And then I run into this problem of whether I'm really in love with a person, or just with the idea of being in love.
Am I a partner or a dependant?
This is why kids need to break away from their parents at an earlier age. Thanks to the poor job market and work ethic for all these 20-somethings fresh out of college, who think that their bachelor's degree is going to magically put them on the fast-track to success along with the 500,000 other graduates this year without an inkling of competing for those limited jobs on their part, the average age for moving out has gradually crept up. Even more so when you consider the "boomerang effect" typifying our generation, and me especially, it seems. This is at the root of all the fighting we do with our parents as teenagers; in order to form your own identity, you have to push them away so hard that there can never be any semblance of you as an extension of them again. But instead of becoming our own, we instead hang around and learn to live in a state of constant conflict and stress and turmoil. And when that becomes your habit for adulthood, when you're confident in that pattern, it's easier to seek out relationships that mimic that pattern rather than breaking the cycle, no matter how miserable it is. We go through life asleep, never realizing that we choose our own situations. We are in charge of our own destinies, but most of us do exactly what I've been doing: defaulting.
"If you want tomorrow to be the same as today, do nothing."
So I dragged myself out for a run the next morning when I would much rather have pulled the covers over my head and gone on wallowing forever. And my mood lifted. I was and am still sad. But not devastated. The following day, I finally figured out my new ignition switch wiring and was able to start my truck for the first time in a month. It's been laying around with the wiring torn apart while I drag my feet and balk at making decisions about how to reassemble it. So I took a hint from Nike and just did it. Weather permitting, I bet I can finish it in three more days.
And at some point in there, I remembered that I was happily single before this guy. Well maybe not happily, but definitely a lot less stressed out. A lot more like the capable, confident person I know I am. A lot more like someone others would actually want to be around. And I actually prefer being single for this very reason. Cuz everything's great whether I'm powerfully single or with someone wonderful, but the moment I have to deal with missing someone, the moment I have to deal with them being gone and the fact that they're not thinking about me because I don't mean nearly as much to them as they do to me, and with the fact that they're lives are progressing and they're over me while I'm stuck wanting them and jealous of whoever they might be with now that I'm out of the way, I become a basket-case. I become the worst version of myself. Every bad thing that men say about women, I'm it. Needy, clingy, insecure, jealous, controlling, smothering, childish, desperate, demanding, bitchy, whiny, manipulative, nagging, pathetic, pitiful, paranoid, controlling, obsessive... And I hate myself, and whoever I'm chasing cant help but grow to hate me, too. It is truly sad to see myself falling so far short of what I know I have it in me to be.
I just forgot for a minute. I forgot that I'm not supposed to give myself to anyone anymore; not until I find someone I know I won't have to miss. Someone I can keep. The contact was just so intoxicating I lost my bearings for a minute. My other best friend, with the bachelor's in anthropology, (study of people) says that we crave it to the point that deprivation can make a person legitimately insane. I certainly know all about that.
It hurts and offends me to be called psycho. Because I know that I'm not psycho. I just want the same thing everyone wants. And prolonged periods of rejection will fuck anyone up. I am exactly what anyone else would be under similar circumstances. And then I look at the behaviors I engage in because of it and see how it could easily be interpretted as psychotic, even though everyone knows in a close personal way the kind of frantic delusional state you're in when you act like this. Hell, I've even diagnosed it as psycho in others!
And I also came to the realization that having a good reason for being the way you are doesn't make it any more attractive. Who wants to guilt someone into loving them? Who wants to be loved for who they are when they suck and not for who they are when they kick ass? I wouldn't want me either.
Seriously, what did people DO back before they knew there was anything wrong with them? Back before "PTSD" ushered in the therapy-culture with the fledgling pharmaceutical industry riding it's coattails. Did they actually take their problems in stride and call it life? And do we really lead more fulfilled lives now? Or is it all just filler? Simply an excuse to avoid ever beginning to live? Hogtie your time with stress. Hogtie your time running psychoanalytic circles within yourself in an elaborate process for justifying WHY WHY WHY you're the way you are and therefore not capable of progressing, and who is to blame. We all live in a house of cards. And the answer is not to make it more and more complicated as the consumer culture would have you believe; the latest techno gadget is but a fleeting comfort, not a cure, and serves only to make you more dependent upon it thus making you an easy target for the next gotta-have-it fad.
Unfortunately, I don't live in the idyllic little world in my head. I live here, and now, where everyone is playing a game simply because they think everyone else is. They won't take it at face value when you're straight with them, and even if they do, it's not "exciting" to them because they've conditioned themselves to exist in a state of constant stress and chaos and conflict. Contentment and depandability are boring now. Everything must be fast and convenient and disposable. Including people. Including me.
Yeah, I'm a psycho cuz I'm the only one who hasn't gone crazy.
Silly me, I thought we all just wanted some one to love, who would love us, and who would always be there. But people you can count on aren't thrilling enough in this fast-paced, devil-may-care, dog-eat-dog world. Like we've all got a lisence to be inconsiderate and insensitive and even blame others for getting their feelings hurt when we carelessly trample them.
And I guess in a sense I'm as guilty as the next one. Because regardless of whether I got used for sex or money or comfort, wasn't I too, just using him for comfort or affection or making me feel like I'm interesting and valuable? Isn't that all it is even in ideal relationships? Business transactions. Each has something the other wants. And as long as I don't give them that, ever again, maybe I'll be able to keep the next one on the hook while keeping my feelings locked away so that I don't get hurt, or scare him with them. I'd much rather just be open with a person willing to do likewise with me, but that ain't the world I live in. Here, if you stand on your silly moral high ground and refuse to be a player, then you're gonna be the one getting played. Period.
Read through some old texts I saved and the one that really hung me up, from him, went: The thing about Denver was that we were both there at the same time, and now we're not.
Given the last five years of my life, I can't believe I'm still so naieve.
The girl he dated last year, or I guess, now I'm the girl from last year, but the one from the year before that visited him at the track one day last summer, and he really just seemed to give her the cold shoulder as she followed him around. He said he didn't need a clingy girl. I told him I didn't want to be that girl next year. And I look at myself and realize that's exactly what I've been and in all reality probably ten times worse. Hanging around after he was done with me. And I realized that I'm in control of whether I'm gonna be that girl or not, not him.
And somewhere in the midst of all this, I got over it. Not over it, over it, but at least to the point where I know I'm okay. I've survived worse before. I miss him, and I'd take another shot with him in a second, but I don't need him. I can move. I'm hurt and sad and disappointed and lonely as fuck, and I mainly feel like I got cheated out of my shot since it wasn't either one of us wanting it to be over but rather circumstances that ended it for us while we were both still enjoying it, and now he's seen me out of my mind to the point that I'm sure disgust and apprehension will keep him from ever remembering why he liked me in the first place, but I'm not broken. Just mad about the situation, cuz this is one I'm always gonna wonder about.
I'd rather be with him than be alone, but I'd rather be alone than be like I've been hanging onto him long after he's gone. It was a moment, like any other joyful, glorious, heartwarming, life-altering, magnificent moment, and this too shall pass. Can only tarnish it by hanging on. Like crushing a baby bird.
God! it had just been so long since anything good happened to me. Water in the desert. Or as I said to him, "what the sunshine must feel like to the grass in the first week of spring."
A woman can grow and grow and grow, but she won't ever bloom without it.
I love these epiphonic moments I have where I realize that everything is ok. That struggling with hardship is just life and not a sign of incompetence or inadequacy on my part. Shapes you as a person. And for contrast, also.
This has been the sound of my one neuron firing.