Muchness and Light

I'm not here for your entertainment.

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of my four-day, constantly-tearful breakdown of what established initial patterns in my relationships, I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.  La Bruja had recommended this book weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading it. 

Holy shit.

When she first recommended it, I did a little quick research online and came to the conclusion that I have an anxious attachment style.  "Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back."  I realized I mostly have dated and been in relationships with avoidants.  "Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness."

According to Levine and Heller, people with secure attachments—those who "feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving"—make up about 50% of the population.  Anxious ones like me make up 20%, while avoidants make up 25%.  The remaining 5% of the population is made up of anxious-avoidants, and I can certainly include a couple of my exes in that narrow margin. 

But when it comes to dating as an adult, the majority of secure people are in healthy relationships.  They're the ones you know who are still happily married after twenty years.  They're the ones I look to and wish I'd ever had a relationship like that. 

Secure men are generally not on the open market. 

There's a disproportionate number of avoidants in the dating pool.  This is part of the reason I am far more likely to encounter a Fragile Cat when I'm on the prowl myself. 

Anxious people are also more likely to be attracted to avoidants, as if something unconscious in us feels like we've found a missing piece of our puzzle.  Avoidants are usually reflective of a powerful, dysfunctional attachment in our earlier life, often from childhood.  Initially everything may seem really great, but then something happens and the avoidant backs away, which causes the anxious to move closer to close the gap, which causes the avoidant to back away even further.  Both partners are having their fucked-up emotional attachment needs met, but it's a pathological dance of getting close and backing away. 

In reading Attached, I was surprised (and thankful!) to learn I wasn't quite as screwed up as I'd thought.  Yes, I am anxious, though not nearly so off-the-chain as I could be.  (I'm less of an outlier than I normally am.)  Levine and Heller argue that there is a biological, evolutionary purpose and need for attachment.  Just as happens with parents and children, bonds are formed in the brain when we partner.  Synapses and neurotransmitters and a bunch of brain shit that I only understand as a layman come together to imprint that person on our brain as a matter of survival.  As inherently social creatures, especially ones who have sexual reproduction, we need other people. 

When an avoidant backs away from me, it activates that attachment system, and I've learned mostly unconsciously to do things and work in ways that will get a response from my partner, to deactivate that system.  (I'm talking phone calls and texts, not boiling bunnies, though I'd imagine this is exactly where and how stalking begins.)  When I don't get the response I need, it amps up my anxiety, so I step closer again and again until I'm either soothed or I get so worked up that love feels like a huge waste of my life.

Because of these patterns established throughout my life, emotional security is something I need in a different way than secure people.  That doesn't make it better or worse than anyone else—unless you're the avoidant on the polar opposite side of the need.  The avoidant's need for independence, their oft-refused acceptance of needing another person, is a defense mechanism and a way to fulfil their own established patterns. 

The avoidants' defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with.  The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others.  So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again. 

My secure friends, and certainly my avoidant ones, have a very hard time understanding this.  They don't get why I can't always just suck it up and go on and get over someone, even when they've hurt me time and again.  But when that attachment system is activated and spinning out of emotional control, contact with that person can immediately soothe all of my anxieties, much in the same way an upset baby is soothed by the presence of its missing mother. 

Many individuals find it hard to follow through on their wish to break up, even after they've tried more than once to do it.  Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take.  Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

One of the things Levine and Heller stress is that emotional dependency is not bad.  It is, in fact, a natural part of a healthy relationship to make your partner's needs more important than your own and vice versa.  It's okay and normal and good to elevate someone else's needs above your own when you are healthily in love. 

But I have this history of addicted men.  Alcohol, drugs, sex—I've seen and dated and slept with them all.  I've written before about how I am historically and enabler.  So what about codependence?  Isn't becoming so enmeshed in another person that your boundaries are blurred just dysfunctional?  Doesn't dependency on a partner make you lacking or broken or just fucked-up in some way?

Not necessarily.  

Need and addiction are not the same thing.  Codependency exists, and it is especially relevant in the realm of addiction.  The addict uses their substance as a tool to maintain emotional distance.  They drink or get high or sleep with other people as a way to cope with their own damage, and that often means they are actively inserting something between themselves and their partners.  There are other biological factors that come into play with addiction, as well.  The times I have refused to leave because my partner needed me to take care of them—whether to pick up their drunkenly-abandoned car or make excuses to their boss or friends about why they weren't showing up or to clean up whatever mess they created while they were fucked up—that's where the dysfunction of codependence can actually be applicable. 

Just because you need someone, that doesn't mean that you are addicted to them.

One of the things Attached recommends I do is date a lot of people, to go out with several at once.  That way if an avoidant sneaks (bombards his way) into my circle, I am reassured by the fact that I have someone else over here who wants to go out with me.  It's no big deal that this one fucked up, because there's someone else who finds me attractive and wants to spend time with me.  Historically, I am not a multi-dater, but I'll see how it goes. 

So I put myself back on the market. 

Friday night, I had a date with a new guy.  I'll call him S, because I don't want to reveal his name and—as you'll see shortly—he's not worthy of a jellicle name.  We met nearby at a billiards bar.  We had a couple of slow drinks and talked, though we never got around to actually playing pool.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We sat on the patio of the bar talking about sociology and music and dating as adults.  We walked around for a while, still talking and laughing, and ducked into another bar for a last drink.  I even messaged the Castration Committee while I was peeing that it was going really well. 

With about thirty minutes left in my night, that first kiss was looming.  Okay, you'll get a kiss, and it sounds like there's a chance you'll get another date.  I was looking forward to the prospect of seeing him again and getting to know him better. 

Cut to the chase, and he turned into a handsy ass.  Now, I'm no prude.  While I've been mulling imposing a Three Date Rule for sex, I have never been one to live by such social proprieties.  That doesn't mean I've slept with everyone I've been out with, and certainly not always on a first date, but I am comfortable going quickly down that path if I feel the situation is conducive to such intimacy.  Yes, sometimes, it's just a one-nighter.  I had to be home in an hour; this was not going to be one of those nights. 

For the first time in a really long time, I felt like a 16-year-old piece of cheap meat.  I felt stupid and also insulted that I was being offered a quickie in the backseat of his car, parked down a dark side street.  Again, not a scenario I'm unfamiliar with given my history, but I am not that girl anymore.  I'm a grown-ass woman.  I am worth far more than what this man was clumsily and uncomfortably offering me. 

And after writing two weeks ago and talking with my therapist this week, it was like I was watching this from above, from outside my own body.  For a moment, it felt like Stephanie was sitting there with Quinn as this recently-nice man imposed himself on us.  I could feel myself now, knowing this was just insulting, but I could also feel Quinn sitting silent and petulant, wishing he would just take his rough hands and slobbering mouth off of her. 

Something in me clicked and shoved him away quickly.  I got out of the car and said I needed to go.  I walked back to my car, a block away.  I texted Pandy to let her know it had gone awry but that I was okay. 

This is where I will also interject that I called Bounder.

In the now-14 months since we met, dated, broke up, dated again, broke up again, slept together, slept together again, dated others, slept together again, et cetera, we have continued to have this weird connection.  One of us reached out to the other, usually via text, at just that right moment when the other seems to need us.  We still sometimes dream of each other at the same time, as we'll find out a day or two later. 

But in all of that time, with all of the men I've gone out with, Bounder always seems to know.  He has never failed to text me while I'm with someone new, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments that I don't see until after the fact.  He's never failed to reach within than four hours after I've been with a new guy.  Whether he smells my perfume on the wind or has a bug in my phone (no, he doesn't), he just knows.

It is unquestionably the dance of an Anxious and Anxious-Avoidant.

I'd even joked on Friday afternoon that I wasn't blowing off this first date with S just to go sleep with Bounder.  (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

I hadn't even left my house for the date when his text came.

Totally innocent response to something else from days before.  I was leaving for the date when I saw the message.  The man is uncanny, really. 

And I didn't shut down this thing with S because of Bounder.  He really doesn't have the power to cock-block my dates from a distance.  I wasn't caught up in the idea of him that night; I was completely engaged with S until it turned weird.  (Let me stress here that at no time with S did I feel unsafe or in any type of danger.  I was simply very, very uncomfortable.)

My voice shaking and low, I called Bounder to tell him thank you for having never made me feel like I owed him anything.  Honestly, I was thankful it was a late-night voicemail and that I didn't have to talk to him directly.  For all of his faults, for all of the times I have done this fucked-up pathological dance with the man I love more than any other ever but who is such a heartbreakingly-close-but-terrible fit for me, he never made me feel sexually worthless.  In fact, as I was working through some pretty ugly memories and trying to get past some things, he was incredibly, beautifully patient and supportive with me.  He failed me in a lot of ways, but he never, ever made me feel anything but beautiful and wanted for exactly who I was, not because I should or might be something else, not because there was an expectation.  And that, in and of itself, is its own kind of love. 

So I'm still learning how to step differently, how to dance to a different beat.  It's not like reading this book would suddenly make me not maladaptive.  But it did open my head, giving me some insight and tools to work toward the healthy relationship I likely never would've possessed, had I not started this process of intense self-analysis and re-discovery. 

As shaken as I was when I walked away from that uncomfortable moment, I know I am fully engaged in this process.  I'm not watching from afar, checking out emotionally to just let things happen to me.  Healthy or unhealthy choices are my choices, and they aren't dependent on what Cissie or Quinn might want, though their needs are sometimes still my needs.

I drove us all home and to bed.  Alone.

And as La Bruja commented on Facebook as we talked about this date, "The good things that I see from this: 1) material—duh; 2) nothing happened and you're fine; 3) when you meet the right man, and some hot guy starts flirting with you while you're in line at Starbucks, you won't wonder if you missed any fun experiences by not dating more. You'll know you've got a great thing going and that 97% of all the guys who flirt with you would not come close to measuring up."

 

Yes, I promise, you are loved so don't give up.

A couple of months ago, I met a guy online.  We hit it off and agreed to a first date, which turned out to be fantastic.  Schedules were a little tough to sync at first, but we did manage to eek in a couple more great dates.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We had long, engaged conversations and fantastic chemistry.  Even though he was clearly into me, I knew pretty quickly that I didn't have substantial romantic interest in him.  (I never even got around to giving him a nickname.)

I was mulling how best to go about ending it when the court date came up for my divorce.  I was so caught up in that week that I didn't think much about it when I didn't hear from him. 

Eventually I did get a text, though, asking how court had gone, how I was, etc.  I caught him up quickly, while I was in the middle of working one of my three part-time jobs, and then asked how he was.  He finally admitted that he hadn't checked on me because he'd gone on a week-long bender. 

Red flags flapped ominously in my breeze.  He knew my history of falling for alcoholics, and I knew his history—what he'd been very adamant was an ancient history of non-alcoholic addiction that had been long-ago dealt with.  I knew I was ready to end the romantic relationship, but I liked the guy and wanted to be able to be his friend through the hard time he was having.  I offered to be a sounding board.

Another week went by with no word from him.  I was both busy and not unhappy about having a little distance from it.  Then came the voicemail, telling me he had gone on another black-out binge and was hospitalized in a detox unit.  He asked me to call him.  He texted me the next day, asking if I'd gotten his voicemail. 

I replied that I had but that I had to distance myself from the situation and from him. 

"You know my history," I texted.  "I am clearly an enabler.  This is more than I'm willing to deal with right now.  It's unhealthy for me and unhealthy for my children, given the energy shift it will create in me.  I feel like a cad for not being your friend through this, but I just can't be around this right now.  I wish you well."

Alcoholics aren't always, or even usually, the people who drink all day, every day and can't hold down a job.  I've never dated a man who sat on the street corner, sipping anything out of a bag.  (At least not more than a couple of social times.)  My history, however, is peppered with functional alcoholics—those who lead productive lives filled with work and family and friends, who seem perfectly normal to anyone outside the closest inner circle.  It wasn't just that they were alcoholic abusers, they were alcohol dependent. 

When an addict of any kind begins the process of recovery, there are several paths they can take.  Going it alone, private counseling, community-based therapy and support groups.  Each has to find their own path. 

In my personal experience and through my research for Persona Non Grata, there are two main thoughts about recovery.  On one side, the addict needs to give all of their time and energy to recovery, at least initially and for some indeterminate amount of time, in order to stabilize and come to terms with themselves and the immediate consequences of ceasing substance.  Different substances—whether alcoholic, heroin, cocaine, food, etc.—will have different effects on biochemistry, and withdrawal can be a bitch no matter your poison.  Some addicts choose to immerse themselves in the process of recovery, sometimes to the point that the unavailability they showed their loved ones is just as prevalent even though it's in the name of meetings and sessions and getting better.

There's a second line of thinking, in which the addict has been a selfish bastard for so long that they need to immediately begin rectifying that damage to the people who've paid the highest price for it thus far.  It's time to step up and show those people that you really do love them; it's time to start making amends for your asshole behavior of the previous weeks and months and years, balancing them with your own needs and therapy. 

Often on the other side of an addiction is an enabler, someone who excuses and justifies and cleans-up and forgives the selfish, destructive behavior in the name of loving the addict.  Someone like me.  I've been known to give so deeply of myself to maintain the status quo that I would find myself frazzled and exhausted, a shell of who I was supposed to be. 

If recovery for the addict includes stopping being a selfish asshole, recovery for the enabler is the time when they have to learn to be a little bit selfish, to take care of themselves before they care for the addict. 

It feels completely unnatural.

When you are structured around this idea that "care" means self-sacrifice, you'll do anything for the people you love.  Every detail of your life becomes about how you can help this person you adore, how you can make things easier so that they can accomplish their goals, even after recovery begins in earnest.  It's all too easy to find yourself still in that pattern of compensating for the addict who has floundered for years. 

But isn't that what you do for the people that you love?

If they're young children, absolutely.  But even adults who were badly parented or never learned the life-skill of self-care are still adults; they have to be responsible for themselves. 

It is hard as hell to turn away from someone you care about, leaving them to deal with the process of recovery without you.  You, who has taken care of everything for so long, who has loved them like no other and for reasons and in ways maybe no one else would ever understand... you are abandoning them in their greatest moment of need. 

You're a fucking heartless bitch. 

As the enabler, you have to heal from this process of addiction, as well.  You have to learn to care for yourself and how to devote time and energy to those who really need it, not just those who refuse to do it for themselves. 

Given my history, my telling Bender (okay, so I named him just now) that I couldn't be a part of his process not only took my support away and forced him to stand with one less crutch, it allowed me to drop that fucking crutch, too.  My hands are free to hold something else.  Something more important—myself. 

Even though that romantic relationship wasn't hugely impactful on my life, it came at just the right time to remind me that I am important in a relationship.  My needs, my care, my wants are just as important as the other side's, even and especially when that other side is addicted. 

Being cognizant of this, being fully aware of how necessary it is for me to make those healthy decisions means I have to follow through.  To continue the behaviors and patterns when I absolutely know better makes me no better, but also no worse, than the addicts I have loved. 

Even after Bender, there is another friend who is maybe in that process of sobriety and recovery.  It's likely, though I don't know for sure because I had to make the decision to cut this person out of my life.  And it is hard.  Every single day, I want to know how they are, to hold them and listen while they talk through what I know is coming.  Some days that connection still feels as strong as it did when we met so many moons ago. 

I want desperately to reach out, to ask how they're doing.  I can't, and it sucks.  Some days, it hurts like hell. 

They're no more irredeemable than I am.  We've both always known that change would have to come from within them, no matter how much support I offered or shoved or emotionally blackmailed them into taking.  But taking is not accepting, and I had to stop bashing my head against that beautiful brick wall.

As much as I hope they are taking the time to really face this and heal, I hope I am able to turn and face my own role in my life, my own choices to excuse and justify and encourage—all in the name of love.  This time, I have to love me, in the same active way I have tried so fucking hard to love them. 

Keeping them out of my life is supposedly the best thing for me.  Supposedly it's also the best thing for them, but it smacks of abandonment and dismissal in the ways that feel most brutal to me.  I hope to God, every day, that there's a healthy way forward for us, together or not, in each other's lives or not.  I hope to hear that they're okay, that they're doing their work and dealing with what has been so long neglected.  I hope I do the same. 

Above all else, I hope we both can one day see that we are loved, not because of our roles in that dysfunction—not in spite of them—but for the people we are on the other side of the addiction and the history and the hurt.

 

Day after day after day, I called out Fate.

Once again, I have let my arrogant, trusting heart bite me in the ass.

In the course of a few days, I dealt with my wedding anniversary—19th, but the first since DH and I separated—as well as the demise of my relationship with Bounder. Again.

I have been over it with him, with the girls, and in my own noisy head about a hundred times. Here was a man who said, “I am done being afraid. I love you. I am committed to you and to this. I want to be with you and not just so I don’t have to be without you. You are wonderful, though you deserve more than I can offer in my damaged, fragile state, but I am willing to try fully to meet you in this, with the goal of moving forward in our life wherever that may lead.”

But when it got real, when I got real and challenged his excuses for being suddenly and irrationally unsupportive and distant, I was told it was my fault—that I was just too much.

At every turn, I was blatantly honest with him. I told him from the very beginning that he would always know where he stood with me, because I would be sure to tell him. I was just as quick to remind him that I loved him and supported him and cared about him as I was to tell him I was upset or unhappy about something. Because of his own damage and his past, it was sometimes hard for him to understand how someone could actively love him, how they could do it not in spite of his plethora of issues but openly and accepting of those as what made him into this enigmatic mix of strength and vulnerability, of hurt and hope, of love and loathing.

Bounder and I met at an incredibly emotional time in our respective lives. We were each in process of divorce, which included the unmitigated difficulty of examining what in each of us had led to the unexpected death of dreams and plans and intentions. But we understood each other like no one else and were instantly, constantly connected. We could often seem to read each other’s thoughts.

When he came to me in June, he asked me if I really wanted this, meaning him and his baggage and the hardships that might come from that. I told him yes, that I loved him and that I was willing to take the risk of being hurt again because the potential for good far outweighed the potential for the bad. I asked him, again, if he was ready to really be in this with me and accept my own flaws and baggage and logistics. He was adamant that he was. But

there was always the issue of his sobriety. I wrote after our initial breakup in the spring that I was pretty sure he was an alcoholic. He denied it then and later. Truthfully, alcoholism can be tricky to determine. There is a difference between having a high tolerance, being a problem drinker, and being an alcoholic. Even when some people drink heavily or regularly, that doesn’t mean they’re alcoholic. It’s the impetus behind the drinking that determines whether it’s a problem or an addiction. There are alcoholics who’ve been dry for long periods of time but who make the same choices, perpetuating the addictive behavior, even without the use of substance. I’ve often heard it referred to as being a “dry drunk”.

Like so many others, he functions well and lives an active, productive life.

“You have to be sober for me,” I said.

“What does that mean to you?”

“You can’t let alcohol or any substance be the thing that allows you to create and maintain emotional distance between us. It can’t be the tool to drive me away.”

But when I needed him, and needed him most, he did just that; he let a drink become the excuse behind why he couldn’t be there for me. He let that be the place to escape his own tormented head and to drive the cycle of self-flagellation.

I know his history intimately and fully understand like almost no one else how and why he came to this place in his life. So much of our respective pasts is mirrored plainly in the other’s. We have always been openly cognizant of the pitfalls and respectful of the fact that we each had to tread very carefully and consciously in that minefield. But he assured me, time and again, that he was willing and able and ready to do that. He told me he loved me, that he supported me, and that he appreciated me.

In the end, the breakup happened over an email while I was 200 miles from home.

I didn’t go into this blindly or easily. I didn’t forget what had happened before. I did choose, consciously, to put those things aside and do everything I could to healthily support him and our relationship. I refused to constantly be waiting for him to fuck up, because that is no way to love or to live. Even when I was afraid during the last few days that this might be happening, I told him, asked him again to face me and talk to me, to tell me if it was more than he could handle. He reiterated again that he was in it, no matter how scared he was of disappointing me.

But his excuses won out over his intent. He let it be easier to push me away than to face himself and do the work needed to mend his own soul; he let it be easier to be overwhelmed by the fear of the difficulty than to actually make the attempt. His refusal to believe that he could ever be healthy or deserving of good things fueled his fears, and he bailed. Again. Rather, he pushed me to the point of saying I’m done.

It hurts, make no mistake. I loved him deeply and passionately and honestly in a way I’d never been with anyone else. All of the lessons of the preceding years, all of the work I’ve had to do to deal with my own past and mistakes, allowed me to go into this thing with him with my eyes open. I always knew I could get hurt. I had no specific expectation that I would be with him for the rest of my life—if it happened, so be it. I also wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with this man if I knew there was expiration date. There was no way I was willing or able to go into this without accepting the potential of something long term. Regardless, we agreed to see it through to the end.

Instead what I got was a man who wasn’t brave enough to face his own demons and who used excuses to justify running.

“I appreciate you and everything you’ve done in my life. I wouldn’t have come so far if I hadn’t met you when I did. I love you so much more than I can really express, and I’m afraid I will disappoint you.”

You disappointed me not because you decided this wasn’t right. Even if it was that I wasn’t right for you, that would have smarted but I get how that happens. It’s that you yet again chose to let your fear stop you from accepting what you want most: to be loved for who you are rather than who you should be or what you can do for the people you care about.

You did it knowingly and decidedly and didn’t try not to hurt me in that. You made excuses for refusing to move any direction in your life, and you intentionally misled me to your place of stagnation and then had the balls to both blame me and say that you’d always warned me it might happen.

It’s childish and toxic and cowardly, and you had no right to drag me down with you.

So now I’m back the place of grasping for stability. Eventually I will have to start the process of regaining ground, but right now I just want to ground to stop spinning beneath me.

Before, I wished him healing and peace and hoped that he would find his way to a healthy place, whether or not it led him to me again. Now, I just don’t care. I refuse to do it. When I did care, it brought me this. Again.

My heart hurts, undeniably. My head comprehends the how and why, really, but my heart is unlikely to ever grasp how this could happen again, given the intricacies of intimacy that occurred between us every single day. I wasn’t delusional about any of it, I am confident in that.

But maybe I shouldn’t have been, and I probably won’t be again. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to trust someone again, let alone love them. If you’re not in my inner circle now, don’t expect ever to be. I worked so hard to come to a place where I could even be willing to love another person again, and it got me this. Again.

Hot Pocket says I will meet someone one day who can love me like I deserve and want and need. She says I am a generous, light, and shining spirit who deserves someone who appreciates that.

I may be, but I feel pretty sure that person doesn’t exist. Every time I’ve come close to that, when I have someone who looks me in the eye and says, “I see you for who and how you are, and I love you for that,” they back the fuck away and let their own baggage drag me down. I feel stupid and humiliated. I don’t trust my own judgment, let alone my heart or my head or my gut. And I don’t want another person ever to touch me if it means they might have the power to hurt me.

So for me, it’s not worth it. It makes me question my own worth, undoubtedly, and whether I was right two years ago when I suggested that my lifetime value was bankrupted when I gave birth to my sons. Was my purpose in life fulfilled when I procreated? Did I really have everything I deserved at 32?

Life is complicated, and love is hard. I was willing to take on that challenge, for me and for him and for others before him. Now? No. So even if Fate herself appears before me and says, “Sass, you gotta do this. You gotta see this person and go this way. I’m going to make you,” I will tell her very clearly to fuck off.

I would rather incur the wrath of the gods than ever let my heart be open to another person again.

I am extraordinary, if you'd ever get to know me.

After Bounder and I broke up, I realized that not only was I ready but I was willing to date.  That is perhaps the most daunting aspect of my new, single life—finding someone to go out with.  The whole notion of "finding" someone seems so stupidly foreign to me anyway.  I didn't date much, in any traditional sense.  The guys I was with before I was married were all friends before I was with them.  They were in my circle, and it was natural to just start hanging out together all the time.  I don't know that I've ever had the experience of a new guy picking me up, taking me out, and bringing me home.  For that to happen, though, I'll have to step out of my neighborhood and into new places with new people. 

The chick with the pink-striped hair? That's me.

For years I identified myself as an introvert.  For anyone who knows me now, that's pretty hard to believe.  Looking back, I realize I wasn't introverted so much as I was shy.  Once I was comfortable with someone, I could easily talk to them and be my normal, boisterous self.  It just took me a while to feel at ease enough to open my mouth.

I'm still that way, for the most part, which is why it's hard for me to meet new people.  I'm also 40 going into this life.  After being with the same man for twenty years—a man who really was an introvert—I have no idea where to go and what to do, especially if I'm by myself.  There's free time now when the boys are with their father.  I don't have to fill all of that time away from home, or even with someone, but it is nice to have someone different to talk to once in a while. 

Having been fortunate enough to have some remarkably special men in my life, it's going to be difficult to find someone who really turns me on.  I can be a lot to handle, and I'm very picky.  It seems that any man who comes close to what I want and what's good for me will have be a very rare breed of human being.  I deserve to have someone that special—and that person will deserve me—but I also know I'm unlikely to encounter them at the same grocery store I see five times a week. 

Queen Frostine encouraged me to go out and try a few, specific new places.  A couple of male friends have volunteered to be my wingman on a night out.  All of that will be happening over the next few weeks and months, and I'm sure I'll meet some great people, along with the ones who aren't so great.  And just meeting someone, even if I like or date them, doesn't mean I want to love them. 

But the day will come (again) when I fall in love.  As I wrote recently, the bar for me has been set very high.  I know I can't compare one man to another—though women do that shit all the time.  It's not about finding someone as good as or better than somebody that I used to know.  However, because I've had some exceptionally profound experiences, I won't be settling for mundane.  A new relationship doesn't have to be full-on excitement all the time, but it also can't be so lacking in real chemistry that I have to constantly overlook flaws in an attempt to be content. 

I've been thinking a lot about what this as-of-now imaginary person might be like.  If they're important enough to me to really pursue something more serious, I can give them a copy of Persona Non Grata, though it's a little strange to hand a would-be the Zagat Guide to Stephanie.

Here's the Cliff's Notes version:

They have to understand that I am a mom.  My kids are always on my mind, and they are usually in my custody.  Although I do get time without them, they are my main priority right now and will be for quite a while.  Anyone who comes into my life has to be willing to accept them as a part of me, and vice versa. 

They have to understand that I used to be a fat girl.  I often still think like a fat girl.  More than a hundred pounds ago, I was miserable.  The weight loss brought the surgeries, which brought the scars.  And I'm still no small thing and never will be.  I am very cognizant of my body, and I'm still trying to adjust to what I see as myself. 

I'd like them to be bigger than I am.  That seems kind of silly, but I was often heavier than my boyfriends and even my husband.  Still an Amazon, I'm not usually attracted to men who are shorter or slighter than I.  I want someone whose hands and feet are larger than mine, who can make me feel physically small when he holds me.  There's a comfort in that, and I've only really felt it with one person. 

They have to be smart and funny and a little unconventional.  I am impatient and easily bored.  I constantly look to be amused in my life, but I have a dry, bawdy sense of humor.  I do not think or act like other girls.  And I talk a lot.  They have to be able to converse with me and laugh with me. 

They have to see me eye-to-eye.  It was recently brought to my attention that one of the reasons I can make people uncomfortable is that I see them for who they are pretty quickly.  I have always read people well, but after two years of really examining myself and others around me, I have developed the ability to hone in on the truth of people with relative ease.  Turns out a lot of people don't like it when others see through their facade.  But that special person has to be honest both with me and with themselves about who and what they are.  That's how I live my own life, and I expect nothing less from my partner. 

They have to be considerate of me.  My time and attention are finite.  I have a lot of responsibilities.  One of my pet peeves is people who are perpetually late or absent who can't be bothered to let you know.  It's not so hard to call or send a text to say you're running late.  Things happen; just keep me in the loop. 

They can't be an addict.  I've dealt with too many men who use substances as a crutch or even a wheelchair to manage their lives.  I can't handle it.  It's not that I'm opposed to drinking or other people's use of occasional recreational substances.  It's the addictive behavior and emotional stuntedness that are unacceptable to me. 

They have to accept that I can be emotionally high-maintenance.  I feel everything—for myself and my friends and my children and the others I love.  I can be insecure and temperamental.  I need emotional validation and attention, though it can be quiet and subtle.  A squeeze of the hand, a murmur of, "I hear you," is sometimes all it takes.  Sometimes I need someone to listen to me rail and cry for a few minutes.  It's not constant, and I'm always willing to reciprocate. 

Maybe this is a lot.  Maybe not.  I don't have a great frame of reference.  If I'm too particular about what I want, it's because I have years of having exactly what I didn't want.  I refuse to live that way ever again, if I can help it. 

So, whoever you are that may capture my heart next, know what you're in for.  This is only the tip of the iceberg, I promise, but start here; we'll see where this path leads us. 

And chances are that guy you saw me with is just my wingman. 

I can't stand myself. I'm being held up by invisible men.

Sassafras O'Malley has double-blind confirmation of a new superpower: the unmitigated ability to attract alcoholic men. 

She's not especially thrilled to have this talent, though I suppose it's an equal and opposite reaction to her ability to dazzle small animals and children (and stupid people) into submission with her disco ballness. 

All joking aside, it's shocking to my system, just how well I can not see the addiction sometimes, how I can have come so far toward self-awareness and integration and still be so willing to ignore the flashing red signs when my heart is on the line. 

The thing about addicts is that they are selfish: self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-deprecating, self-loathing, self-mutilating, and self-destructive.  As Bounder said to me recently, quite ironically, it's not that they don't want good things in their lives—they aren't trying not to love or feel or be available to those that seem to matter most to them—it's that they can't; they are so selfish in their addiction that they are unable to see past themselves to the secondary and tertiary damage they inflict on those around them. 

It's one of the hallmarks of addicts, to deny themselves the things and people who are truly good for them, to push out anyone and everyone who might be able to serve as a lifeline to reality and healthfulness.  They will instinctively surround themselves with people who support and facilitate their patterns of addictive behavior, who tolerate and even sometimes encourage their excuses and their inconsideration and their lies—enablers.

My refusal to enable the addiction of men I loved was, in part, responsible for the demise of previous relationships.  It's always more complicated than that, but addiction has played an important and sometimes torturous role in more than the last twenty years of my life.  When I wrote at the end of the year about what I didn't want going forward in my life or a new relationship, addiction was part of that list—mine or anyone else's. 

And yet, here I went again. 

I don't get it, either.  In my head I can understand how the addiction, especially alcoholism, works and impacts the addict's entire life, including the people closest to them.  But deep in my soul, I cannot fathom how a person could be in such desperate need for something, or someone, and flatly refuse it when it's presented to them on a shiny, silver platter.  When you most need it, you're given a gift from the universe of exactly what you both need and want, and you are openly thankful for that—until you realize it won't follow you to the bottom of a bottle.  Then you turn your back on the good in exchange for the bad, like an ungrateful, petulant bastard?

I don't fucking get it. 

What I do understand is the other side of it—the heartbreak and the rejection and the feelings of being worth less than a fucking bottle to that person who says they care about you.  The dismissal and the isolation that come when they start drinking.  And it's dramatically juxtaposed to the attention and the connection that's there when they're sober, when you let yourself think for just a moment that just maybe this time you will be enough, be special enough, to help them see the light and to give them the goal and the strength to break out of those patterns.  But those moments become more and more fleeting as time goes on with the addict, until it's a constant daze of distance and excuses and emotional neglect that borders on malice. 

Hot Pocket says it's not that I'm worth less than that bottle; it's that he feels he deserves the bottle more than he deserves me. 

Growler says she understands why it feels like I will never find another person to love, who loves me back in a healthy way, but that it's just not true, no matter how hard that may be to see right now.  (I'm not looking, but I wasn't looking this time, either.)

Queen Frostine listens patiently while I rage about how I'm done with men, about how I hate the catch-22 of being myself and attracting damaged men or going back into my own box just to make a man comfortable in the hopes he loves what is ultimately a shadow of Stephanie. 

And I'm pretty positive I don't want a romantic relationship with a woman.  Women are crazy.

Yet again I find myself spinning, trying desperately to touch solid ground and calm the nausea, to stop the sickness that is surrounding me and invading every fiber of my being.  I'm trying again to catch my breath, the wind knocked out of me simultaneously by love and heartache.  As much as I may want to fix this, to use my incredibly unrelenting resourcefulness to make this okay, I can't.  This is not my battle, no matter how hard I fight.

Maybe it's not about me, but it sure as hell still feels like it's me that's taking the brunt of the damage.

So I'm pulling back again, shunning men and shunning that sector of my heart.  I was pretty sure I was ready this time, pretty sure I was healthy, but I feel like I missed something.  My trusting, naive, hopelessly-romantic nature let me, encouraged me, to believe the unintentional whispers of another alcoholic.  I can't do this again.  I really would rather be alone that to go through this another time.

 

Such a multitude of masculinity could only be found in one place... and that place was O'Malley's Alley.

I have a thing for cats. 

Dogs are okay.  I like other people's dogs.  It's kind of the same way some people feel about kids or grandchildren—you can play with them and enjoy them but can also give them back when you're done, without having to clean up after them. 

My real attraction, though, is to what I commonly call The Fragile Cat.

Fragile cats are beautiful and strong, quiet in their complications, and they respond to my affections readily.  They know I'll pet them and care for them, feed and affect them at their whim.  But they're skittish and easily spooked.  If I'm too attentive, they arch their backs and puff up defensively, backing away with darting, slanted eyes and an occasional hiss.

In case you don't get it, I'm not talking about actual cats.

Some women have a thing for bad boys.  Not me.  Granted, some of the fragile cats I've known have also been dangerous and bad-tempered, but most of them have been sweet if a bit mischievous.  They're aloof.  I am especially adept at coaxing them out of their hiding places, whether with treat or a gentle scratch behind their ears.  Growler deemed me to be a fragile cat hunter, and we agreed that my autobiography will likely be called Fragile Cats in the Mist.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish them from other cats, and sometimes dogs, but there are certain characteristics they all have in common:

complex, complicated histories with some substantial damage, usually involving their mothers

history of sometimes-addictive behaviors, whether alcohol or drugs or sex or love

craving of quality affection that they've missed out on

deep need to share their own truths, whether or not they feel safe enough in their regular environment to do so

intriguing, enigmatic personalities with a craving to experience their lives

They're deliciously funny and dangerously charming.  They're generally wry and self-deprecating, and they will deliver to my doorstep the most scrumptious of morsels, often stalked and hunted in my own backyard.

I can recognize them almost immediately, in part because I've had lots of experience with them.  Even the ones who know they're fragile cats and try to hide it catch my attention and draw me in, because I am a fragile cat.  My intuitive heart feels the kindred spirit, sometimes on sight. 

I spent so much time and energy to understand my own history and damage, and I fought like hell to move past it and rebuild from a place of utter deconstruction.  I know the road that is offered before them by the time our paths cross, but I also acknowledge that no one can be forced to take on their issues.  Everyone must come to it in their own time and place, at a pace that is suitable for them. 

So I know better than to try to fix the fragile cat, to try to repair their damage or bandage it for them before they skitter back into a dark alley in the middle of the night.  That's not my job.  What I am, consistently, is a place for them to bring that damage into the light of day without recrimination, without judgment, without fear of being abandoned on the side of the road. 

Sometimes they let me.  Sometimes they don't.  I've known fragile cats for years or months or sometimes only days.  That's their prerogative, to come and go as they need.  But the most fragile ones almost always come back, no matter how long it may be between their visits, because they know I won't hurt them. 

I don't seek them out; they are just the kind of personality that is utterly magnetic to me.  They are the ones who cause me to peer again into the darkness, searching twice for the glint of their glowing eyes.  Every single time I swear I'm not doing it again, that I promise myself I won't go hunting for the feral, some stray caterwauls nearby and then swishes its tail, weaving between my legs.  They seek me out because they know I can't turn them away. 

And what do I get from them?  I get their softness.  I get the undeniable surprise of their appearing when I least expect it, often when I'm at my lowest, and rubbing their heads against mine while they purr, just to make me smile and sigh.  When those cats are self-aware enough to see my catness, they feed me and pet me and remind me that sometimes it's okay to curl up in a safe lap and nap in the sun. 

 

There was that smell in the air of an old place that hadn't seen much daylight in years.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about the things I don't want to take with me into 2013.   I've thinking about this a lot today as I'm packing away the Christmas decorations and cleaning out some miscellaneous stuff from the house.  There was something I left off that list.

I don't want secrets. 

Mine or anyone else's. 

When I was writing Persona Non Grata, converting from the non-fiction Point A to Point Me to the substantially fictionalized story—and I can promise you that two years didn't all play out as depicted in that book—Absolem suggested I title the work Secret Keeper, or something similar.

"That's what you've been, Steph.  You've kept everyone else's secrets, plus your own.  That's who you are."

But secrets just suck.  They can seem alluring, shared or created in intimate moments.  They can seem seductive in their intimacy.  When someone else gives you their deepest, darkest secrets, it can feel like there's a certain level of trust they have with you, like you're the only person who knows them well enough or is strong enough to help them carry this burden. 

When you are the secret, though, that's perhaps the most double-edged of the covert swords.  You're special enough to be hidden away, to be a covert truth to be shielded from prying eyes.  But at the heart of that bond, at the heart of all secrets, is someone's shame.

There are things you keep to yourself or between you and a select number of people.  The privilege of intimacy is sacred and beautiful.  Surprises are wondrous moments sprung unexpectedly with utter delight. 

But secrets are the things that hurt, whether yourself or other people.  Secrets are the things that can only be whispered in the dark, because they are damaging to someone.  Maybe several someones.  To ask another person to keep a secret is to request that they carry the burden of your own shame—whether at your action or inaction or reaction. 

In the process of cleaning out the house since DH unceremoniously left, I have been blindsided by twenty years' worth of secrets.  Things were squirreled away that should've been brought to my attention.  I hid my own shameful truths from him.  Sometimes we hid them from ourselves, which meant we couldn't help but hide them from the other.  And I always find the evidence of those hidden truths in the most unexpected places, at the most inopportune times.  It never fails to knock the breath out of me and to make me cry. 

Had I known the truth of these things in the appropriate time, I probably wouldn't have felt so hurt about their specifics.  But now, when they're coming to light sometimes twenty years later and only through accidental discovery, I am cut more deeply by the surreptitious nature of non-disclosure.  I am appalled in specific and in general that somehow I wasn't worth the truth.  I only know now because things have gone so horribly wrong, and I am stumbling upon the facts of things no one else has had the fortitude or the guts or the fucking balls to face.  I am left to deal with them on my own and to clean up the mess of revelation like so much clutter in the basement. 

It's all right there, along with the mud-caked yard shoes he left by the back door. 

What it's made me believe more than ever—looking at his secrets, the ones I kept from him, the ones I kept for other people, and most especially the ones I became—is that secrets devalue a relationship.  They are detrimental to esteem and the trust that is at the core of any kind of love.  They make that relationship worth less than the shame of the secret.

To him and to so many others, I have been worth less than their shame. 

I also know that I have been on the other side of that.  I have damaged trust and love and honesty, in general and in specific, by keeping my own secrets.  One damage doesn't negate the other, though; there's no tit-for-tat in that kind of emotional warfare.  It just creates a mounting pile of broken promises and broken hearts that block everyone's path forward. 

But maybe that's the hardest part of all of this, the trying to see around the damage and toward the future.  It's hard not to get caught up in the vulnerable moments when all I want to do is cave into the crying and the heartache and the blame and hope to Hell that he feels it, too.  Someone told me that eventually he will realize what he's lost, that he will eventually feel the hurt and pain that I'm feeling now.  Whether or not that's even likely is moot—it simply won't matter.  The damage is done, and I hope I will have moved past it by that time, if it ever comes.  There would be no vindication in knowing there are more tears and screaming and sorrow later.  If I'm not worth the grieving and the sorrow now, just like I wasn't worth it six months and a year and two years ago, why will it matter if he feels it then?  In his world, I will never be worth more than the secrets he fought so hard to keep from me, and that definitely makes me feel like I never, ever had a fighting chance at the life I was told we were building.

I have worked hard to feel my own inherent value, to feel not worthless to the world and to myself.  But it's reeling to feel like the person who supposedly loved you the most in the world maybe never saw the value in you at all. 

I don't know what I was worth to DH.  I don't know if he even knows.  I will likely never know, because he will likely never face me to have that conversation.  That's a secret he'll keep to himself, despite both me and himself, perpetuating the cycle of damage that's gone on for so damn long now. 

So, to all of the unavailable men who may cross my path going forward, offering me their addictions and secrets that will passive-aggressively stall my own journey, stay the fuck out of my way.  Take your damage and your destruction elsewhere.  I don't want it.  I have enough of my own tears and burdens to carry, and I just don't have the strength to carry yours, too. 

This is a happy new year, ain't gonna worry me to death.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about all the things I'd done in 2012, about what a momentous time it's been for me.  (I forgot to include both turning 40 and taping a pitch pilot for BRAVO.  Really.  I've done a lot this year.)

But now the year end is approaching, neither rapidly nor unexpectedly—it happens the same way each year.  My therapist asked me to work on a list of things I don't want to carry with me into 2013.  I've been thinking about it for days, writing both in my head and on actual paper that was later burned in the fire.  Now, though, I thought it time to share that here. 

I do not want unavailable men.  Maybe that seems like a no-brainer, but I have this tendency to attract such beings into my life.  Whether logistically or emotionally, I am magnetically attracted to the men who are least likely to be able to share their life or mine.  Maybe it's something about their being inherently broken—a fragile cat.  They're soft and pretty and purr when I pet them, but they can't give what I need or want in return.  I don't want that anymore. 

I do not want stasis.  I don't want to be stuck in the past or in the present.  I'm a creature that likes movement, and I want to continually move forward in my life.  It doesn't always have to be incredibly exciting; there just needs to be momentum.  And I recognize that there are times when I need to sit still, for just a moment, and absorb what's going on around me.  Like a stop on a commuter train, it needs to come and go in its necessity so that I can go on to the next place. 

I do not want addiction.  Mine or anyone else's.  Absolem has always said that I have an addictive personality.  He's right and wrong, of course, like he always is.  His point was that I can easily get wrapped up and a bit obsessive about things—whether life or love or experience.  In my constant quest to understand my life, I do examine the details, over and over, until I have exhausted my understanding.  Sometimes that's just exhausting to the people around me, too.  But this is where I go back to my not wanting unavailability.  I don't want to be caught up in someone else's addiction, whether literal substance or figurative obsession.  I want to healthily carry my own burdens and not enable anyone else's.

I do not want fear.  I've written a lot about finding the impetus to overcome my own fears, usually of myself.  There will always be things that scare me.  I don't want the paralysis that comes with being afraid to make a choice or live my life.  This is probably the root of most of my historical stasis, and I want to be strong enough to swallow it down and move past the apprehension. 

I do not want anger.  There's a lot for me to be angry about, both with myself and with others.  I don't want to hang onto that anger, finding it to be the only fuel to move me forward.  I want to make peace with the past—with the unavailable men and the static and the addictions and the fear—and to let it go.  Not letting go keeps the pain of the past so very present.  I want to be able to look at those things and see them clearly in perspective, from a mild distance where they don't feel so cogent anymore. 

There are also a lot of things I do want.  I want Persona Non Grata to be successful.  (Thank you to everyone who has purchased it and downloaded it so far.  Your reviews and kind comments are incredibly important to me.)  I want to be productive writing the next book, Mantissa, which I started this week.  I want to enjoy my life with my children and to find ways to enjoy this new life on my own.  It's not what I'd planned or expected a year or even six months ago, but it's my life, no matter what.  And I will do everything I can to make my mark on this place in time. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported and encouraged me this year.  You have been often effervescent in your love, and I am deeply appreciative of that.  As big as 2012 was, here's to hoping 2013 is even bigger and better.  I'll let you know how it goes as I live it.