Contextually speaking

I'm doing fine. Really, really fine.

A friend of mine who reads this site called today and basically asked if I was standing on a ledge somewhere. The last post a little dark, yes?

Well, yeah. That part of my story is dark, and sad, and it perhaps could use some context. I carried it for a long, long time. And a little more than a month ago (a month that has flown, by the way, faster than any I can remember...this life goes by us so damned quickly) I got backed into a corner by a wall of words and people with agendas that I didn't and didn't want to understand. I got really, really uncomfortable and I let myself feel that way and then I forcibly let it go. I freed myself from this whacked out psychological and emotional prison, overnight, because I had to. I couldn't take it anymore, and although I may hold on for inexorably long periods of time to impossible situations - a mix of my genetic codependent programming and my own resistance to giving up anything that I identify as MINEMINEMINE - when I can't take it anymore, I REALLY can't take it anymore. It was as difficult as saying, "I so love you, you are so dear to me, but I can't talk to you anymore, and I can't let you talk to me" which, by the way, are words I never thought I'd have the fortitude or phonic capability of uttering. 

Is there a way to feel a bigger ass than to not be over something when you feel like you should be? So what I did was to give someone a pass, not hold them accountable on any level anymore, and just look at my own actions and words and decide what to do about them. I didn't blame anymore, I didn't say, hey, what about those things YOU did, what about YOU??? There wasn't any point anymore, it was all sand through my fingers.

And somewhere on the plane back from California, after more than a week of immersion in the world of words and people who write them, of awesome people and landscapes and straight talks with people who love me, I decided that if stuff came up in my head about this lousy and increasingly ridiculous situation, no matter how random or sad or pitiful-sounding, I was going to take it wherever it went and I was going to WRITE IT DOWN. I decided to do it for all the years I didn't because I was afraid that the person I was so screwed up about would read it, and actually know how I felt (God, the truth, it just sucks so hard, doesn't it?) But what never occurred to me in these years of censoring because I was afraid of how he'd react (it was always, always about him, on so many levels, in so many ways) was that I was digging myself into a hole of shame and depression from which I would eventually erupt, snakes for hair, shrieking at the universe with 800 axes to grind and in dire need of anti-anxiety medication and multiple shots of the brown liquor.

It got pretty deep there for a couple of months, let's just say, but I think now that it was just the final dark phase, the final letting go. Mostly of illusions, I know, but they were mine, thanks and I didn't construct them by myself. I had help, although somehow it's always come back around to me, to my fragility (fuck that), to my issues. And by the time I tried to fix it for the millionth time a couple of months ago, there was nothing left to fix. There was no connection there but memory, and for the final time I was not afforded the compassion of honesty, of being treated like a person who can handle my shit, who will not fall apart. No matter what the reason, no matter how well-constructed the logic of handling me with insulting and patronizing kid gloves, that ended it for me. There was a person, completely ambivalent about me, and me all building elaborate altars with my hands, hauling ass like those dudes who worked on the pyramids for 87 years, to something that never really worked in the first place.

At least I know I'm committed to causes I care about. There's some positivity there. Turns out my pea brain will go to great lengths to hold on to people who made me laugh and feel deep love once and were better than adequate at the kissing thing. And actually that's a flippant understatement. I had a great thing for a minute that lasted for a few years. And that was the minute that was in my mind when I was writing and feeling all of this old, old stuff that came out in the previous post. Yesterday morning I expected to feel stupid about writing it. I expected to want to set it back to draft, because it's amazing how jarring your own words can be staring back at you in black and white from this screen.

What I didn't expect was that when I walked to the parking lot to my car to go to work, that I'd feel so much the opposite of what I wrote. That I'd feel happy, like a weight had been lifted. It was so strange. I had no idea I'd be in a good mood all day, that I'd not be dwelling, that I'd feel a clearing in my heart and mind, for real, for the first time, not like all the other times I told other people I felt it just so they wouldn't worry and I could pretend everything was cool.

I didn't know how much I missed being funny for real instead of just darkly so. 

Maybe, although I feel like a weird poser reading a few pages from the Tao te Ching here and there throughout my day, and reading books written by Buddhist nuns and monks to try to put some good stuff in my fucked up brain, maybe it's helping. Funny how admitting I felt things but following that up by doing absolutely NOTHING about them is helping. Funny how letting all of the old stuff rise to the surface and releasing it here, in the only place I feel like doing that it seems, has been transformative. And although I'm afraid there will be backslides, because there always have been so why shouldn't there be again, I think maybe this time there won't be. I think this time it's happened. I think I did it, that thing he told me I'd apparently done last year, because he is apparently not as perceptive as I always thought he was and maybe didn't know me as well as I thought he did, bless his heart. (Or maybe I was just that convincing, because I wanted to be, and I made him believe it.) Maybe I'm doing that thing he was always doing in relation to me, so much so that it was the title of the only song he ever wrote with me in mind. I think I'm moving on.   

Comments

[joanna]

Good. This letting go biz and the subsequent "doing nothing" happens in waves that decrease over time until you can't believe that you ever were where you were a few years ago.

[Genie]

GO TEAM! I forecast great things for you in the coming days/weeks/months/moments.

Here's to more fortitude and less need for shrieking.

[Jen]

It's funny, I'm reading "The Codependent's Guide to the Twelve Steps," and this is exactly what I was just reading about. You did an inventory of the situation (step 4) and posted it in public (step 5) and were willing to let it go (steps 6 & 6).

Happy to see you're feeling lighter without all the crap you were carrying around.

[Deb on the Rocks]

I've noticed that the most brilliant brains and strongest hearts have the worst time with that moving on thing. Too much getting it, ignorance is bliss alright, all that. It's a sucky price to pay. The good trade-offs include a fierce devotion to an intelligent analysis of the next worthy thing, though, so I'm staying tuned.

[Jenny,Bloggess]

God, this post hurt me. It made me look at things in my life I prefer not to look at. But I need to look at them. Thank you for sharing such pain...it helps the rest of us move on as well.