I'm Exhausting To Be With

That's what he told me.

"It's exhausting to be with you."

I could laugh it off, if I didn't know it was true, and if I hadn't already heard it a couple of times before. Never during the breakup conversation, the times before were during fights, in person, and I remember one instance where I got it turned around to wry smiles and romantic conversation. But this time, it had gravitas.

Chris is pathologically stubborn, and there are some things he says that you know aren't going to change for anything. Telling me I'm exhausting to be with felt like a death blow. I knew I wasn't coming back from that statement this time. And he doesn't like that I'm "better at arguing" than he is. He feels manipulated, like he thinks one thing at the beginning of a conversation, and at the end, I've convinced him otherwise, or at least, have put doubts in his head. That frustrates me, because I believe him to be my equal on every front, and while I may have my lawyering skills in play, he's no slouch at arguing, not by a long shot. Plus, he diffuses me more quickly than anyone, with pointed comments that I immediately acknowledge are true. In short, no one has argued with me as well as he does.

But, I understand why I'm exhausting. I exhaust myself. My life exhausts me. The combination of anxiety, observational skills, empathy, and self-awareness, plus a band to promote etc, a literary event to produce regularly, a job where I'm never really off the clock, and a circle of friends who've got their own mountains of stress make for a brain that's processing serious emotional quantities at all times. A lot of that doesn't just stay in my head, and it tends to pour out to my paramour. I vent, I process things verbally, and sometimes, I take out my stresses on them unfairly, in the form of nitpicking, and arguing, and judgmental observations.  Plus, my tack when feeling insecure is just to become nitpicky and argumentative; all I'm looking for is affection and reassurance, but it takes someone secure and happy with themselves to know and do that, and that is not Chris. He withdrew affection, or I became insecure, chicken before the egg, egg before the chicken, and that was where things started to go down hill. He is not someone who muscles through very well. He doesn't fight for things, he flees, though he is of very strong character, and he's pulled himself out of some serious muck in the past year, his instincts are still pretty safely on the side of flight. He's someone who decides he's done, and figures out how to cut and run. It's a defense mechanism, of course, and it's one I've got no resources against other than time. I'm pushy and I'm intense and I'm difficult to deal with. He is too, just as difficult with his stubbornness, his tendency to be negative and use black and white thinking, to seek solace in depression instead of pulling himself up and out of it. I was willing to work through these things. He was not willing to work with me. In fact, according to him, he has his "reasons" for breaking up with me, but they're "mean," so he's not going to tell me what they are.

This indicates to me that these are things he never even brought up to me, never gave me a chance to defend or change, that he views them as so intrinsic to my character, they were things he put under the umbrella of "love someone for who they are, not who you want them to be," and started to put his love for me out to pasture. And, I believe, that they must be things I am proud of, things I would perceive as "mean" if I were criticized on them. He said, that maybe once he becomes more comfortable with me as friends, he could maybe tell me what these things are. He doesn't seem to realize that, he's dropped a significant box of kittens on my head, here; I can't work through this breakup not knowing what these "mean" things are. As much as I work on pushing it out of my head and try not to obsess over it, it's still going to come back, over and over, the obsessing and fretting over what these "reasons" could be.

So this is all exhausting. If he'd just had a clear, rational conversation with me, instead of tallying up reasons to leave me, we might have had a chance. Despite the distance, despite the fact that we are both difficult people who will never have an easy relationship, despite ourselves. I think what we had in the first couple of months was an indication, to me, at least, of how good a relationship could be. He was my partner in crime. We discussed things rationally when there were things to discuss. We lifted one another up, we loved one another truly. And then, or so it seems to me, he just checked out. And I got insecure, and an ugliness set in.

I have the kind of life where, even if I'm sitting completely still, I am surrounded by a whorling mass of intense situations. Last week, while sitting in my living room, I watched a car hit my car head-on through my picture window. By the time I got outside, they'd done a u-turn and were driving off. That's in addition to the crane that hit my car while I was at an art gallery, whose insurance I'm contending with now. One of my good friends' mother committed suicide recently, and he's coming to me to help him with that. Another's mother and father-in-law are both gravely ill, only three months after one of their sons had drank himself to death. A member of my band is experiencing serious health issues.

Chris implored me, last week, to talk to my friends. That I couldn't keep coming to him because I was hurting from this breakup, because he's the one that broke up with me. He asked me to stop contacting him, for the time being. A perfectly fair, and correct assessment, but all those things above are what I'm contending with in my day-to-day life, and those things are why I often have a very difficult time being vulnerable with my friends. Many of my friends have it much worse than me, and I'm realizing, a lot of my "close" friends, particularly in Minneapolis, are more drinking buddies than anything. Quite a few of my truly "close" friends have moved in the past couple of years. To Portland. To Chicago. To New Orleans. To San Francisco. My emotional ties to this city are dissipating, and it's depressing me. I've wanted to leave for a long time, at least for the winters, but literally feeling less and less desire to be here because of the people around me wasn't something I'd expected to happen.

So, I don't have a lot of people I feel comfortable reaching out to right now. Additionally, one of the people I normally discuss my relationship woes with is Chris's sister. I realize they are close and that this is a huge conflict for her to be in the middle of, but it's a point of fact that neither of them seem to acknowledge.

My life is experiencing significant shifts. With therapy, I will make yet another shift toward being better at living. With others, with myself. Employment shifts are on the horizon; I'm reducing hours at the job I loathe as of March 1st, and I'm going to make the leap toward jewelry design, in the hopes it can at least provide half my income per month. I'm considering moving from the apartment I love more than any other living space I've been in, in order to be more in the thick of things in Uptown. This would mean less space for me and four cats, no more porches and fenced in backyard, no more giant perfect kitchen and dining room and ten foot ceilings, but it would also mean fewer cab rides and more biking and walking now that my car is completely totaled. So that would happen as of May 1st, when my lease is up.

I don't know. Like I said, I exhaust me. I feel like I never get a break. Not from the drama of everyone's lives around me, not from things that happen to me without my consent, not from heartache. Some of that is what I'm putting out in the world, and I can work on that. A lot of it, though, I know to be just the way my life is, and will be. So perhaps acceptance is something I need to work on, too, instead of fighting the cars of the world who want to careen into my car...