Fail on the way to win

It is taking some adjustment to be in a happy, healthy relationship. Joey accepts me, unconditionally. He is patient and loving. With him, I am not pushy, or intense, and when he tells me he's eaten some horrible food covered in cheese and I chastise him, he tells me to push harder because he wants to be healthy--he's got myriad seasonal allergies and has a shit immune system and I'm trying to help him eat better, and he loves that I care and give him helpful suggestions of things he can eat that are healthier. With him, I haven't experienced any anxiousness at all, at any moment, aside from the anxiety and frustration I feel that he is so far away from me and there's not much to be done about it right now. It's been three and a half weeks since I last saw him, and my finances are currently in a shambles (it's the 7th and I have $0 toward rent, so rent plus other bills and debts I'm behind on total $2574.39, all due before August 5th. Normally, that would be totally doable, but my work has slowed to a crawl, and I'm transitioning into other work that so far is also proving to be a bust. It seemed like this new job would be something that would really open me up to getting squared financially and starting some savings and finally being on my way to buying a house, but it's been completely disappointing thus far. It is something that can potentially pick up, though, so I'm going to persevere. And quit the other job to devote more time to this.

So, the happiness and excitement I felt initially when I began this work has resolved itself as the image of a brick wall, again. The wall I've seen for the last year, the wall that says, "Sarah, you're almost 35, and you're a failure."

Today, I realized something important, though. I realized that having someone like Joey in my life does not make me a failure. I have had people love me, care for me, be patient with me, but not like this. He is a natural caretaker of the anxious and the neurotic. His actions are preemptive. I never react badly because there's nothing to react badly to. He curtails my usual fears by simply being himself. Instead of being frustrated that we haven't seen one another and that our next meeting is uncertain because I can't afford to get there (he's got a 9-5 M-F job, so coming to see me doesn't make much sense, especially since flying is several times more expensive than me traveling to him by bus), he just says that everything will be okay, that he'll be there any time I can get to him. He tells me he misses me every day, but his patience is contagious. It's okay, it's all okay. Three weeks may feel like a long time, but by October 1st, which is two months and three weeks away, I'll be living there, and I can see him all the time.

Yes, I'm moving to Louisville. I will be getting an inheritance of $5,000 from my grandma's estate, and it should arrive within the next month or so. I had really hoped I could piggyback another few thousand onto that and buy a house, but I will have to wait. It is what it is, and it is what I have to accept.

I am learning how to make sense of someone good. I am feeling my neural pathways reset. To stop craving extremes, and to accept that being with someone so even-keeled is going to mean being bored or not wholly stimulated all the time. I am going to have to learn to be easier going. And I am.

What's most noticeable to me is how I perceive the world around me now. I have always made excuses for bad behavior because I understand it. One of my first therapists always cautioned me against this behavior in myself, and while I took his advice to heart, I was never able to act on it. I find myself doing it now. There are so many things about Chris and our relationship that were destructive. From the first hours. Within the first 24 hours, we had gotten into two minor fights and he'd made me cry by being insensitive and rude. We had an intense connection, and we got on famously in so many ways, but looking back on that, that kind of constant intensity and tension, it frightens me a little. He is not a bad person, but that was not a good relationship. It pains me so much to say that, and to acknowledge it, and I find myself feeling angry with myself and at him. I know what I could have done to be better, but I also know he needs a lot of help to be better himself. I am also seeing how I have been an enabler to so many of my lovers and boyfriends and friends. Chris is a mean drunk. And he IS a drunk. I made excuses for him, when he told me he was an alcoholic, I told him that it wasn't true. But it is true. He doesn't get through more than a day or two without getting drunk. And he is rude, and unpredictable, and he blacks out when he drinks, and so much of our fighting happened in those situations, and yet I always encouraged us drinking a bottle of wine together, or him drinking when we were out. I, and Chris, and Lindsay, have been operating in the mindset of drinking = fun. But I'm finding out that's simply not true. I go out and don't drink or drink half the amount I used to, and I am still having a ton of fun. I'm just choosing much better people to have fun with, these days.

I may have curbed Drunk, Slutty Sarah a while ago, but Drunk Sarah remained. A friend is going through AA. She's really together and amazing now. I was an enabler to her as well, and I'm ashamed. She is far more fun now than she ever was drunk, but yet I always encouraged her drinking, even though I knew she didn't know when to stop.

Things are changing. It's so good. Every day is still a challenge, but I am surrounded by the love and support of my family and friends and a man with a tremendous heart. I'll be a winner yet, by gum!

Baby Steps

I'm trying not to over analyze, let things happen. Try some thought processes I've learned in therapy, and avoid other behaviors that have found me feeling and reacting too intensely in the past.

Yesterday, Joey and I made plans to meet in Chicago next weekend, to stay with friends of mine in their lovely new house, where we'll have our own room. Feeling a little panicky after we talked about it, I told him I needed him to come into this not really expecting anything, that I have to approach things conservatively. I'm not freaking out, I'm just feeling cautious about it. Sex tends to be how I get to know people. It's how I see them vulnerable, it's where I gather and sort the most data, in the spreadsheet that makes up the whole of who they are.

That's another thing we talked about in therapy, that I'm very logical and rational and I want hard information, but yet I am also incredibly emotional. These things, obviously, fight against one another.

Mostly, I don't want to feel pressured. I want to see him, and feel comfortable with him and ease into spending time with him.

It always amuses me how problems in my previous relationship for the other person become something I'm suddenly feeling myself or hyper aware of in the next relationship. I do work really hard to see things from other peoples' perspectives. It's just not always an instantaneous thing. Sometimes, years later, something will happen, and suddenly I'll understand everything that someone was upset with me for or criticized me about. It's like hearing a song you've known all your life and suddenly hearing the lyrics clearly, whereas before, you just mumbled along. Or thought the words were something else entirely.

I observed a lot of these things while with my family while my grandma was dying. Certain things my mom's side of the family does that I had had an inkling of an understanding of, that I now "get."

For instance, arriving at the hospital, to see my grandma, my mom, sister, father and I sat around her bed, talking to her. I wrote about this before, we tried to get her to eat. She did, some. Not enough, but some.

Then, my uncle and aunt came in and we left. When we all were back at the house, one by one, my mother and her brothers voiced some way in which they were special. "We got her to eat!" "Oh, she always takes my calls, no matter how tired she is." "She got really emotional while we were there." It's never said with a tone of celebration, it's all subtle, passive-aggressive one upsmanship. And it's gross. And I see how I do that in my day to day life, trying to prove that MY contribution to a person's life is somehow more valuable, and that ultimately, they are successful or somehow achieved something because of me.

And it's not quite as gross as that, because it does come from a place of caring. Mostly, I think it's part of the abandonment issue schematic; I have to prove why I'm valuable to you so you can't leave me because you'll realize you can't do this without me. With my mom and her brothers, it's a little more sinister.

In my life, it's also something that drives people from me. I see that now. I am not responsible for them, or their success, any more than they would be responsible for mine.

Baby steps, in any case, with Joey. LOL. Joey. Baby. Joey, baby kangaroo. It's bad enough that he's 26, does he need to have a child's name, too!? Oy.

Baby steps. I suppose my biggest fear is this will be something that fizzles fast for me, that it will function as rebound, and I will hurt him. I don't want to keep him at arm's length, I don't want to move too fast, and I don't want to write checks I can't cash. There's a happy medium in there, and I think we're doing pretty well in that frame.

11 Hours, 4 Cats

So much for celibacy.

I went to Louisville. Steve and I had a fun drive down, we are great traveling companions. We arrived at Joey's, I produced the bottle of Malört I'd asked Steve to acquire (a rough-tasting, wormwood based liquor found only in Chi-Town) for Joey, and we immediately did a shot and then sat down to play three rousing games of Scrabble. Joey kicked our asses every time.

Steve and I retired to Joey's room, where I'd take Joey's bed, Steve the futon. I went back downstairs to grab my water, and in one easy movement, went from hugging Joey goodnight, to kissing him.

It was a decent kiss. Mostly, it made me feel safe.

I went to bed.

The next day, the presence of Steve meant Joey and I stole touches on the sly, a squeeze here, a kiss on the forehead there. Pheromone-wise, all of the right things were happening. Again, I felt safe. A glance from across the room made my heart flutter. I felt defensive, I'd gone there with the intention of distance, but he is sweet, earnest and kind. Defenses dissolved. He can't hurt me. When I first reached out to him the next day, it was especially nice, he seemed to breathe more easily knowing the kiss the night before wasn't because we had been drinking.

His Morrissey night was fun. We spent the night at the bar as he DJ'd, and mostly, it inspired a lot of conversation between Steve and I about relationships. The fact that masculinity has been bred out of men almost everywhere in the US. That women like me struggle to find someone dominant enough to handle us on a day to day basis, who understand what it means to be dominant enough to subjugate us sexually in the bedroom without being crass and disrespectful, and yet respect us fully all of the time. Instead, we settle for men who can fuck us, who are assholes, who are misogynists, because the biological need for fulfilling our sexual appetite is stronger than the biological need for fulfilling our need to be taken care of. Ultimately, we can take care of ourselves, even if that's really not what we want. What we can't do is bend ourselves over in front of a window at three in the morning with a storm raging outside and get fucked from behind while rain water soaks us and the floor, and then half way through get picked up like you weigh nothing and thrown on the bed to get fucked some more. So we sacrifice, and we take men home who can do that, who treat us like shit otherwise. Because men who were raised well in this day and age can't navigate their desire to dominate, or that desire has been neutered. Andy was a walking Women's Studies/lame feminist girlfriend disaster. He didn't even look at porn because an ex had convinced him it was a really awful, demeaning thing. Good christ. A little tweaking, and he was able to let a little of his manhood out, but there was always a hesitancy. Not so with dudes who never got that education... I like to think an upcoming generation of men will be inspired by Don Draper of Mad Men to be both gentlemanly and viscerally masculine, but who knows how long the damage of feminist extremes will prevail.

Anyway. In the midst of these conversations with Steve, as I sipped a whiskey water that seemed to be doing nothing for me, Joey would look at me as he DJ'd, I'd be singing along, as he'd be singing along. It clearly made him happy. It made me happy too. Mirroring. Connection.

Morrissey happened to me when I was 17. I'd say I was mostly through that phase by 23. But it was a strong obsession. Morrissey (namely the Smiths), Depeche Mode, and the Cure dominated my life for the bulk of those years, with a two-year dalliance with Japanese rock like Luna Sea and L'arc~en~Ciel in there in the middle. Revisiting this with someone so deeply into it is charmingly nostalgic. His interest, while an obsession, is only one color of his musical palette, thankfully. He appreciates music at the same level as I do. We have already had some really great conversations about music, and it's something that's very important to me. A lot of people I know are into music. Really into music. But there's a special level where it enters definite nerdery, a field I've been playing on my whole life. Encyclopedic knowledge, and an expansive openness to new things. I don't get to spend much time with people like that, like me, except peripherally. Andy was very into music, but also closed-minded and judgmental about what makes something good. Chris loves music passionately, but his interest is more sponge-like; he invests himself in music that comes to him, is around him. He doesn't seek things out, he doesn't go to shows. Joey is like me. He is invested in the scene in Louisville, and writes a popular Louisville music blog with some friends.

After Moz night wrapped up, we returned to Joey's. Attempted another game of Scrabble, but I was beat. I went upstairs and Joey was close behind, to grab his pjs and brush his teeth. Steve stayed downstairs, and I knew he had all his things with him. We'd talked earlier in the evening that it was possible I might like to sleep next to Joey. I figured Steve was smart enough to figure this would happen without further discussion.

Joey and I kissed, as he held his shorts in hand, clearly prepared to head downstairs, assuming nothing. I fidgeted on the bed, looking at my lap, unable to look him in the eye. He continued to lean in to kiss me. Eventually, I looked up at him, and I said that it would be nice to sleep next to him, but I didn't think I could handle any more than that. He assured me that arrangement was more than acceptable, and we each went to brush our teeth.

After kissing a while, he was touching my back, and it tickled. I asked him to touch harder. Instead, he squeezed me really hard, seemingly everywhere at once, with his entire body, and I felt myself sigh into it, I allowed myself to just be there with him, and I felt the fear bubble burst.

And thus, more than kissing began.

I am trying to figure out where I stand here. Being with him helped to snip the last tethers of strong emotion I was tending the knots on for Chris. I was able to unblock Chris on fb yesterday, and don't have any urge to go spelunking his page as a result (I haven't looked at it at all, in fact). It feels like a big step. Seeing a new photo on Lindsay's Instagram of him doesn't make my heart shoot up into my throat. Today, I received the package of Kickstarter prezzies from Chris's comic project and didn't dissolve into a puddle of tears, as I know I would have a week ago. Instead, I just felt an ease, and pride. He is so talented, and I want him to succeed. He is his own worst enemy on that front, and his business sense is myopic at best, so I fear for him. But, for the first time, I don't feel like any of that is something I should have my hands in. Those tethers are gone. I am sure if I saw him, if he knocked on my door right now, it would be a terrifically conflicting battery of emotions, and I feel pretty sure love would be amongst them, but there's a joy in knowing that isn't going to happen.

I can just focus on Joey now. There's nothing I can do about Chris.

So, another chapter in my love life begins, with another long-distance entanglement. My therapist is kind of excited, the pleasant weirdo. He likes that Joey is a kind, easy-going guy, because he feels like I can focus on him without getting into intense emotion territory and can use some of the lessons and information I've gathered since we started therapy in January to make this involvement function better than others have in the past. But, there are still the giant issues of distance in play, albeit marginally less insane, as Louisville IS a day trip away, not two, by bus or car, which is about 4,000% less a logistical and financial nightmare. I can easily bus to Chicago, spend the night with friends, and then bus the rest of the way without putting myself out in any way. Plus, his sister is in Chicago, and she goes there often, so we can get to spend more time together and bus down too.

Joey, too, is badly allergic to cats. So he can't come stay with me. 11 hours. 4 cats.

I get now something that both Chris and Thor struggled with. I looked at our relationships and our distance as something we simply had to accept, and treat accordingly, but they complained about not being able to get to know me face to face. To go on proper dates. That to see one another basically meant living with one another for a week at a time, when we weren't ready for that level of interaction. I honestly didn't think much of it. I tend to accept circumstances that cannot be changed. Except now. Now I'm pissed and I'm frustrated that this lovely person is 11 hours away from me (11 hours driving like a bat out of hell, that is), that I can't bike over to his place and go to a bbq with him after we go out to his favorite coffee shop and then head back to my place for the night. That it's an all or nothing contact situation.

At the very least, I feel rational and in control here. I think because when I met Joey, I was still pretty thick in heartache and thus didn't entertain the baby crush I immediately had, and we had a month and a half to let a connection brew long distance, and become friends, that there's nothing to make me get super heady about this. I worry this also means I may not develop stronger feelings for him, but something tells me this is a curious new frontier for me. My involvements grow healthier with each new one, and the intensity I normally feel is not particularly healthy.

I'll take it as it comes, I guess. And I guess this means planning another trip to Louisville soon.

The stuff that is happening right now is stuff that's pretty good

Ever since I had the stomach flu three weeks ago, things have been on an uptick. There's just something about sitting on the can, voiding both one's bowels uncontrollably while simultaneously vomiting into the bathroom trash receptacle to really, I don't know, purge all the badness from one's person, both literally and metaphorically.

There was even a moment we could call religious, where, realizing I had but a moment to get back to bed before I was going to pass the fuck out, I wound up flopping, just barely, onto said bed, only to wake up I don't know how much later, face down in my blankets, legs half off and nearly touching the floor. Even in my sickly torpor, I laughed at the situation I was in, and crawled up to my pillows to fall back asleep. Three hours of this, about every twenty minutes to half an hour, and the worst of it was over, but it would be four days before applesauce, saltines, Sprite and bananas weren't 90% of my diet. I tried ravioli on the third day, it was a mistake.

I feel good. The weather seems to be, as of yesterday, in the mood to be more of a summery spring than a wintery one, and as can be expected, it's done wonders for the moods of everyone. I'm wearing a flimsy tank top today. I have a cardigan in my bag, but I don't need it. Praise Jesus.

I am continuing therapy, even though I am now feeling stable and content and like I can tackle shit without the bolstering effect of someone impartial to talk to. Mostly because, despite this stability, the problems are still there, in theory; I need to learn how to be better in a relationship. Less anxious. Less tense. Less nitpicky. And I need to learn that keeping some things to myself, in terms of the intensity of my feelings, can be kept to myself, for weeks, even months at a time, without it being "lying." This is the point we covered last session, and when my therapist laughed at me, I laughed too, and quite deflated in my chair. It's the simple realizations that cover the most ground, and it kind of floors me every time. Not being forthcoming about EVERY thing that I think doesn't mean I'm lying to someone. Bah.

This came about after I told my therapist about a friend who went on a date with a fellow she'd liked form afar for some time. Their date went very well, and basically from that moment, she was like, "He's the one, I'm done," but she didn't say that, for, I think, FOUR MONTHS. And now they're married. Had she said it in the first week, or first month, like I do, he probably would have freaked and ran. But she didn't. And she wasn't lying to him, she was smart, she kept it to herself, let him catch up to her. Why can't I do that? It's one of the many little things I do to sabotage my relationships. Every time. We came up with the obvious metaphor of letting things stew for the other person, letting them feel out the full flavors of me and the relationship before I dump the intensity of my feelings on them. DUH, really, Sarah. And in the meantime, I might find that my feelings are infatuation, or that I don't really like them all that much. But the way I do things, I dump out all that's in my head and expect the other party to be comfortable with that, and also put myself in a position to be overwhelmingly attached to them because of the word LOVE. But they never catch up, not to the level that I found from the beginning. Other women are smart. I need to be like them. A little mystery, girl.

In other news, celibacy and emotional distance are still the name of the game. I had a very handsome, charming, 6'5" college football coach hitting on me in a very adult and gentlemanly way at a literary event last week, but while the first meeting was purely charming, and mildly piqued my interest, when I ran into him at another lit event this weekend, it was determined that he has crazy eyes. Also, dad jeans. Dad jeans, unfortunately, are unforgivable at this stage in my life. I am too old to be teaching a man how to dress. Which is good, because the night I'd met him, and gave him my number after he asked, I woke up at 4 a.m. in a full blown panic and could only get to sleep after I convinced myself he'd never call. He did text the next day to say, adult and gentleman like, that it was a pleasure to have met me. And when I ran into him Saturday, something was off. His charm was now plasticine, his eyes a bit shifty. None of us who had borne witness to the charm four days prior could pinpoint what had changed, but the change was there, nonetheless. I am relieved. I am not ready to date, or even think about it, as is evidenced by my 4 a.m. wakeup in fucking heart pounding fear mode.

But I do have a pleasant, harmless crush that helps me pass the time. We play Words With Friends games and chat about Morrissey. He is too young, too slight of build, and too much the brother of a friend (and too much, again, living in another city), but it is so safe, I can use it as an experiment, and have been. Not a whisper of seal has been broken on the crush. Our talk is very vaguely flirtatious, but no admission of any attraction or interest has been broached in the least. I've never done this before. It's been a month, and I am proud. In fact, I sincerely doubt, when I see him again (given he lives in the city I'd like to relocate to in the fall), that I'll allow it to become anything else. Too young, too slight, too brother. I see those red flags, y'all, and they are not worth the trouble it would be to put another notch in my bedpost. Land sakes, might I wind up with a friend that I find attractive, who finds me attractive, that I never engage in physical activity with?

The mind reels.

Anxiety, the fickle cunt.

Yesterday was good, anxiety wise. I had what I have long called a "creamy" feeling all day, in that my brain chemicals were easy, mellow, I had the beginnings of a smile on my face all day (despite being hungover and physically tired from having walked 8 miles and danced two hours the day before), and things like listening to sad songs just made me wistful, not upset in any way. Creamy has always been what I call this because it's like the feeling of sour cream with something spicy; the spicy is there, still, but the milky kindness of the sour cream tempers it, soothes it, renders the potential ass-kicking of the spicy inert. It feels so very, very nice. Days like that, in the midst of a tumultuous time, are rare, and I treasure every moment. I relish the softness of my heart's beating, the ease in my belly, the lack of racing thoughts in my brain. I walk gently through the day and I may even turn a pirouette or two in the kitchen in the midst of cooking or washing dishes.

Today, I've awakened with a different feeling, and it's just as simple as that. A different feeling. It's nothing I've done, nothing anyone else has done, and there's little to be done to effectively change it but to be aware and vigilant about not letting it get worse. Today, I can tell I shouldn't have too much caffeine (just enough to stave off the headache from withdrawal), and that it's going to be a day of intermittent little pep talks to not let the heart start racing, or get into bad thinking, and that I'll have to listen to bouncy music to ensure my mood doesn't crash. I'm not upset in any way, I'm actually quite fine. It's a purely physical sensation. My heart is primed for battle. My limbs feel slightly tingly. To say I'm "on edge" would make the feeling sound altogether too aggressive, but it's definitely the feeling of waiting for something to happen. Something baaaaaad. Is this dread? It may be best defined as existential dread. hm. Funny, I'd not considered that before.

And, on days like this, it's likely nothing will happen. It's easy, when I feel this way, to feel like somehow I knew it was going to be a sucky day if something shitty happens, but it really is more so that because of the chemicals my brain is pumping, unfairly, out to me, my reactions are going to be shittier, thereby casting a pall of shit over it all should something go awry. Yesterday, I could have taken things in stride without much effort. Today, it will be a consortium of minutiae gathering to ensure that IF something that could upset me happens, that I react as calmly as I would have yesterday.

It's fucking hard to deal with chronic anxiety. Even on a good day, even on a great day, when I'm calm as fuck and I don't feel a whit of heart thumping panic on the horizon, it's still something I've learned to to do constant checks for a hint of, because things could flip flop at any time. On one hand, it does make me relish, as I did yesterday, each moment where things are easy. On the other, it means that not a minute goes by that I'm not making sure things are still okay.

I work hard on this. All the time. I've gotten myself to a point where, though the anxiety is still ever present, I can fairly easily react as if the anxiety isn't there. It might take me a few moments to pause, assess, and find the right words, but I have learned to be measured instead of impulsive, for the most part. I spoke to my therapist the other day about how hard I work on diplomatic responses to situations I feel emotionally about. He asked for an example, and I gave him the most recent one I could think of, which was my response to a male friend I've shared an emotional, romantic relationship with the past year, who is now single and pursuing one of my best friends. When I confronted him about this, he neither denied nor confirmed his interest in her by saying, "Would you be mad if I had a crush on her?" I didn't have an immediate, non-emotional answer (for the record, the emotional answer would have been, "Fuck you, of course I would be"), so I took a few moments, discussed things with my roommate, and responded, "I think, given our history, that that would be an inappropriate course of action." When I said this, my therapist near to guffawed. He said it sounded like something Kissinger would have said, a reference I don't understand as I haven't much knowledge of the man, but my therapist went on to say, still laughing, that that was, indeed, a terrifically diplomatic way of saying what I mean.

Five years ago, such a response would have been almost impossible for me. Three years ago, I would have put on my Fuckit™boots and chosen the emotional answer 75% of the time. Now, unless I'm just completely ready to throw down with someone, emotional answers be damned, I will almost always choose the measured, diplomatic response. In some ways, it makes me feel trapped inside myself, but that's the burden I've got to bear to be functional. Daily, exhausting work, dealing with a mental illness.

Writing this has eased the heart a bit, and with some jaunty tunes and a proper stove scrubbing, I may find this day is not entirely lost to brain management. Alrighty then. To the kitchen I go.

In Love

I fall in love easily, but I also stay in love for a long time, typically well after the relationship is over. If I make a decision like that about someone, it's because it's true and it stays true. It took me over six years to move on from my first love, Jared, who I'd only been with for a month and a half (with periodic make out sessions every couple of years after). The end of love came abruptly, a thought, out of nowhere, when I woke up one morning in Paris in 2001.

"His kisses are too soft."

And that was it. If I don't enjoy kissing you, it doesn't make much sense to be in love with you.

That realization won't ever come toward Chris. His kisses were exactly what twenty years of kissing has taught me is perfection. And we had a perfect rhythm from the first instant.

My high school "Psychology" teacher (in quotes because she was mostly there as volleyball coach) once said, "You can't be in love with more than one person at a time." For the longest time, I regurgitated that pabulum as if it were gospel. It's been years since I thought that were true, and yesterday, as I sat at the intersection of Hennepin and Franklin after my therapy session, thinking about love and my longing for a "true," lasting love, I considered, again, that statement.

Love, being a chemical reaction to a battery of things, pheromone, timing, proximity, and hundreds of other things that you just know you "like" or "love" about someone, it makes not one iota of flipping sense that you can only be "in love" with one person at a time.

I say this because there are people I know I will always be in love with, on some level. It's not sexual, though it is romantic, in a way, and comes from a place of bonding that just can't be broken. 

My therapist asked me why I love Chris, when he's done several things that are a bit fucked up and could be grounds for moving on. After thinking about it, I made this statement:

"When Chris is trying, when he's in it, he's everything I want, he's the one for me. But he isn't trying, he doesn't want to try, he's 'done,' so he's not the one for me."

It's just a matter of reconciling the disconnect between the two versions of Chris. He is ugly and immature in his darkness, anger and distance. But when he is focused and in it, he is, as I've always told him, a magickal fucking unicorn.

Time will tell how my feelings play out, and whether he and I will ever reconnect on any level, but at this moment, I just need to take everything day by day and not let my fears or hurt dictate my behavior. Right now, at least, it's not time to let go of being in love.

On Patience, a followup

The friend I mentioned the other day in the blog titled On Patience made my night last night, just before I went to sleep. I'd written him earlier in the evening and said I was thinking about him (when a friend or loved one is clearly troubled, I tend to think of them all the time, like a sort of meditative white noise running in the background, and oft foreground, of my thoughts). He responded later and thanked me. I avoided mentioning therapy, and we talked a bit about how he's doing, and he stated that we must get together in the next few days, as he really needs me right now.

I'm certainly not pleased that he's in enough pain to need my friendship and counsel for something so serious, but I am fucking elated that I was able to turn this touchy situation around and find him still confiding in me.

Lesson: Change a behavior known to cause less than perfect results, possibly get ideal results the next opportunity to exhibit said behavior by avoiding said behavior!

I'mma turn these stodgy, OCD-reliant neural pathways of mine into sleek, happy pussycats, by gum.

On Patience

I am extraordinarily patient.

With myself.

With everyone else, I assume they're not self-aware enough or reliable enough to get the thing that "needs" doing done and I "need" to incessantly remind them of this.

I recognized this some time ago, but changing that behavior, which is precisely as grotesque as that sentence makes it sound, is proving to be very difficult.

One, I've got some fairly solid OCD behaviors. This means that, by and large, if I think it, I say it. I have gotten increasingly better at using mindfulness to think about the consequences of what I say, but I can't win every time. Worse, I get something in my head that "needs" to be accomplished, and I grow increasingly angry and disappointed in a person for not doing that thing within the timeframe I feel is appropriate.

Yet, with myself, I know that I will eventually get anything that should be done done, eventually. I believe in myself. If I don't feel like doing the dishes one minute, I know that by the end of the day, I will want to, and I will enjoy doing it. I don't push myself. I don't view it as procrastination, I see it more as waiting for the planets to align to make the experience as fulfilling as possible. If I force myself to do something, to finish an art project before the inspiration is there, to clean the apartment when I'd rather be watching Friday Night Lights on Netflix, it makes me feel leaden and it winds up taking five times as long, and when it's done, there's no sense of pride or accomplishment.

And so, I've learned that things'll happen when they're ready to, and I leave it at that. It has done wonders for my stress levels; I used to fret, lie awake at night, blah blah blah stress behaviors about every niggly thing that "needed" to be done that I wasn't getting done within the timeframe I thought was appropriate.

Why can't I have this laid back attitude with the people I love?

I don't fucking know, and it frustrates me enormously. I see it driving people away from me, I see it hardening people to me when I push, and yet I can't just sit back and let things take their course. And don't get me wrong, it always comes from a place of love, it just doesn't feel like love to the people I'm pushing.

A recent example that crushed my heart a little the other day; a friend is going through a very rough time. His mother committed suicide not too long ago, and he is, as he should be, having a lot of trouble with it. I suggested he see a therapist at the place I go to. He said that was a very good idea, that he'd do it, just not this week as he was busy. The next time we talked, I asked him if he'd called the place yet. He hadn't, and gave an excuse. I implored him to do it, please. He said he would. The other day, he initiated a conversation and when I asked him how he was doing, he said, "I'd tell you, but every time I do, you harp on me to call NIP."

"Fuck," I thought. "There you go again, Sarah."

And my mind scrambles, trying to figure out a way to assure him I wouldn't do that this time, and I settle on saying, "Well, what are you waiting for?"

It's a chat conversation on Facebook, so when he responds, "Goodnight. xoxo" I know I've just pushed him away from speaking openly to me about how he's actually feeling. He's a touchy man to begin with, so we've had several instances where I've discovered things are taboo (he gets super weird about me telling him anything about someone I'm dating, for instance). But in this situation, I want to be the paragon of empathy, and I'm failing. Now, I am fairly sure, he won't talk to me about how he's doing, thereby isolating him from someone who cares deeply about his welfare.

How do I learn to let people do things on their own time while also offering the advice they seek from me, without being pushy or too invested in their success and progress in life?

The question may very well be a koan.

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.

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...

Breakups & Therapy

It's been almost two years since I've written anything here, but I need some covert(ish) writing therapy.

And, just plain therapy.

I started it up again, three weeks ago. After my now ex boyfriend told me he thought I needed it, with that condescending, needly-voiced tone that speaks of frustration and, unfortunately, projection. I'd told him he needed to keep seeing his therapist, even though he can't afford it, so that's what he came back at me with.

And we're both right. We both need therapy. We're two fucking assholes in our mid-30s who, despite having quite possibly the best relationship either of us had known, just fucked it up. Within three months.

I'm learning things, already, in therapy. Two notable things came out of my session on Friday; I have trouble with grey areas, and I'm always right.

The latter is a bigger ball of kittens than I can process right now, but the former thing, that's pretty simple to acknowledge. The problem is executing a better way of dealing with the grey areas.

And what do I mean by grey areas? Well, that it's very difficult for me to wrap my head around statements, in a relationship, like, "I need space," or dealing with the concept of someone moving, emotionally, at a different pace than me. Because, I think, of my chronic anxiety, I've maladapted to an expectation of timeframes and status reports, asking, in general, for people to give me concrete quantities of time so that I can process what I'm dealing with. I can't expect people to know how much space/time they need. I can't expect people to process their emotions and come to a conclusion as quickly as I can.

Like a lot of things in therapy that end up being the most helpful, these two things are simple things to see in my day to day life. Unfortunately, getting better at handling them is not going to be the easiest thing when I've got no relationship to work with, and my therapist agrees. But, he is determined to help me, and he is kind and he is not afraid to tell me the reality of things.

This is gonna be a several parter, I think, so I'll end this one here.

Dream in which my ex introduces me to his girlfriend, "Randy".

It's narcissistic to be so awed by my own dreams, but I am. Particularly when they're so linearly constructed, so basic, so realistic, peppered with true behaviour (and internal monologue) from myself and others, by appearances of folks I'd be likely to see in such a scenario. It is genuinely hard for me, when I have dreams like this, which have almost no function of "dream" contained within them, to not believe I am privvy to some glimpse into an alternate reality.

I had one of these dreams last night, and I feel like something's been corrected in the waking by it, because of this real, basic quality it has. Namely, that Andy wanted me to meet his new girlfriend, in order to reduce tensions between he and I, and to aid me in facillitating less internal drama in regard to him. The logic: I'll meet her, like her, see that he's happy with her, and it will help me move on. And, if he were to do such a thing, that is exactly what would happen--the only major problem being that both of us are far too neurotic for it to happen (why make a situation easier when you can make it complicaaaaated?). Secrecy and distance only serve to make me feel I'm being lied to or treated like persona non grata. I thrive on inclusion, and while I understand it is not always, or even frequently possible, given that people do want to keep things for themselves, it does tend to grease the wheels quite a lot in my process of working through any situation which is of high emotional content.

In any case, the dream went thusly:

Andy picked me up, there was another girl in tow, a friend of the girlfriend (clever, no? Now I'm not only not alone with Andy, but one of her friends is there, so I can't even ask questions about her or show emotion toward him). Andy was wearing the shirt I first saw him in, and the shorts I last saw him in (clever, too, you silly brain). We drove through a college campus/New England-y looking area, where we stopped to pick her up; at this point I asked Andy what her name was, and he mumbled, or there was too much noise from the radio, so I barely got it, "Randy? Like 'I like to fuck?'" and he looked at me, disapprovingly, for my crassness; "You'll note that there IS someone new in the car." And there she was, and suddenly, I was sitting next to her in the back seat, and her friend was in the front (the one dream function that took place). Randy. She was like a plain-pretty version of Mila Kunis (Andy is fond of plain-pretty), long dark hair, olive complected, all slight of build, long-limbed, dainty, but with an obvious internal strength, and...a sweetness. She smiled, we shook hands, and I mentioned that she looked familiar; she said something about how that was possible, though she'd been out of town for the past three months off in Europe studying for her graduate degree (of course! My god, how cunning my brain is to provide the details for all the things which would be exactly what Andy craves in a woman; in a woman who is not me--though the only detail I do know is that he thinks she's "sweet"; her physical looks, her name, what she does, who she is, all unknown).

We drove to a large, old stone building, where we were to enjoy various presentations on various things--it was some kind of multi-roomed conference on the campus of this university that both Andy and Randy were attending, which was of interest to all of us, where we'd wander at our leisure and listen to important people tell us important things about important topics, all within this large building, built somewhere in the late 19th century, with marble floors and long, echoing hallways. We split up relatively quickly, and I gathered info on the things of interest to me, but soon hours had passed and I was ready to reconvene with the group. I began to search for them, hoping to not come upon Andy and Randy having some sweet, intimate moment, seeing in my mind's eye how they'd look in an embrace. I eventually wound up in a student lounge (how gorgeous these old buildings are, with student lounges filled with large leather couches and velvet drapes over their floor to ceiling windows) where a girl I've known for years sat with a computer on her lap (she's one of a set of twins, and as always when coming across her, I looked for what makes her Lindsey and separates her from her sister, Taryn). I approached her, and she gave me a soft high five; I sat next to her and asked what she was up to, "Just email," she said, and closed the laptop to pay attention to me. There were other girls on the couch, and I noticed that Taryn sat at the opposite end; we acknowledged one another, and I moved to sit in a more central location on the couch. "Why are you here?" Lindsey asked, an obvious question, since we were not in Minneapolis (and yet why they were there seemed clear, though I know they're not anywhere but Minneapolis). I told them, and then lowered my head and voice a bit to convey the greater reason; to meet the girlfriend of the man I want to marry. An audible sigh/gasp came from the girls around me, and remarks of pity began to be made.

"No, no, it's okay," I said. "She seems really sweet."

I wandered back out into the hallway after a bit, and looked out the window (at a building, which I knew housed a woman on the third floor that I'd assisted moving a few months earlier). The trees were bare of leaves, and it was chilly, not cold, and there was no snow on the ground. I would guess it was November. I heard someone behind me; I turned, it was Andy, leaning against the wall. He looked crestfallen, and he was alone.

Something, I understood, had happened between he and Randy.

And that was where the dream ended.

See how banal that is? It definitely serves a purpose for me, because even though it didn't happen in any reality I know of, the effect is somewhat like if it had. Of course, if I ever do meet the girlfriend, it will be a total mindfuck because she almost certainly will be nothing like "Randy".

Therapy, it turns out, is therapeutic.

This morning I was feeling solidly fucked up. 30 Rock viewing did not help me, as even the slightest similarity to my current situation is liable to give me false hope which is subsequently dashed by the vagaries and whims of television writing, which then causes some kind of fissure in any semblance of rational thought I have put together for myself, made of tenuous, fragile bonds.

It doesn't help, either, that practically everything is somehow related to Andy. He'd become so completely, comfortably enmeshed in my life so quickly, and then just as quickly, completely ripped from it. It's been almost a month now. A whole, sad, month.

And so, I walked to therapy today, which I've been excited about for the past few days, which, having been in and out of therapy for the last 20 years, I am fully aware of how beneficial a session can be, but I cried as I walked, somehow still able to be sad despite the Lady GaGa thumping in my ears.

And I cried in my session, with a perfect stranger. Three times. I saw my previous therapist, Monica, for about four months and didn't cry once. The eyes welled up, but no actual loss of saline was made. Monica pointed out numerous times that I seemed to be detached from the tales and problems in my life, that I could talk about very emotional situations and express no emotion about them at all. Which was curious, since I was genuinely feeling emotion, and I wasn't the least bit uncomfortable with her; I was, somehow, detached, though. But not today! No, the waterworks flowed with ease. I went from feeling borderline hysterical, considering rushing over to Andy's today so I could see him, to feeling quite calm and centered, considering.

I like this new girl. She seems to be of similar demeanor to Monica, but Katie is a touch younger, prettier, and she's got a sense of humour. Monica wasn't a wet blanket, but she was also not the sort of gal that I'd ever go out and have a glass of wine with. Which was what I liked about her. She was completely non-judgemental, honest, even blunt with me. Katie's a bit more laid back. She dropped an F-bomb at one point, which I respected. And she laughed at my jokes.

I told her how I'd never cried with Monica, and how Monica had pointed out my detachment. I feel it's Andy that's changed this. I became better with Andy. The best version of myself. I need to get back to that, without Andy. And I think I can. Deciding against Drunk, Slutty Sarah, against casual smooches, against heavy drinking at all, that's a huge step. As is the realisation that I need to begin putting myself in the position to be ready for marriage and a child. I'm two, three years away from that, and that's if I pull it together as of yesterday and make dramatic life changes. Maybe Andy doesn't fit into this plan in the greater sense, but he's certainly been the catalyst for it.

Why do my hands smell like meat?