Headed Home...

I have been in Chicago and Louisville for the past week. Chicago has three dear friends that love me very much, and though I don't really care for the city, being with them has been immensely healing. Last night, when I got back to Chicago from Louisville, the couple I'm staying with told me that to them, I'm family. The statement came about because when I was here early last week, a package arrived for them while I was gone. Amber asked why I didn't open it, sincerely. "You're family!"

This is the only house that isn't my actual family where there's a picture of me on the fridge, far as I know. I'm sitting on the bed in their guest room right now, the sheets stripped and drying just outside the door. I should have left nearly three hours ago. I'm just going to hit awful traffic now. But my gut is all in knots and I keep tearing up. I'm afraid to go home. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't know what the next few months hold for me, and I'm afraid.

I've been away for a week and it is the happiest, most content I've been for months. Since before Chris and I broke up. I had a week of adult conversations, interactions, situations. I went out, to shows, to bars, to restaurants, and no one was obnoxious, no one acted a fool, no one said any stupid shit to me, and it was eye-opening. I've thought for a bit now that maybe I'm really done with the party life. Like most things I do actually mean eventually, I think I've been saying this for about three years now. I want reasonable, adult people in my life. We can still go to shows, go to bars, go out and drink, but getting shit faced doesn't feel like me anymore. Fucking dudes who have appropriately thick bodies and the right amount of chest hair but are assholes doesn't feel like what I should be doing anymore. You'd think that would have occurred to me some time ago, and it did, about half-way, nearly a year ago, but, fuck.

I think I'm done. I want to focus on me, on healing all the things I'm holding onto that make me difficult to be close to (with the understanding that I am always going to be an intense, difficult person. I know that's who I am, and I don't want to be someone else. I do want some smoother edges, though). My other friend here in Chicago told me I'm much calmer than last we met two years ago. That means a lot to me.

Every year for the past three years I've gone on a trip this time of year that's put huge things into perspective and moved me forward a great deal. Memphis in 2011 pushed me toward forming my band. New Orleans 2012 made me realize just how many toxic people I was keeping in my life. I hope looking back around this time next year, it'll feel like something just as big was created from my travels.

Science vs. Romance

Part of the constant frustration of being me is that, when given enough information to go on, I can easily argue, and believe, both sides of any story or situation, even in the context of my own relationships. Oftentimes, the biggest part of the "fight" is that the other party isn't actually telling me how they feel and why, they're blocking me out, they're resisting communication, they're projecting anger or resentment instead of efficiently addressing the issue. Then, when the true, bare bones of the scenario are revealed, most of the time, that's the end of things, and it's usually met with some frustration by me since what has sometimes been weeks of misunderstandings could have been avoided entirely by just saying what you mean to begin with. I can be shockingly logical when it's clear that someone isn't just spitting evasive emotion at me. I do not have a prevaricating nature, and my hackles cannot be more quickly raised than by having to deal with it in others. I understand that sometimes, it's a process, and the other party honestly doesn't know how they feel or why and can't articulate things, but there's still the projection dance that's really hard to not react super emotionally to, which always exacerbates things. And I'm sure, from time to time, I do the same thing without realizing it. Unfortunately.

There's also the split of science vs. well, not science.

I can think about palm reading and know that there's no way looking at the lines on my hand mean diddly squat. And yet, the two times I've had my palm read, things were said to me that rang so true, I'm still nearly daily pondering them, years and years later.

And what of ghosts? Logic says there's no evidence of any soul or spirit that powers the body other than the simple (not simple) mechanics of a living thing. And yet, I've experienced visits from dead family members, seen things that shouldn't be there, had things go missing only to be found in conspicuous places months later, etc. I can reason that there is a "rational" explanation for all of this, but my heart also tells me to believe in ghosts is rational.

Or astrology, which has been painfully accurate to my life thus far. Or, well, a dozen other things. I feel like a hypocrite, but I don't think that's the word for it. Is there a label that can be applied here? I've always been at a loss to find one.

The Letter I Wrote Today

In conjunction with not hearing from Lindsay for more than three weeks now, I've received a couple messages from a woman I used to consider a pretty close friend. She has, over the past two and a half years, tried several times to learn why I had stopped speaking to her. The thing is, by the time I officially ceased all communication with her, I'd been pulling away for months, and I feel like the reasons I was doing that should have been all too obvious to her. The message she wrote me today inspired me to respond, since it seemed clear that at the very least, she was in denial about any reasons I had to stop having her in my life.

Because the lack of communication from Lindsay is happening at the same time as this woman trying to pull me back in, I've been examining whether there are similarities I should be making note of. I'm not seeing anything notable. The breakup with Chris, despite being painful, has been very adult, all things considered. No one is writing mean, drunken text messages or leaving 4 a.m. voicemails, and there hasn't really been anything posted online intentionally aimed at maiming the other party (Chris's "I did whippits and made out with people at a party and it was the best time I've ever had!!!" post notwithstanding, and I'm trying to hold onto the slim hope that he was really being a dumb boy and didn't consider that I'd see it, but it seems fairly impossible that he wasn't trying to get me to 'go away' in a passive aggressive manner. Just the same, the incident gave me a good reason to delete and block him on fb, as that kind of shit just isn't something I want to see. And, for fuck's sake, dude. You're turning 36 soon. You were too old to write a poem to your girlfriend on your two month-aversary, but you're cool with doing whippits? 

In any case, looking back, there were several passive aggressive instances that I didn't pay much mind to, now I'm seeing that that is, unfortunately, an aspect of his personality when he feels cornered or can't articulate himself in a positive, adult manner [sorry for the lengthy aside]), so I'm hard pressed to feel like that's the whole of it. Someone suggested that it's possible he asked her to not speak to me, which would be... weird.

Anyway. This is the response I gave her, and I'm pretty happy with the diplomacy of it, considering that I really don't like her and have no intention of having her in my life. This is about the level of shit it takes for me to oust someone from my life.

Xxxxxx,

I haven't spoken to you in about three and a half years for several reasons. It started when I was dating D. You wanted us to get together, and then you pretty constantly shit-talked him when we did. It wasn't very respectful to your friendship with him, and it made me very uncomfortable that you'd want that for me. Then, as B and I became better friends, I was really not impressed with the way you treated him. I know that things are different inside of a relationship, and he could have been blowing things out of proportion, but from the outside, it seemed like you were using him and abusing his love so that you would have a safe place to hang your hat. This only became more obvious as you continued to be involved with other people (J, namely) and string them along as well. Then, when B acted on your "open" relationship for the first time, you flipped out. Yes, he did it in your bed, and I understand that was a violation, but it really seemed like you were telling him he couldn't do what you'd been doing the whole while.

So by this point, I had already backed off from you, and was more or less avoiding communicating with you. The last (several) straws were the summer of 2009 when you became involved with S, L, and finally P.

That made four people you'd dated/had sex with who were people I had recently been involved with, in the course of just over a year. P in particular was deeply upsetting to me, as everyone in my sphere was perfectly aware of how deeply I felt for him. I found it enormously distasteful, and it hurt quite a bit. I felt betrayed by both of you; that was the third time I'd caught P in a lie about sleeping with someone I was friends with. [Editorial note lest it sound like I was obsessed with P; he and I had an on again, off again but never committed "thing" for three  and a half years, which finally ended in 2011, though we have now overcome all that mess and are good friends now]

While I think you are a woman with a great many interesting things to say, and I know you're a lot of fun to be around, these are things I won't over look. I think they speak altogether too much about your character, and that is why I do not consider you a friend, and why you shouldn't continue to spend time trying to get back in my good graces.

Take Care,
-Sarah.

Feeling Impotent

A sure sign my brains are rotting:

Bad dream about bad touch uncle. Haven't had one in years. And it wasn't that bad, but he was there, at a family gathering, and the air was hot and damp with summer, the lighting was bad, everything was shadowy and uncertain, and I could see him, sitting there in a recliner. It may have been the 80s, I felt young. He was wearing a ringer shirt; red around the collar and sleeves.

I wondered why he was there, and why no one was doing anything about it.

So I slunk around, afraid to be seen by him, afraid to engage with anyone because I didn't want to upset anybody.

I don't remember if the dream would have been before or after I woke at 5 a.m., panicking a bit and fretting over the fact that I've not heard a word from Chris's sister, my friend of nearly nine years, despite a couple of emails and two texts, in the three weeks since I wrote the first email.

But it seems to work either way. In general, I'm feeling pretty impotent. She avoids conflict (though I'm not even sure what the conflict would be here, so that compounds my impotence), and I've done as much as I should without being pushy.

I'm a doer and a planner. I like to take an active role. There's nothing to be done, and nothing to plan for but two vacations that seem altogether too far off. A month away. I'm too sad to do things at home so I just sit on the couch. I've lost momentum, I am mostly coping with loss, doping myself with Friday Night Lights and Downton Abbey and numbing movies because there isn't the energy in my limbs to do anything else.

I should clean out my juicer. Take out the garbage. But today is not a day where those things will get done. It's taken about all I've got to convince myself to sit down for a bit and start a painting, which I'm all ready for, the tools are in front of me...

So, paint.

Ego strength, and more on being exhausting...

I think of the people I know that I think are exhausting, and what, if anything, that means in relation to how I might be being perceived. There are parallels, but there are differences. Namely that anyone who has ever called me "exhausting" never really goes away.

Of the people I've considered truly exhausting, who are two women I was close to, I walked away from those friendships and absolutely did not look back. When we meet in social situations, we treat one another as if we'd never been close, with a compulsory civility.

Both of these women glommed onto me and wanted to spend tons of time with me. One didn't like driving home after drinking, so she'd sleep in my bed. Both were intense, emotional, but emotionally stunted women. One of them was in a long term relationship with a good friend of mine, and the joke with them was that it wasn't a date until she was crying about something.

Both of them wrote me handwritten, multi-paged letters, which they sent through the mail, after a perceived infraction. Typically, this was me calling them out on a negative behavior that made their social interactions difficult for them. One was so thin-skinned, aka the one with the aforementioned relationship and its constant crying, conversations had to be kid-glovved at all times. It was tedious, and exhausting, and few of us around her dealt with it well, when it was understood that the conversation had to be steered toward what was going to not upset her. The other was a profoundly weird girl that no one ever understood, but that could also be part of her charm. Sometimes, it just happened that something one of us did offended her. Very, very deeply. I'd dealt with her, on two occasions, having a devaluation episode with someone I considered closer to me than she was to me, so she put me in a position where she expected me to side with her, and not them. In both instances, her thought process was so starkly black and white, there was no way to reason with her. These people, both male friends of mine, were "evil."

Both, despite their flaws, were a lot of fun to be around, when they wanted to be having fun. They were incredibly smart, witty, funny women.

In any case, at some point, the hand-written letters arrived. The close friendships with these women happened a couple of years apart, 2006 and 2008. The former continued to write me letters, which I stopped reading, and then she finally sent me an absolutely horrible, scathing email in 2007 which I received just minutes after finding out one of the most wonderful, kind-hearted women I've known had died of a heroin overdose. Those two things made for some bad sleep the next two weeks... When I see her now, we don't act like we were ever close, but because she is a very funny person and we have that rapport with one another, we have let bygones be just that.

The latter's letter, in 2008, was meant to be a farewell, and to her credit, it was. I have seen her socially a couple of times, but other than not meaningfully ignoring one another, we haven't conversed at all.

So. Pairing these experiences with something my therapist said last week, I'm going to make a leap here. My therapist mentioned the phrase "ego strength" when we were discussing how I am polarizing, and at around the three month mark, if someone has gotten close to me, it either passes by with no issues, or I "lose" the person for a while. Rarely forever, but that has happened too. Both of these women "broke it off" with me after about three months (though I had known them for several years prior to our spending a lot of time together, and we'd only been casual friends 'til that point). Usually, after about four to six months, the person who has "left" comes back in some way. Through tentative contact, or, sometimes we just completely resume the previous relationship, romantic or friendship. Typically, the relationship is solid the second time around and suffers none of the issues of the first go-round. I would hazard a guess that in the interim, both parties reflect and accept things about one another that they, at first, had trouble coping with.

It makes sense, putting the phrase "ego strength" into the equation that this is what happens. The people whom with there is no three-month bump are people who are quite aware of who they are as people, and, though they are certainly works in progress as I am, they are not daunted by someone with a strong personality challenging them, and often they wholly embrace it (as I do when I am met with the same). The ones who do balk and have a great deal of difficulty with me are generally in some state of flux, who are trying to help themselves and maybe don't know how or can't yet see that they do need to help themselves and feel as if they are not on steady ground in general. In short, my presence in their lives is unstable feeling and it threatens them.

I don't know how to change this, but it feels good to recognize it. I certainly don't want to continue this pattern, and wish to be a calming force to people who have not yet found their ego strength, but that will be something I have to continue parsing out.