To Kim
Apparently I cannot explain myself without you feeling like I am trying to change you. I am sorry that I am not good enough.
I don't want you to apologize for who you are. I don't want you to change who you are to suit me.
All I want is for you to understand some key issues and to take them into consideration when you are deciding your actions.
1) I am not Michael. This has its good sides as well as its bad.
a. On the bad side:
i. I am not a clean freak and am no good at cleaning
ii. I am not always tinkering with things and keeping everything working
iii. I don't understand your way of fighting and do not follow your rules for it
iv. I don’t like all the same music you do
b. On the good side:
i. I don't expect you to bow and scrape for me
ii. I respect you as a person in your own right
iii. I do listen to you
iv. I do not throw things at you
v. I won't go behind your back and cheat on you
vi. I try to manage my bi-polar condition
vii. I do not want to be "Supported"
viii. I almost always think about everything
2) I am a person with real thoughts and feelings of my own.
I do not know how else to explain my position, not on the specific issues of last night and today, but on the underlying problem which is currently threatening to split us up-if these last two fights were in fact the issue I would just apologize and we could move on, but they are not, they are just symptoms. Like many diseases, the condition can be present for a long while without showing symptoms, can even appear to be treated and go away only to flare up again later. Please, Please, understand that I am not saying you are the problem-I'm not even saying that we are both to blame. I am saying there is a problem and that there are things we can do to fix it.
From my perspective, you keep trying to treat me like-and expect me to react like Mike. When you react to something I do, whether good or bad, I feel like your reaction is based on a thought something like, "If Michael had done this it would have meant…."This is a problem for me because it makes me feel like you don't want me after all; like you really do want Mike back and all your statements about not wanting to be treated the way he treated you are just "sound and fury". In thinking back to any of our arguments, how often do I say anything like, "I was in a relationship like that…" or, "I had someone who treated me…"? When I am asking you to consider who I am while deciding how you will take my actions and you reply with, "I was in a relationship where I had to apologize for everything," I feel like you are saying, "Who Salvador Melo is doesn't matter." And your insistence that I be the only one, or the first one to apologize in every situation just because you had to do that with Michael makes me feel like not only am I worthless to you, I am also supposed to think it is perfectly fine that I am meaningless to you.
You say you are not going to change who you are. I applaud that statement. I do not want you to change who you are. All I want is for you to treat me different from how you would treat Michael. Some things to think about:
If Shylo reacted badly or blew up at something you did accidentally or without intending to cause harm, would you expect her to apologize or would you try to find out what was wrong?
If Martha started acting huffy in the middle of a conversation preceding plans with her, would you get mad at her and break off those plans or would you try to find out why she was suddenly upset?
If Richard were to explode after taking too much from too many people and something you asked him to do was the final straw, would you just be mad at him or would you feel sad for him that he had been pushed so far?
Historically, if I tried to ask these kinds of questions your response has been, "I'm not trying to have a relationship with them." I understand that. Do you understand that this response carries an unstated but understood inclusion of, "So they are allowed to have feelings of their own but my boyfriend is not."? Can you see how your acceptance of these other people, even Mike, as having the ability to be hurt by actions which you did not intend as harmful can in itself be devastating to me when you refuse to accept that I could be hurt in the same way? Can you understand how painful it is to watch you treat all these other people as themselves-even the Shelbys and the Aarons-and then to have to deal with it when you treat me like you expect me to be Mike; to have you tell me the intentions behind my action or request don't matter because what Mike's intentions would have been behind the action or request is more important than my actual intent? This consideration, the right to be judged by my own intentions as opposed to his intentions, is something I have been requesting since before we first kissed; you have apparently forgotten as back then the need for this request made sense.
I realize my emotions are often hidden from the world. People have accused me of emulating Spock-taking everything as logical and refusing to have emotions at all. Frankly, it is because I am so overly emotional that I take this approach; I cannot trust my immediate emotional reaction to a stimulus so I send that reaction through a maze of thought and try to look at the basic, hard facts effects of all stimuli before allowing myself to react. With millions of things happening around me, and my natural inclination to believe they are all because of me, I hope you can understand how much mental effort I am spending at any given moment trying to determine the rational, reasonable reaction to my entire world. This can often make it look like I have no emotional reaction to anything, until something happens to overload my process, either through sheer numbers of important stimuli coming in and filling up the maze so the next one goes straight to reaction, or through the stimulus being so big, so important, or so powerful that it dwarfs my maze and overpowers my ability to reason, forcing my reaction. This means that any time I react in an overly emotional fashion, I am experiencing a problem, possibly a huge problem, and if my emotional outburst is directed at you, then you caused my problem however unintentionally. If you knocked a can off a table onto my bare foot and I screamed in pain, wouldn't you apologize for the accident while I was still in pain before expecting me to apologize for screaming once the pain was manageable? Am I not allowed the same consideration for emotional pain? Note: I do not expect an apology every time you hurt me emotionally, especially as I understand you won't even know how I was hurt or what you did to hurt me. All I ask is that when I have an outburst you understand: it is because I am hurting; that before I can apologize for whatever damage my outburst causes, I may need help to get through the pain that caused the outburst in the first place; that however inadvertent it was for you to cause me pain, an outburst from me is just as unintended as screaming and jumping when someone steps on my foot. Thankfully, you don't wear heels, but you wouldn't think I was being rude for saying, "I am sorry my moving my foot caused you to fall, however, your heel on my instep was painful." Nor would you think me obnoxious for wanting an apology for being stepped on in the first place, even though I doubt anyone would have stepped on my foot on purpose. Why then is it so wrong for me to say, "Sorry I blew up at you, but you hurt me by (insert action here)," or to expect some kind of explanation and occasionally an apology for the, hopefully accidental, pain which caused the outburst in the first place? (Why is it wrong for me to have wanted Barbara to apologize for not noticing how upset I was and continuing to taunt me when my reactions to the teasing were not favorable, but not wrong for both you and her to want me to apologize for saying something I didn't actually say and not wrong for neither of you to accept my real apology for unintentionally hurting her when she miss heard my final request to stop teasing me including a heartfelt explanation of why I was requesting the cessation? Why is it wrong for me to want to know that you know that you did hurt me, however unintentionally, when the hurt is bad enough to cause an outburst, and why is it so bad that occasionally, not every time, I want the order of acknowledgement to follow the order of events?)
I am by nature a loud, obnoxious, opinionated, self-righteous asshole. I have worked hard, put in hours of research, and performed thousands of thought-experiments to earn the right to be self-righteous. I continue to work at always trying to be certain I have correct information to be considered a valid resource for anything I care about in the least, and thus feel I have earned and continue to earn the right to be stubborn in defense of my position in any intellectual argument. I also recognize that others have the right to not be subjected to the presence of a loud obnoxious asshole and my process as described above was set in place to protect others from my natural self without causing them to withdraw from my presence. In the past, I always had somewhere I could go to be myself, and some friends around whom I could occasionally let my sick, twisted, obscene and entirely too agile mind come out to play. To date, I have not met anyone around whom I could feel comfortable being myself 24/7 as no one, to my knowledge, is anywhere near as depraved as I am (by current social standards-I happen to think I am normal and it is the rest of you-all who are sick) . For all I know, my potential best-friend could be the most proper person in Orem, and just not show their true mind, like me. However, in the last three years or so, I have had no chance to let myself go, no truly HR free zones in which to let my inner demons run and play, and no one who, to my knowledge, would accept my verbal expression of my natural inclinations as both non-threatening and non-offensive. Even the most carefully constructed and best fitted of masks becomes uncomfortable occasionally, and I have been wearing mine since moving to Utah County in 1992, and without more than an occasional breath sucked in quickly while lifting the chin slightly for the past three years. This is not a situation you can fix, nor is it one I am asking you to fix. It is something that I find painful and I would like to know you occasionally recognize that it is something I endure without respite for your benefit.
I don’t know if you read this far. I believe that you care about me; I'm just not sure you care enough to go through the effort of reading a 4 page report on who I am and what I think is needed to make our relationship better. If you have and you do, then I hope you understand that I am not asking you to change who you are. All I am asking is that you remember who I am and who I am not; that you treat me as myself, not ascribing to me intentions which I have never felt; that you realize I understand you have been hurt before like I have been hurt before; and that you understand I am not an emotional eunuch, and my emotional knee is not as fast or well trained as my physical knee-it is entirely possible for you to kick me in the emotional balls and it hurts when you do no matter how unintentional the blow.