I am supposed to be writing a boring profile of MItchellville right now. I am supposed to be writing everything but this. I am supposed to be putting notes together. i am late, I am behind. I am everything about myself right now that I hate, that drives me crazy about myself, that has me driving around these two counties in despair, speaking conversations aloud that I'll never have for real.
I cannot focus. The monster is back in full force and I"m so scattered and I am not doing what I'm supposed to do. This is not to say that I'm suffering. In fact, I'm drinking wine and listening to Dar Williams and getting high on the smell of this luxuriously beautiful Pier One candle that I got on clearance a long time ago, which isn't a negative experience at all. I'm just not doing anything that's taking me anywhere, except out of my head, which is where I so badly need to be that it feels essential to do it even though there's other stuff on the agenda that other people care about.
I don't know why all the required things in life - the academic programs, work weeks, family dinners, need to reliably last like one-third past the time where you start to feel like you can't live in them anymore. This program sucks my soul. It's broken me down. I'm not even sure it'll do what I thought it would anymore, things just feel like they'll go back to where they were, but oddly enough I do trust that it was the right thing anyway
I wrote my ex a letter the other day. It's long. It's all kinds of complicated shit, and it's incredibly honest. It'll never be sent. It jsut needed to get out of my head. I kind of felt better after it. It's better to do that - to draft that stuff here and never push it live - than to keep it trapped in my gray matter. My brain is like his effing billboard anyway at this point. And why, I have no idea. But really...it's happening. The moving forward is happening. It's been a terrible season on that level and it turns out it was necessary. I'm packing this stuff up and putting it away.
Tonight I went on a jicama binge, only because Whole Foods craftily packages it with lime and I was standing there feeling all boogie like, Oh, I've had jicama, and they're giving me a lime! So I'll buy it! It's not satisfying. There's probably a way to make it so, but in my current existence where it's jicama and lime in the Whole Foods container with pita chips and wine? Not so much.
I attacked this season with a big-ass shovel. I decided I was going to take matters into my own hands to make something better and that not only didn't happen, things got exponentially worse. Now finally maybe the dust is settling some.
I'm tired, just as a state of being and of complaining but I'm not so sure what to do when the news is consistently not good. I don't know if you're supposed to expect it to get better or just to expect nothing at all...if it just means the wiring's bad or what. I don't really know. Maybe I'm not supposed to talk until I have something more positive to say? Or maybe people who are uncomfortable can just back away. I'm totally okay with that.
I've been in bed today, soul-sick more than anything, utterly unable to afford the time off, with the usual chatter battering my brain. I can't really stand it. There's a fundamental lack of organization of anything, of being buffeted around to produce this piece or that of whatever that has no common thread. And when the demands placed upon me are random and disorganized, that doesn't work with a brain that needs a lot of help making the lists and checking them just because.
I've done okay with some stuff this week, removing some triggers and being with my friends for good things. There's an awful lot of dissatisfaction around me. I'm over-pondering why I've been put in a space with a particular person for the short haul who doesn't bring out a speck of the best in me, who makes me nervous and worried. I'm tired of tests. I don't really give them out so I'm always surprised when they come back at me.
My mom went today to the funeral of a friend, someone I've known since I was a very small child, one of those losses that doesn't seem so profound to my life on the surface for reasons of time and distance but when I learn of it there's a thought of "how will the world continue to turn without this person? How does it continue?" The comings and goings are constant. It's the learning to be in the in-between that's my challenge, and although I know I'm not alone in that that's really the most lonely it gets so it's hard to really care sometimes.
I'm finally grieving for real after years of false starts and failed attempts and it's hard. I thought I did it a long time ago but I so didn't. In some ways I wasn't allowed to but in other ways I refuse, and even now when I feel like I'm doing the best I've done I'm usually proven wrong. Last night I had a thought that lasted for hours, that this was going to be okay, that my mind might finally be reshaping gracefully around my new old reality. And maybe just maybe I could do something revolutionary, something cool, without the dead weight of this garbage hanging on my back.
Today I am not so strong. Today I'm anxious again.
Tuesday night when I failed to respond to a stupid message that is so far away from what I once got, when I didn't pursue conversation because I knew it would only deepen the cracks in my heart, I guess I did the right thing for myself. I guess I took matters into my hands in the way I should have a long time ago instead of expecting that someone else would look out for me. And maybe I'd be better off if by some chance I'd been able to do that stuff a long time ago. I don't know. Right now my hands just feel empty, the weight of what I know too much and the effort it takes to maintain nothing is much more significant than I think it ought to be. But this is what was left to me. This is the way it turned out. This is nowhere I thought I'd end up, the last place I want to be, and it is left to me to fashion something from it.
I saw my friend Joyce again last weekend after many years. It was a total surprise. I went to a fundraiser for a woman we worked with who is now very ill with cancer, and I was so glad to see so many people I never dreamed would be there...but especially this person.
Joyce
worked in the kitchen when I was a waitress. I met her 20 years ago, when I was 17.
She fed me literally and she fed my spirit. I sat on a milk crate while she rolled out dough and she spoke to a young girl
who was so angry and so confused in so many ways. For the whole time
I was at the restaurant, she made me feel special and gave me love and
truth.
She is one of the most hard-working, humble, honest and
beautiful people I've ever known. This has been a season
of reunion...for some reason I'm being called to look at so many places
and people all at once who have touched my life and it's an
overwhelming blessing. She was so happy to see me, it felt really good to feel that genuine mutual gratitude, and I'm amazed to say that it's not the only time it's happened lately. This one was a special surprise though.
If I never have anyone else pay
attention to me or identify the person in me who needs an ear and a
shoulder, seeing her again reminded me that I'd already been blessed
beyond measure. So amazing how you can go back 20 years in 2 seconds
and feel so much the same. Another theme of my life has been how
friendship and relationship are in no way about color, ethnicity,
cultural identity or age and this was one of the first relationships
that taught me that.
It's so important sometimes - no matter
how uncomfortable it is, and make no mistake, there has been no shortage of discomfort here - to go back to where you were to find out how
you got where you are. I don't know what caused all of this to happen at the same time, but that's how the fall rolled out. That's my life now. Even though I'm not comfortable with where I am, even though I'm still too-often focused on the lack of some things that feel so essential to my soul and heart and mind instead of the ridiculous excess of some other great things, I'm still living every day. I'm showing up to see these old faces along with some of the news ones that sustain me. And I'm grateful that doing this put
me back in the same room with Joyce even for a few hours.
So I failed NaBloPoMo, after acing the last two. I just couldn't do it. Things are too chaotic right now, trying to finish school and not go completely crazy in the process, along with a general disinterest in recycling any of the stuff that's cycling through my head on a daily basis. Suffice to say that this has not been a season of peace, which doesn't bode well considering my general usual lack of same during the holiday season.
My heart is not yet unbroken it seems. I am frustrated and sad. I've been crying more than I like to admit and beyond that more than I just like to do. I've been having some problems with the things that typically cause me problems, or at least that have for the past ten years. I am an up-and-down sort of girl, with a desire to be more up, and it's frustrating that I can't seem to manage it for the long haul.
I'm not ashamed of admitting the biochemical short straw I drew. It's nothing I sought out and nothing I foster because I like it or I'm proud of it. Reams of better pages have been written about depression stating the case that it's a beast, that it's unmanageable, that it can make you feel like your one relatively insignificant human existence is the nexus of suffering that no other person has ever experienced or could relate to. I'm completely unmedicated now and not in a place to afford the time or money for therapy. I've tried the drugs and they intermittently worked and didn't, and I finally found that I wasn't that much better with them so I wasn't sure what I was trying to prove. I've been to exactly one out of five helpful therapists in my life this summer who is just too expensive for me but she gave me some tools that still help. I'm making it day by day with the effort it takes to examine negative thinking and flip it around, with mostly good choices that keep me in the company of people who have a good influence on me. I know the environmental and situational things that need to and in some cases will change very soon. It's just a matter of moving through the present moment and reminding myself in general to appreciate it except when I just can't.
I got into a bad place this week because I allowed someone who has always pulled too much weight with me to get into my head again. I suffered another short bout of imagined communion that is so, so embarrassing, always, in the aftermath - even if only I know about it. I don't really understand why this keeps happening because beyond sad it's just stupid.
I got together with a friend who has really been a godsend for listening and also talking to me about this for an obscenely long time, and I told him that in spite of my "everything happens for a reason" training I felt that this situation had had absolutely no redeeming value in my life, that I didn't feel grateful for it at all and just wished that it had never happened. I felt that I had already known and experienced the strength that It was supposed to bring me in the long run because of other things I'd experienced. Except for the fear that never entering into this relationship may have been that flapping of butterfly wings that caused an earthquake 15,000 miles away or maybe just would have meant I'd have been in the path of an oncoming car and died instead, I'm completely not grateful for it and wish beyond wishing that it had never happened. I can't imagine any purpose or any value that it has could outweigh the ridiculous amount of pain and suffering it's continued to cause for absolutely no reason at all.
My friend thought that was sad and quite frankly it is, but it's also what I know and believe to be true in this moment for me. It sucks. I don't recommend it. Here, have a beer.
See, I already knew to welcome love and be giving. I already knew to appreciate what I had, and I had already been rejected enough in my life that it just seemed cruel to have it happen on that insane level. I was ready to love someone for the long haul. I was ready to be there. And now I'm not. Now I have so little trust, so little belief in that experience for myself. It's the most significant and at the same time most glaring truth that I've gathered from the past couple of months of soul-searching. I've been told it's the wrong perspective to have. I say I can't help what I know. I say that as open as I am to life experience, which I have been for a long time and continue to be, I don't expect it to happen to me. And yes, I wish I'd turned a different corner (JUST where that's concerned. I'm glad I walked in the door of the place where I was, because it gave me other people who make my life so much better. I just wish I'd stayed away from particular departments.)
I've also been in this super-stressful daily work situation for a while now, and it's coming to a close so I'm hoping that will have a positive effect on my generally horrible state of mind. I'm also trying, really trying, not to close down socially which is what I have the urge to do lately but I know that's a guaranteed trip to the bad place. And I'm trying to be smart. To that end, I'm on the verge of booking a trip to Savannah for just after classes finally end, and I'll be spending Thanksgiving in San Diego. Other than that, I honestly have no idea where I'm going. For a long time I thought that would be freeing but for the most part it's time to reel it in a little. I don't ever want to be complacent, I don't ever want to be in a place where I'm bored with my life or thinking "this is all there is and ever will be," but I'm identifying a sense of needing to land, of needing to feel anchored with something at my center that I haven't had in a long time. It's been wearing me down progressively since I came back to Maryland in 1999, and almost ten years is long enough.
With all of the guidebooks and templates and rules of the road that exist, I wish sometimes they existed for the bigger stuff. And also that every time I wrote stuff like this I didn't feel the need to apologize for it, because if I don't have this space to store it I wouldn't have anything to look back on later when things are better and go, yeah - that time, I'm glad that time's over now.
(For instance, me a year ago - that time's over now too.)
I went to Vietnam in March. I'm disappointed that I haven't done more with my photos from that trip. I came across these randomly today and I like them so I'm posting them. Simple.
It seems unbelievable that this day is here but it is.
Last night I went with two people from my program to cover the Obama rally in Manassas, Va. It took us three hours to get there and two hours to get home, where we finally landed at 3 a.m. It was brutal but it was another life-changing moment, much like sitting in Invesco Field watching him accept the nomination in August.
I cannot believe I've been there for the things I've been there for, speaking inarticulately.
I sat on the media stand on a really, actually beautiful night in Virginia, praying I wouldn't fall off the riser and break my neck, smooshed on one side by a tiny camerawoman from a Japanese news media outlet and a man to the right of me from who knows where who wasn't pleased that I found a spot on the "floor" between their two tripods. For a not-small woman I can compartmentalize into these spaces pretty well when I want to. There were almost 100,000 people in those fairgrounds - a magnificent mix of color, age, gender and fashion sense. There were many, many people in wheelchairs and using canes to pick through the uneven ground to get out there and wait for a man who lost his grandma today, which I could tell by the look on his face and the almost-imperceptible slump in his demeanor.
The admittedly kind of shady but well-meaning video that I captured is on my YouTube channel.
I wrote this while I sat there:
I really never want to forget how I felt, sitting in these chilly fairgrounds in southern Northern Virginia. This has been a long, ridiculous eight years and whether or not this man can even begin to piece some things back together, I'm not willing to bet any more of my country's future on a short-sighted party that sold it out to the atrocities of war and domestic oppression.
80,000 people in Manassas, in November, at 10 p.m. on a Monday night. My friends, this is change.
I slept for two hours so it's a good thing the adrenaline is kicking in. I'll be in a few places today. I'm going to stop into my local precinct and vote, then go to campus to pick up some last-minute footage and news for the YouthVote Blog. TerpsVote and College Dems and Republicans are holding events all day.
I'm on Twitter at @lauriewrites, which I expect will heat up when I'm with the awesome list of bloggers expected to be at NPR tonight with me as part of their election coverage. My friends Jill Miller Zimon and Shireen Mitchell (aka digitalsista) will be there, along with several others - mostly women, amazingly. As much as after two years of this I want to be on my couch with a beer and a pizza, this is such a cool opportunity and I can't wait.
I'm going to vote now. For the rest of the day, if you're interested, you can find me on what I randomly called LeftRightLeft, the small corner of this site where I allow myself to get political. I can't promise wisdom, not at all, but what I can leave you with is the reason why all of this happened in the first place, in two small parts.
In 2000, I knew very little about politics but I knew in my heart that something was wrong. I had been back in Maryland for a year and my life was sort of messy (nothing like the airtight awesomeness it is now! Haha. ;)) The Gore loss - the election day actual real-time debacle and the eventual legal loss - changed my life and my mind forever. It altered my concept of what is fair and just, and what a country can really do. I learned then that things are not always as they seem, that sometimes in fact they are quite horrible no matter what kind of a pretty dress you put on them, and nor are they as they ought to be, at least not from my spot anyway.
I got seriously fired up for the first time but clearly not the last and I dragged everyone I knew and loved with me through my growing sense of frustration and disenchantment with the political process and the rightness of leadership in this country that has not abated since. Nice, right?
In 2004, my life was a little more together and things seemed like they might be looking up. I sat up all night hoping against dying hope that even though I knew that John Kerry the windsurfer didn't have what it took to get us out of the hole we were in, that some kind of universal force (call it God, call it what you will, I'm open) that opposed an unjust war killing many thousands of people would cause a miracle to happen and let him take over for awhile.
When I am told I need to be unbiased as a journalist I respect this - on paper. But as a fully living, beyond-opinionated woman living in this crazy world, I can't be. It stresses me. It challenges my communication skills, because I have too many ideas and have drawn too many conclusions to pretend I haven't. Because, see, I want equality for people of color and for women. I want - as I said - an end to an unjust war, and a slimmer chance that we'll end up in a series of other ones, with nothing but axes to grind forevermore. This is my central issue, I admit it, beyond the economy even, even though I know how very serious this is. This is my heartbreak, and anyone who says this means I don't support troops or my country - well, okay, I'm all about freedom of speech, but they're wrong.
So that's why I'm here. I may never work in a traditional newsroom because of this (and let's face it, at my age I'm cool with that - they can't afford my starting salary.) I'm a teacher and a writer at heart so I'm okay if I just do those things. I'm not going to be silent today, except when it makes sense because I don't want to get punched. Today I'm going to say on my little corner of the Internet what I believe in my heart, my most impassioned heart that was very battered along with millions of others eight and four years ago. Today I'm going to say like I have not before in this cycle that if things go the way I hope they do for a man who has managed to stir millions of people the world over with an undeniable sense of promise, the right thing will have happened. I'm saying this because I've finally decided that I should, and because even when I didn't I caught hell anyway. I'm saying this because yes, I can.
Seriously, drop by the other page later if you feel like it. We're going to tear it up at NPR, I promise. There may even be a webcam involved at some point.
I know it's terrible quality - it's a Flip Video camera which seems to be the most advanced technology I can handle actually downloading files from - but this is what I saw tonight.
I don't know what will happen tomorrow or over the next four years. Let's face it - the next five minutes is fairly questionable. But this is what I saw tonight.
Several years ago a man I thought I was going to spend my life with (oh, hope and belief, how cute and uninformed you are, in all of your hope and believiness!) made me a mix cd for Valentine's day. He was a pop music geek and a romantic who worked diligently not to be one - he was a lot like me in those ways, come to think of it - so like all people with that combo going for them it all comes out in the tracks.
Some guys I'd been involved with even tangentially over the years (i.e., had crushes on or vice versa all the way to verging-on-to finally-becoming boyfriend) had much darker taste, such that when a tape came out of that it involved inscrutable alt-rock tunes that had no meaning other than the fact that we'd heard the song together once and it was SERIOUSLY RAD, or he thought I got his nihilistic view of the world even if I didn't share it and that was cool so he slapped some 8-minute prog mess on there. I got a Metallica mix once, which, if not warm and fuzzy, I have to admit was kind of hardcore, in a good way.
But this was a very different relationship, and this cd was different. It was sweet and thoughtful and a little sexy even (really, hi, to see us you'd never guess, but anyway it was like that sometimes, actually a lot of the time then, hahaha, anyway, I'm totally blushing right now.) It was produced with a billion times more care than your average thing of any kind because that is how he produced things, dear little earnest man. He was a musician and music is very closely woven through my day-to-day, and so it was through ours. He is still (aggravatingly) responsible for the five or so sweetest material things anyone has ever done for me, and this was like number three maybe.
I listened to the cd in my car and I actually SQUEEE'd out loud, and said, "Oh, I love you too" although he was not there, because I am a dork. And I also cried. I am so not a "squee'er", especially not all in caps, although I am indeed a crier. I was touched and relieved and all kinds of things, I mean, I knew that this person loved me a really lot but here was some kind of tangible evidence. IN SONG. How awesome was that?
When you feel about music like I feel about music, as an emotional marker and cultural indicator and just, well, it's hard to explain, it was just very awesome.
He put a song on the cd called "Someone" by the Rembrandts (yes, the band responsible for the Friends theme song. Have to pay the bills somehow. Not all of us have a trust fund...except their kids now, probably.) I had never heard it before, which was typical. Champion of underdogs and the underappreciated that he was, he had a habit of finding the one song by the band that no one else liked (and in some cases believed to be incredibly lame) as proof that they were, in fact, genius and although on many occasions I thought he was so, so sadly wrong in this case I have to admit that it kind of worked for me.
It is the most pathetically sappy pitiful song, and the fact that he closed out this cd with it touched me.
So I made it our song in my head, although I didn't tell him. Proof of my crazy, perhaps, but it just didn't come up, like a lot of other things that just...didn't come up. We didn't have "a song", not really, unless you count "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch." (because I guess I'm just not that much of a lady.) We didn't dance. We talked about music all the time (allthetimeallthetimeeveryminuteweweren'teatingorsmoochingorathemovies) and listened to it together constantly but not in this "Oh listen baby they're playing our song" kind of way. There was a random Lou Rawls tune (because we were really 55 and not 20-something?) which verges on
not-terribly-happy, so I don't like to think about that. In the aftermath of our relationship there was another song I identified with (again: super pathetic), and the only one he ever wrote about me was about that eventual end, which, wow, that sounds kind of terrible now, but then again I didn't write stories or poetry about him either. We were all kinds of busy being in the trenches together on a variety of levels, way more serious about everything individually and together than a newly dating couple should have been and it really didn't leave much time for assigning symbols or dreamily picking out songs or even writing them for that matter, although I wish now looking back - looking back sucks, don't do it - that we had tried to do more of that kind of thing instead of all that trenches stuff. It gets so serious so fast. The fun goes away when you need it the most. And so.
****Have fun. That's my only advice, which you should take seriously given that every relationship I've ever been in has failed miserably. No really. I have a lot of learning experiences from whence to draw my wisdom here. Pick someone who you think is cute whose basic annoying traits you can forgive who likes to have fun with you and doesn't tell lies, rage at you, hate your family or criticize your work or basic belief systems, who makes you laugh (super important, because it's harder to want to punch someone in the face so much who you think is hilarious) who you like to talk to and also to listen to (key point. Please see 1997-1999 in my personal history for proof) and who calls you out on your more ridiculous bullshit without making you feel like a fool, and you will live happily, if a little combatively on occasion, but that's okay cause who needs boring lockstep eh?, ever after. Mazel tov, may the road rise to meet you, etc., there you go - and that was free.****
Anyway, this gross song went like this:
<>
No, I'm kidding. That was Christopher Cross, who will never be responsible for "my song" with anyone, although I do love "Never Be the Same", and I apologize to all of you "Longer" people. Except oops, that was Dan Fogelberg, who I'm fond of so I'm sorry I went there. Poor Dan.
Anyway, this is really it.
<>
If you don't watch it (which I really can't blame you for and it may in fact be advisable that you don't) it kinda goes "Someone to love me the way that you do, someone who needs me the way I need you, someone to show me the way that is true, blahblahblah and on and on about how much this person is so happy that this other person is someone who will do all of these fabulous things and after all this TIME thank GOD IT WAS THAT PERSON because that person ROCKS and everything and everyone else SUCKS."
And there's this other horrible part about having no one left to turn to and the world falling down and not being able to face the morning and how this SOMEONE just fixed that right up too. And then the singer incongruously and rather rudely screams out COMEONCOMEONCOMEONYEAAAAAHHHHHHH like he's being beaten to death just as he realizes how FREAKING LUCKY he is, and wouldn't that be a bitch?
Taken altogether I thought that was a great choice for a unilaterally chosen "our song," which makes the "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" thing make a whole lot more sense.
I hate this song now and it makes me cringe for reasons far less musically judgmental than it might have then. I lost the cd (on purpose, probably) a long time ago but for the last eight years I believed in some version of that squee and all that stuff I believed because I could not stop believing and not just because Steve Perry would find me and kill me if I did. I just couldn't stop. It didn't make any sense and it was also unfair because hey, if you feel so terrible about something and you're a fairly decent citizen of the world who regularly swerves to avoid hitting squirrels and who puts the grocery carts back in the cart corral it only makes sense that it would stop, right? That you would stop FEELING BAD? Because feeling bad sucks! Feeling bad isn't good!
Right???? It only makes sense that your usually-not-incompetent brain would be able to overcome what can only be determined to be a chemical mess, that the switch that flipped would shut down if indeed you were wrong in the first place? That one day you'd get it? That because you are a relatively logical person on a decent day that the evidence would begin to add up?
And it also makes sense (although I don't ask for much, really) that the universe might throw ANOTHER SOMEONE (although not as miserable as this poor, singing soul, please) in your path within that time frame who would figuratively kick the previous someone's ass on multiple levels and make him a non-sequitur. A blip even.
This did not happen. Hello, thanks for playing. And I was not a wallflower all this time. Quite the opposite. I am never still, constantly all the time with the go go go and the being with the people and the going to the places. I have been as open to meeting people without taking the horrifying step of joining a kickball team as it is possible to be in this area.
Nada.
Now. As much as I believe in independence and being a whole human being and not just an appendage to another person in a "relationship" - and I totally check out in this area - it made this chapter of my life really difficult. It made me very unkind towards myself. It made me jealous of friends and family and complete strangers whose someones stuck with them when mine did not (translation on a bad self-pity day: who found them compelling enough to stay with. Who did not want to be without them.) It made me irrationally angry at people who would minimize what I saw as a terrible blow, even as I grew sick of myself because I knew it wasn't that bad in the overall scheme of things and stopped talking about it with much of anyone for a long time because really, what difference did it make?
As this summer wended into fall, I couldn't stand it anymore. I was tired from this year. I had things to do and I needed all of my brain to do it. I was wrapping up a graduate program. I had places to go and things to do. My old situations were not serving me any longer. Everyone else involved had moved on. More to the point, I started to think boys were cute again. So in a last-ditch attempt to excise this out of my body and mind like a tumor, I went for it. I approached the topic directly with the only person who could really help me, in a strange twist on High Fidelity that involved only one person, not five, who was unfortunately not John Cusack.
It was weird and awkward and uncomfortable and painful. I randomly ended up where he lived and that turned out to be helpful. I made my delusional side listen to things I didn't want to hear because I knew it was essential for long-term survival. I saw him as a friend and someone who regardless I care about so profoundly, which is just true although hardly anyone understands that.
And it has been really hard. I've been very unhappy for a number of weeks now, absolutely on purpose. It's been like a vaccination, going back to this someone for antibodies against old, weird belief systems that aren't serving me anymore.
I did it to wake up, and you know, it turns out that I'm alternately really awesome at and really suck at it. I do truth really well, and that's what I've done. Removing denial, forcibly, is like emotional brain surgery and it turns out it's pretty intense. So I've felt lonely like I haven't allowed myself to feel for years, because as long as I lived in a fantasy land I never had to. I was in a between-time for so long, and now on the other side of this? MiserableLand. All the layers are gone and this lonely is inside, like Liz so eloquently says. It's in spite of being surrounded by people more often than not, except when my body or my mind or my heart gets too tired and I have to hermit myself away for awhile.
This season it sunk in that the someone in that old song is gone, on both sides. I am not the girl who identified with the song and he is not the boy it was about or even who sang it. As ready as I've been for so long to move past that, I had to come to understand that there was something I needed there and that's why I kept it. There was something that I relied on in what happened to me and who I became in that relationship to shape my world view and even though it wasn't working anymore I wasn't ready to let go of it yet. As ready as I was to have someone else fill in both of those blanks, I was afraid it would never happen and so I stayed stuck.
It turn out I have to walk through a lot of fear at this age, I'm finding, to be hopeful and to trust again, as well as to accept that what happened didn't fit my idea of how my life was going to be and that's got to be okay. I have to deal with my worry that whomever I opt to let into my life now, or whomever randomly shows up, is not going to make me even marginally "squee," and worse than not knowing what songs I like (which I know sounds crazy but you have to know me to know what this really means) won't really care what they are anyway. I fear not being comprehended or comprehending, which was so fundamental to my evangelical belief in this old situation, and is so essential to any choice I make to include any other person in my life. I worry about my insistence on insisting that I'm okay on my own, no matter how hard it is, because my insistence can often look a lot like bitchy and that's not what it is at all, 90 percent of the time.
Through the worry I move forward. My fall of whatever this has been has opened up to more hope than I've felt in a long time. I know I did the right thing by telling the truth, by finally owning what I felt so I could move through it and put it away. And it's amazing, the things that are coming to me, the way life is circling around to put me in touch with an overwhelming amount of love and support when I really really need it - or maybe now that I'm opening up to it. I can feel the tide turning, even though some days are still pretty hard, because I am myself, let's be honest.
And you know, there's an important election tomorrow. In some ways this is all cycling through perfectly, because an anger and sense of frustration that started seething eight years ago just may come to an end and that seems appropriate for now.
Meanwhile, I read stories that give me hope, and can feel genuine happiness for people who have made it through as well to a place where another person naturally fits into their lives and doesn't have to be forced in, because when all is said and done they can't. My awesome friend Kristy walked a tough path in matters of the heart and in other ways, moved to California and in that reinvention found happiness with a person who did the same. What she writes in that post, save for some of the details, reflect some of the same hopes I have for partnership, should it ever happen for me for real. Scott's words about Erin do the same. (and their photos don't do such a shabby job, either. Beautiful.)
You can't rush it, these stories say. You have to let go of the past, make decent friends with who you are and the kind of person you want to be for someone else, and maybe if you're lucky it'll happen.
There just isn't one someone, I guess. There wasn't for me when I thought there was, it's as simple as that, and hopefully after all of this I can scrounge up the courage to give it a shot if it ever seems like it might be so again. I'm thinking I probably can, but I'm going to try not to think about it for awhile.
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