I’ll be honest: it’s been a hell of a week.
This breakup with Bumblebee has been foundationally shattering. Over the course of a few days, my plans and my beliefs about my life just shifted. Grad school and work and boys are still ongoing. I’m still getting ready for an upcoming surgery to repair a blasted Achilles’ tendon that has bothered me all year.
But I’ve also mourned. A lot. I haven’t slept consistently, and most days the thought of food makes me nauseated. I’ve seen 4:30 a.m. most mornings this week, eyeing the tear-blurred clock blearily.
I’d forgotten how hard this part is.
In reality, I begged him not to make me remember. From the very beginning, I laid out what I was afraid of and why. More from self-awareness than from self-fulfilling prophecy, I knew the depths of despair I was likely to fathom if another man let me down in those ways.
Alas, here I am.
My therapist praised me for having been truthful and honest and open from the beginning, for giving him the literal playbook to prevent my being hurt. Don’t do this to me. For giving him the opportunity to take the responsibility for his actions within my boundaries.
“But maybe most people can’t handle that,” she said. “Maybe most people not only can’t be themselves, but they also can’t handle you being yourself.”
Fuck. This is hardly the first time I’ve been faced with such musing, from someone else or from myself. I have a tendency to see straight into other people, especially emotionally avoidant men, call them out on their shit, and tap my foot impatiently while hoping they will step up and make the changes they need to make. I know how hard that can be. I’ve done it. I’m still doing it.
It took me a damn long time to realize I wasn’t going to be redeemed by anyone else. No other person can ever make up for the shit that has been done to me—or for the shit I have done to myself. That responsibility lies squarely with me.
But the redemption comes not from meeting someone who can not do the stupid shit that undermines my tenuously-reintegrating psyche. It comes from my not making the same choices, not having the same limited emotional responses to similar stimuli.
And this time, I did do it differently. It still wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t enough.
But I am a girl who believes in Love. Deeply. Completely. Yes, in its redemptive power.
It took me decades to realize that my paternal grandparents had set the example for what love was supposed to be. More than fifty years of commitment and love and songs trilled across the house to one another. No fights, just “discussions” and intense care and open affection, no matter what. (At least as was shown to me.)
The daughter of an abusive alcoholic who fell in love with a magician and lived happily ever after.
I have spent my life looking for literal magic.
To love someone is an act of grace. It is to be willing to accept their flaws, to offer forgiveness before slights are committed, to promise to be there and to accept them, no matter what. Love is a mercy, both to them and to yourself, and that spark is as close to the divine as we may ever experience on this Earth.
“I think you need to rethink what it is you want from love,” Queen Frostine said to me. “I know you want that redemption, but maybe it comes in a different form than you want.”
I get her point. I do have people in my life who love me, whom I also believe will be there for me, no matter what. She is one of the few, and she knows it.
But Queen Frostine or Pandy or any of my Psyrens can’t be there in the middle of the night. They can’t be there to hold me or to share in deep ecstasy. They aren’t the ones with whom I want to craft that magical life.
I am afraid that the likelihood of my ever getting the empirical proof of the mystical, of what I know exists because I am borne of it, grows smaller and smaller with each passing year and broken relationship. The reality is that I am unlikely to end this life with that resolution, both because of other people and because of myself.
It seems as if my Holy Grail will be forever ensconced in gauzy veil.
On top of it all, I am slipping into the emotional avoidance that I loathe.
And it is frightening to me, to think of becoming the thing I hate the most, of turning into the monster that hides under my own bed.
This is what I begged him not to do.
I understand that I still have the power to make me and to make my life what I most want it to be.
Except what I want isn’t happening. Still. Again. And it’s deflating. The only way I know to make the cycle stop is to get off the damn carousel, but I keep reaching for the brass ring one more time. Just one more time!
I’m dizzy from the trying.
Maybe it’s the last bastion of adulthood. It begins with realizing your parents are simply human. Maybe it ends with accepting your own mortality, closing the binding-worn Fairytales and shelving it forever.
What if that’s not what I want?
Maybe what I want is delusional. Maybe my love of myth and tortured epic is the fairytale I get. Maybe I am fated to live out my life as a Grimm protagonist.
Except I know it exists. I know couples who commit to respectful, equitable, mutual reciprocity, who gift one another with care and affection, whose passion ebbs but also flows for decades.
I don’t know how my story will end. I almost gave up on Bumblebee in October, and I made the decision to try again. It still went unexpectedly south, but I tried. I will try to keep trying, though I’m unsure I will ever be successful in that endeavor.
Yes, my girls will still be there, no matter what. There are a few others. More importantly, I will still be there, no matter what. And I will continue to be exactly who I am—open and honest and clever and smart and loving—because I don’t want to be my own monster.
There is no divinity in turning myself to stone.
Your grandfather set the example of 50 (lifelong) years of commitment and love songs. That music meant the same exalted things to each of them, and they sang them to each other, and they kept the faith between them. I never heard of either of them betraying that love or association for any reason. It seems clear to me that it took both of them to achieve this balance and earn your respect. They shared real magic. Practical magic was a very small part of that. It doesn't seem like the real lesson they exemplified was learned?
If your expectations were not met, it might be because it's based on something that you don't value, have, or can afford?
Posted by: D | Wednesday, October 16, 2019 at 12:10 AM