Muchness and Light

Scratchin' and survivin'.... Hangin' in and jivin'.

I wrote my last blog post four days before an unexpected first date.

That was eight months ago.

I have been crafting this post for weeks or longer, debating and processing what I wanted to say and what the implications were for me and others. I have thought about who would see this—those loyal readers who’ve been with me from the very beginning, the new friends I have picked up in the 10 years since I started writing again, the people who were removed from my life by their own accord or by mine, those who I know still lurk from time to time for whatever reasons.

Like so many others, I met him online. In the aftermath of my last breakup, I spent some time with some of my girls and debriefed, both before and after Achilles’ tendon surgery. I wanted to have some fun and see what the dating landscape might look like, for whenever I decided I was ready to spend time with another man. I needed to heal, both physically and emotionally. I was still working and raising two young men and in the middle of grad school.

But there was this smile, this tilt of the head that intrigued me. It was simply lovely. Candidly bashful but brazenly joyful and mischievous. Real, complicated emotion captured at just the right angle. Just the right moment.

We realized quickly we had mutual friends, people I’d gone to high school with in Alabama in the late 80s. Similar sense of humor. Incessant, funny, deep, honest conversation started immediately.

The day after I wrote my last blog post.

I was still in a splint and on a blue knee scooter with a basket, but we both wanted to meet. Soon.

That was eight months ago.

Neither of us could have foreseen this, though I suppose no one ever does. But our respective breakups happened almost simultaneously. There was no intention of becoming really involved with this man, and I know he had no intention of jumping into another relationship.

Woobiee. My manister. He’s warm and fuzzy and comfortable. He is strong and supportive. He is present and mindful and considerate. He has done his work—really, with a professional!—and he is wholly encouraging of my continuing my work. He is brilliant and funny and caring. He is gregarious and generous. He is complicated and open and honest even when it’s difficult for him or for me. He is respectful of my boundaries, and I am encouraged by his words and his actions to defend them when necessary, without fear of recrimination.

He did what I asked him to do—which is the same thing I asked of myself—to be open to the possibility, truly willing to accept the consequence of each other, good or bad.

That was eight months ago.

I could gush ad infinitum about his qualities, and I share those words with him regularly. That’s not what this is about.

Muchness and Light was born out of my need to understand myself and to change. Ten years ago, I was unhappy and unhealthy and restless. I didn’t understand that my midlife crisis was beginning. To look back from the position of my life now, it’s startling to see the changes. I don’t know how 2010 Stephanie would feel about 2020 Stephanie and if she would have made the same choices, if she’d known what changes were coming.

Whatever intention I had then, I have achieved only a modicum of success by those standards. I did some writing. I saw some bands. I did a lot of therapy. I have been in and out of a string of relationships that became increasingly nuanced in their unhealthiness.

Whatever I hoped or planned for in 2010 and in the subsequent few years didn’t materialize in the ways I’d intended.

What I got was even better.

I have gotten two sons almost to adulthood. I have a close-knit core of friends who love me, and whom I adore, even when we can’t be together. I am six hours away from finishing my third college degree. I work at a job that I love, and I intend to add part-time teaching to my schedule as soon as graduate school is finished. I am in a relationship that is healthier and more secure than I have ever experienced.

From the very beginning of this process, I have written about how it’s all about the journey and not the destination. I was always open to the possibility of having my path twisted and turned in unexpected directions. I often chose the road less traveled, just to have something new to see along the way.

Above all else, I wanted to live an adventure. It didn’t matter the details, so long as I could talk to my friends and hang with my kids and listen to music and eat some good food and spend time with a romantic partner who offered reciprocity in care and honesty. Nothing ever has to be grand; I thrive on small moments strung together like colorful, random beads.

That journey took me in an unimaginable direction. When I started Muchness and Light, I desperately needed to hear my own voice. It was never public validation that I needed. Accolades and encouragement from others is always nice, but what I needed most was to know that I existed and had value. For a while, I searched for proof that I had value to others.

What I was really always looking for was the value I had to myself.

Over the last 10 years, I have struggled through the demise of my marriage, the financial and emotional aftermath of divorce, returning to college while working and raising two kids, health issues, and one unhealthy relationship after another. Sometimes I flailed and raged against the difficulty and the unfairness of it all, but I never stopped moving forward. Not once.

I still have days that I struggle. Life continues, and my journey is ongoing.

But I am content. Most days, I’m happy. Some days are darker than most. But I am generally content in my life. I am still defiant in being exactly who I am, but it’s no longer in reaction to other people or their bullshit. I am no longer screaming to hearing my own echo, just to know I exist.

Woobiee has admonished me from the beginning to be present, to avoid comparing the past to the present or looking too far outside the immediate moment. As I’ve discussed before, creating expectation spawns the possibility of disappointment, and I still believe that to be true. But expending significant energy on extensive emotional contingency plans is exhausting, and Woobiee makes it safe for me to relax and enjoy myself. He does not make me happy—that’s wholly on me—but he supports and encourages my happiness to the best of his ability, with as much effort as I expend in supporting and encouraging his.

Most days, I am centered and Self-led. I am integrated and whole, better able to handle stressors and insecurities. Not perfect, but better. Self-aware and Self-actualized and Self-controlled.

One of the things I have struggled with is how to handle Muchness and Light.

This blog has been a huge part of my journey, though admittedly decreasingly so over the past couple of years. As my work and school took a different direction, I turned to this outlet less and less. I am no less- Self-analytical—perhaps even more so—but I can hash out those deep explorations with an audience of one or two who know me intimately; I no longer need to hear myself to know I exist.

 I am a Real Girl.

So I have decided to put this on hold indefinitely. I will likely leave something up for a while, at least until I can get my files downloaded and park my domain names and figure out what I want to leave publicly available. For a while, I felt as if I were letting down 2010 Stephanie and 2013 Stephanie and any number of internal parts and iterations that have depended on this medium to be heard.

But I realized they don’t need that anymore, either. Muchness and Light was an invaluable tool, and it helped me to find the voice I lost over the years. It helped me learn to listen to myself and to advocate for myself, even and especially when there is no one else who will advocate for me. The support is always nice, but it’s ultimately Me who is responsible for Me, no matter when or where I am.

I wanted a life with no regrets. That’s impossible to achieve, really. To be wholly human is to be flawed; it is how we react to the consequences of our flaws that defines us.

But to be comfortable in my own skin is blessing. It is a merciful gift that I have given to myself. All I could tell my earlier Selfs is that it gets better, to just keep going.

I intend to still be going for a while, just not this direction.

Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me and supported me and challenged me. You have been an integral part of my journey. Some of you always will be; some of you may never have a place in my life again, nor mine in yours.

Wherever your journey takes you, I wish you well. I wish you good health and peace and the exact amount of adventure that you need. I wish you contentment and love.

Just as importantly, I wish the same things for myself, and I intend to do everything in my power to make that happen.

I deserve no less.

- StephQJ 5/16/2020

 

 

I will wait for it. I'm not too late for it.

Absolem used to lament my penchant for hyperanalysis, especially coupled with my impulsivity.

“You don’t think, and then you think, and then you overthink!”

I mean, he’s not wrong. I can be suddenly and passionately reactionary, then take the time to process and ponder, then spend even more time breaking down every movement and choice of words and determining where I could have changed course.

What I’ve learned through a year of therapy using the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is that this is reflective of my parts—either “managers” or “firefighters” trying to protect some “exile” created from trauma—being blended with my Self. Some firefighter swoops in to act quickly, Self determines there likely could’ve been a better way, and some manager dwells on the minutiae for its own future reference.

In theory, it’s not necessarily a bad process to handle action and reflection. It gives those parts a chance to debrief and report back to Self. The problem comes when the parts effectively hijack Self, becoming blended, and the initial action is so reactionary as to be unhealthy.

And that hyperanalysis only ever stops if I am busy and distracted to the point of self-exhaustion.

Sometimes, though, it serves to let me evaluate a situation over time. In both my relationship with DH and later with Rango, our problems became so toxic to the relationship that things seemed insurmountable. But, in each case, I agreed to step back and take the time to move more slowly, to let us both reflect and reassess, to try to come toward the relationship and each other from a different perspective. In some ways, I should’ve broken up with Rango more than a year before I did. But giving us four months of separation, living apart, allowed for the time to try.

For me—hell, for anyone—ending a significant relationship is never easy. Once I’m attached to someone, it can take me a very long time to disentangle. This is part of having an anxious attachment style. So, when something happens that pushes me to feel vulnerable and emotionally injured (usually reminiscent of some past trauma), I can be quick to pull away, with every intention of ending the relationship. When I’ve had time to think about it, I’ll regret the suddenness of the separation, and then I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time in self-analysis, sometimes to the point of extreme self-recrimination.

I’ve spent the last year trying to learn to rewire my thinking, especially when it comes to how I react to emotionally-charged circumstances.

Taking the time to try to reconcile in those previous relationships made the eventual ending less painful. Choosing to end my 19-year marriage was hard as hell, make no mistake, but it was the right decision, in the end. While DH and I inflicted some serious damage on one another, I was eventually able to disengage. As painful as it was, I knew it was time and had no regrets about making the decision when I did. Similarly, taking the time to see if Rango and I could rebuild our relationship was absolutely the right choice, even if the result wasn’t what I’d hoped for. When that ended, I was sad for a time, but I also had zero question about whether it was really time to let go. Rango and Sass were dead, and I had no interest in holding onto that zombie.

Although my reasons for ending my relationship with Bumblebee were valid and healthy, I felt like the air had been sucked out of me. I have never missed someone as much as I missed him. While the reality of long-distance relationships is difficult to manage, there is no question that we love each other deeply. There’s no question that we have potential for a lasting, healthy, loving relationship like I’ve never experienced before. There’s also no question that the distance and the circumstance may be insurmountable.

But I have to try. I have to give this a chance to overcome the odds. Yes, it’s easier for me to move forward if I know there is absolutely no going back. But he also loves me in ways I have never before experienced.

So, the parts and I had a long talk. Could we walk away now, cleanly and comfortably, or did we want more time to see?

Above all else in my life, I do not want regrets. I would rather fail miserably at an opportunity I took than to let an opportunity slip away. And if I have reason to second-guess my decisions, I will.

So, Bumblebee and I have come to the decision to try. More specifically, to wait. He needs time to deal with logistics in his life. I need time to make sure I’m as healthy and well-equipped to handle a relationship as possible. We have agreed to wait for the other to be ready, to keep talking and maintaining connection, but also to remove other expectations and the pressures that come with them.

There is a love that we don’t want to lose. Maybe that still happens, no matter what we do. But there is also the possibility that we are able to weather this storm, together, and beat our own odds.

And I’ve never known anyone so worth the risk.

 

 

Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon.

During and after my break-ups of recent years, I have lamented why I wasn’t worth their fight. There is a lot of good about me, so why wasn’t it good enough? Was there something inherently broken, or was there something about me that was so bad that it outweighed the good?

In part 2 of this series, I wrote about what I find valuable in a partner. In part 1, I wrote about what I find to be valuable about myself. In hindsight, I do believe that the men I’ve loved found me inherently valuable. Whether or not they valued themselves, I’m not even sure I know, though their actions would indicate they valued themselves above all others.

But one of the things I realized recently is that we didn’t necessarily value the same things in a relationship. Shared interests and similar social and political leanings cannot sustain romantic interaction, if both parties aren’t looking for similar things in romance.

So what do I value in a relationship?

I value communication. It’s important for me to be in regular contact with the person I’m dating. It doesn’t have to be constant, though I fully admit that I am a very active texter, emailer, and caller. I will think of something that I want to share with that person, and I’ll send it before considering any ramifications. I don’t expect that there will always be an immediate reply, but it is important to me to get a response eventually. Ongoing conversation builds rapport, expresses affection in subtle ways, and strengthens bonds. But it’s just as important to me that expectations—of plans, of emotions, etc.—be shared. Far too often, I have inferred one thing to be true, only to be met with irritation that my interpretation was not at all what the other person intended.

I value reliability. Interaction doesn’t have to be constant, though it does have to be regular. Just as importantly, I have to be able to rely on the person to be there. Both because it’s just downright irritating when people don’t do what they say they’re going to do and because I have this deep-seated fear of abandonment, I need my partner to show up. I need them to show up when they say they’re going to, but also when they should. Dismissing important events or forgetting to do the logistical things that you’ve promised to do is an indicator that something in the relationship isn’t worth your time and effort. If you tell me you’re going to do something, show up and do it.  

I value kinesis. I spent a lot of time during my marriage and later in my relationship with Rango sitting around and waiting. I was waiting for them to get up on a weekend or waiting for them to get home from working late again or waiting for them to finish what they were doing to join me (or me and the boys) to do whatever. I stagnated in my marriage, and I became stagnant again during that subsequent relationship. It’s not that I can’t just sit and chill sometimes, but I enjoy going for walks at the park or going to see a concert or a show at a museum. But I also value emotional kinesis. I need movement forward. Not necessarily toward a goal of cohabitation or marriage [in part because I don’t know that I’ll ever be willing to do either of those again!], but at least toward shared future. Happily ever after shouldn’t mean stopping at some self-imposed pinnacle and hoping the balance of my life stays exactly the same.

I value family. My boys are a huge focus of my life, and that’s not changing any time soon. My extended family is important to me, and my girlfriends are the sisters I never had. Whomever becomes a part of my life becomes a part of that. It’s vital that we forge our own sense of family, as well, and that necessarily includes my babies.

I value safety. Yes, physical safety is a big deal. I was in one physically abusive relationship and for far, far longer than I like to admit. But emotional safety, for me and for my partner, is just as important. The relationship needs to be a safe space to share feelings and thoughts and ideas, without recrimination. Far too often, I have felt punished by my partner for expressing emotions he didn’t like. In healthy love, there’s no tolerance for stonewalling or emotional abuse.

I value passion. Look, physical passion may well dwindle after that ubiquitous honeymoon phase, but the loss of physical intimacy is the death knell for a relationship. I know; I’ve been there twice. Sex is natural (and wonderful and fun) and is a healthy expression of emotion and trust between two people. For me, a loving relationship will necessarily be emotionally and physically intimate.

I can write about what I want or need, what’s important to me in a relationship. But until I’m actually in a relationship again, I have no way to put these things into practice. Queen Frostine commented that my break-up with Finn was probably the healthiest and most mature I’d ever had. I do believe that I’m capable of clearly discerning when something is not working for me, of giving it time to grow rather than starting from a place of intense, immediate emotion, and of evaluating clearly whether or not the other person may be a healthy, cohesive match for me.

So I’m going to try dating again. At least theoretically, I’m open to the possibility.

But I’m also going to keep spending more time doing the things that are fulfilling to me, even if I don’t have a partner to join me. I’ve done a couple of 5Ks this year. I joined a fantastic philosophy discussion group that meets monthly. I’ve started volunteering.

If I meet someone who wants to join me for some things, I’m willing to let someone into that space. But I’m also keeping that space well-defined. It has taken me a very long time to realize that I’m worth my own effort, and I’m not willing to let that stagnate again.

 

 

Burn up a basement full of demons. Realize you're a slave to your mind. Break free.

A couple of weeks ago, in her perpetually optimistic way, Goldilocks suggested I give Finn a call.

“No. Absolutely not,” I responded.

“But why?” she pressed. “You guys got along so well. Maybe his schedule has eased—”

“No.”

When I told Pandy about the suggestion, she replied that she would be in agreement with Goldilocks.

But here’s the thing:

 As I see it, one of two things happened. Either I did have significant personal value to Finn, and he wasn’t able to communicate that or to make time for it (for me), or I wasn’t worth to him what he had previously indicated, and he wasn’t able to communicate that and bow out respectfully. Either way, he all but stopped reaching out to me. Even when I questioned whether his schedule would allow time for dating me, he assured me it did. But then it didn’t, given his line of work and the time of year. Rather than say, “Hey, I’m really sorry this is the exact thing I assured you it wouldn’t be,” he just let it drop until I made the call to see other people. Although I said I had no intention of cutting him off from contact and would still like to hear from him, there was nothing from him. After a month of radio silence, I did indeed add him to the ever-growing list of IGNORE THIS ASSHAT contacts in my phone and put him on permanent DND.

This was wholly indicative of much of my dating life the last five years. Sure, potential relationships dwindle, and other things are more important sometimes. Sometimes people realize they aren’t as interested as they’d initially believed. I’ve been on both sides of that. I’ve had dating plans hijacked by daily logistics.

And I admit to having ghosted on people, though never anyone I’d been dating for several weeks, as Finn and I had.

I find it to be cowardly behavior, and I’m tired of dating cowardly lions.

There’s no justification for my own cowardly action at times. Reasons, not excuses. Yes, it’s hard to say to someone that you’re just not feeling it, especially when you know first-hand the feeling of rejection that comes on the other side of that exchange.

But to say to someone that they are important, that they matter, that you enjoy your time with them and want more—with only them—and to then just let it dwindle is cowardly. That person must either keep putting up with feeling like an unimportant option because of your actions, or the other person must be brave enough to admit that their worth is higher than the value of your passive-aggressive rejection and make the call to end it.

That’s exactly what I did. Given my history of holding onto decaying relationships far past their natural expiration, especially to the detriment of my self-worth, it was strange to make the decision and carry through with it. It was uncomfortable as hell and felt a little arrogant to say to someone that their actions were unacceptable and to stop accepting them.

Breaking that cycle, not doing things the way I always have and letting the relationship drag on ad nauseum, is part of my redemption of my past. I can’t control what other people do. I have some control over what I feel about it. But I have complete control over how I react to their actions.

Part of the pathology of anxious attachment style is a repetition of the past, of constantly striving for some kind of cosmic do-over in which it eventually doesn’t turn out the same way it always has. Another part of the pathology is being attracted to emotionally-unavailable men—especially those who want desperately to believe that they are available and thus initially convince me that they are. But if I am always doing the same thing, so are they.

I’m by no means the first woman to be hurt by those men, and I likely won’t be the last. And here’s where I am trepidatious of my dating future. I don’t know what it will take for me to believe that someone else is telling me the truth—not some hopeful aspiration, but honest truth—that they 1) are willing and able to engage in a healthy relationship and 2) can maintain that healthy relationship when things get complicated and difficult, even if the relationship has to come to an end.

I am more jaded now than I was five years ago, and that’s part of the reason I’m choosing not to date right now. It’s not fear of rejection or disillusionment with love or men in general. I don’t want my jaded perceptions to establish expectations of others before I’ve given them an opportunity to truly engage me. I don’t want to go into a date with a half-hearted, cynical view, because it would never give that other person a fair shot at getting past my other defenses.

I get that I tend to dive inward deeper than most people are ever willing to go. My expectations of my own self-discovery and -exploration are so high that it would be unreasonable to expect that same of anyone else. But dammit! It irritates the hell out of me when people are too afraid to try to move past their pasts, to be too afraid to confront their own failings and shortcomings and to try to learn from it.

It’s hard as hell to admit that you have a role in the demise of your relationships. In my experience, it is never only one partner’s fault. Ever. No matter the circumstances. But to choose to hide your eyes and cover your ears to avoid your own truths, especially when you know it will mean you’ll continue to make the same mistakes over and over, hurting other people in the process, is utterly nonsensical to me.

Right now, I am reticent to believe that I will ever meet that man, who is brave enough to choke down his fear and really face himself, especially if it means having a clearer view of me. Right now, I’m not sure I would even recognize him. I don’t know that I could see past my own jaded expectations to see someone else clearly, and I’d likely end up right back in that same cycle of infatuation and rejection and hurt.

So I’m taking the time change my own views, which includes evaluating my own worth only through my own lens. I can’t adequately gauge my value by someone else’s metric. It’s hard. Sometimes it’s a little lonely.

But there is also freedom from expectation, of my self or of someone else, and so there is hope that I will be able to do it all differently, someday.

 

 

 

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How silent treatment is used as a defence - Andrea Harrn Counselling Services

And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me.

About a year ago, I was taking a class on women’s religious memoirs. While the women and their journeys were very different, I kept noticing a sometimes-subtle, secondary theme of self-compassion in each text. Mentions of the female Buddha Tara, a sublime personification of compassion and wisdom in female form, led me down a path toward the White Tara, which can be one of seven of the 21 primary emanations of Tara, representing the enlightened activity of pacifying. Sometimes this can be pacifying limitations of the physical body and overcoming illness and avoiding an untimely death. Sometimes it can be pacifying fears to overcome obstacles in a path to success or enlightenment.

In my readings, application of the teachings of the White Tara included applying those concepts to the self, especially for women, who seem more likely than male adherents to turn to Tara. I started to look online for “‘White Tara’ +self-compassion” and eventually stumbled across a book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, by Tara Branch. (See how that path goes along?) Writing from her own intersectional experience as a Buddhist and a clinical psychologist, Branch offers Radical Acceptance as a spiritually-healthy alternative to the “trance of unworthiness” that we tend to fall into when faced with unhealthy or unreasonable expectations and demands of society, family, and ourselves. She analogizes Radical Acceptance as a bird, which can only fly with both of its wings--in this case, clear seeing (mindfulness) and compassion.

She also posits that the Adam and Eve story is at the heart of much of Western dissatisfaction. Even if it’s not part of your chosen religion or mythos, she asserts, the idea--of punishing the self to redeem your own sins (and thereby the Original Sin) in order to be returned into God’s paradisiacal garden--so deeply permeates Western culture that it’s almost impossible to escape its influence. People are assumed to be inherently flawed, to be in need of repair and redemption for sins that may not even have been theirs to begin with. By this measure, our suffering stems from the conflict between the ideal of paradise and the manifestations of our intrinsic unworthiness, and we are caught in a constant cycle of struggling to redeem ourselves.

Of course I started to think about this in terms of my own struggles. It’s no surprise that I have consistently gone back to emotionally- and logistically-unavailable men. Subconsciously, I am always hoping the next one will do what the others couldn’t--love me no matter what, thereby alleviating the deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment that stems from my childhood.

Not only do those unavailable men never fulfill my hope for redemption, that’s a wholly unfair amount of pressure and expectation for me to put on anyone else. So if they can’t make up for what was done to me in the past, and if the people who traumatized me to begin with can’t undo what they did and are unlikely to ever make any kind of real amends for their transgressions (see that sin thing happening again?), then how exactly am I supposed to get over my fears?

Where is redemption for me, for my inner child? What does redemption even mean for me?

Those things happened. I can’t escape the reality of having been sexually or physically or emotionally abused. While I have finally come to understand that they weren’t my fault, that I didn’t choose to be a sexualized object or to find the man I loved had moved his heart a million miles away from my own and blamed me for it, I do have culpability in how I responded to the trauma. Especially within the context of adult romantic relationships, I could be difficult and demanding, so desperate not to feel what I was feeling as a result of my insecurities coming into contact with theirs. I had moments of utter tantrum and a fatalistic view that if that relationship in that moment couldn’t be fixed in such a way that I felt secure, then I must be unlovable and undeserving of anything different or more.

But that’s just not true, either.

Yes, my insecurities are strong and numerous. So were theirs. That’s just a reality of lives experienced into established adulthood. Sometimes bad shit has happened, and we all have developed in response to those stimuli.

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.

I met Finn a few weeks ago and really liked him from the beginning. There’s a lot about him that’s truly wonderful, and it was exciting to see the possibility of something again. It was reassuring to find that I was attractive to someone else, both physically and psychologically.

But Finn’s schedule and my schedule don’t mesh. He works long hours on a schedule that’s very different than my own. Our time together had dwindled considerably. While I loved spending time with him, to date someone requires actual interpersonal engagement within a certain physical proximity. Logistical conflicts made seeing each other very difficult, and I made the decision to be open to other possibilities.

Reliability and consistency are very important for me. I am not comfortable with not knowing when I’ll see my romantic partner again. Rango accused me many times of wanting him “up [my] ass 24/7,” which was actually not the case at all. What I did want was to know that I was a priority--not the only priority--and that I would get concerted care and attention from him. I needed reliably consistent and consistently reliable. I needed to know that he would set aside time to show up and would actually show up when he said he was going to.

I didn’t take it as a personal affront with Finn. Whereas I might have previously seen his inability to spend time with me as a rejection of me outright, this wasn’t. His work schedule is hectic. He tried to make time for me, because he liked me and wanted to spend that time with me. He just wasn’t able to do it at times when I was also available.

I don’t feel abandoned by him. It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t make our schedules work. I really, really like him, and I was looking forward to exploring more with him. I miss him a little bit. I’ve had a few moments where I felt a little sad that I don’t have time with him to look forward to. But I was constantly looking forward to time that wasn’t coming, that he couldn’t provide because his job is different than mine--not because he didn’t like me enough to want that time.

So I made the decision to do what was healthy for me. Rather than drag it out for weeks or months longer, hoping beyond hope that it would magically fall into place, I gave myself the freedom not to be bound by the emotions and unhealthy responses to them that would come from fighting futility. I didn’t have a tantrum. I made a Self-led decision and executed it without blame or recrimination--aimed neither at him nor at myself.

When the pangs do come, I take a moment and let them sit. Sometimes I’ll feel something and one sub-part will immediately chime in with her interpretation of what that emotion is and means.

“Oh, that’s irritation. That’s the beginning of angry, because he didn’t make time to show up to see you, and that means he wasn’t ever going to be able to love you like you need, and your needs aren’t unreasonable, and he’s an asshole for not seeing how wonderful you are--”

Shush.

Breathe.

“But--”

Shhhhhhh.

Yes, it might be irritation. It might be at him, or it might be at me, or it might be at the email I just got, or it might be at the scratchy tag on the inside of my shirt. It’s just an emotion, and it will pass almost as quickly as it came. There’s no need to turn the faucet on just to watch the water swirl. But you’re sweet to be concerned. You’re sweet to defend me and to protect me, and I love you for wanting to.

I try to be mindful of the emotions, to clearly see what they are, and to treat them compassionately, letting them exist without the endless overanalysis that always seems to end in judgment and recrimination. They are neither good nor bad; they simply are, and to let them just be is the healthiest way I can deal with them.

The same goes for the men I meet, and it goes for me, too. Certainly there are not nice people in the world, but someone else’s bumping up against my insecurities doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person. My even having or admitting to my own insecurities doesn’t make me a bad person. While I twistedly pride myself on being able to pick out the Fragile Cats quickly in a crowd, I can’t usually know how their issues will play with mine until we are engaging. Rather than hope beyond hope that an extreme avoidant will love me so much that it changes his attachment style--thereby helping me to change mine--it’s far healthier for me to work on myself and to politely disentangle from any relationship that seems very likely to be unhealthy for me.

The redemption comes not through someone else’s choices in how they love me but rather in my own choices of how I love myself.

It’s all still new. It’s an ongoing process, of course, and I won’t really know how I’ll respond to emotional stimuli until I am adequately stimulated. For now, there’s no agitation or anxiety, no desperation to quell an internal storm of fear or dissatisfaction or loneliness.

Today, I’m just aware, and I’m not beating myself up over it.

 

 

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You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

Is that too much to ask? Well, maybe I'm an idiot.

About three months ago, Rango and I made the decision that he would move out. More than a year of tension and difficulty had spiraled us into a pretty deep pit of darkness, and neither of us could see a way out together. We decided pretty quickly that we still wanted to try to make things work. We continued dating. He still spent time at the house, still called it home, still saw the boys as regularly as their schedules would allow. For several weeks, we both thought we were on track for him to move back home.

But tensions surfaced again about a month ago. Old patterns emerged in both of us, and we find ourselves again in a depressing spiral. We love each other, but our respective needs and wants clash constantly. He feels pressured to give more than he’s able, stressing that I should just accept him the way he his—which he is not going to change for anyone. I think a caring partner makes the other a priority and tries to support their happiness, even and especially when it is inconvenient or difficult. By no means am I suggesting that one partner should kowtow to the other constantly. That’s not healthy at all. But sometimes we should do things that are best for the people we love, even when it requires uncomfortable effort on our part.

The last year has been exceedingly rife with difficulty. After my thyroid radiation, it took months before I started to feel physically and emotionally normal again, due to shifting hormone levels. By the first of the year, it became clear that my chronic neck pain had worsened, and I had a three-level discectomy and fusion in April. I was working full time and finally finishing my bachelor’s degree after twenty-seven years of on-again/off-again, half-hearted attempts. I hoped that alleviating most of those stressors would give us a fresh start toward reconciliation and growth.

I didn’t talk about it much. I tried to avoid it most of the time with the girls. The Castration Committee is amazing, and they will back me up no matter what. But bringing other people into the relationship, even tangentially, can profoundly influence perceptions—and not always for the better. Also, due to somewhat skewed perspectives, my family wasn’t always supportive and could be judgmental. Mostly I found it better to keep it to myself or between me and Rango. Mostly.

But as we’ve come again to a place of incredible conflict, I’m turning back to Muchness and Light. I haven’t written in months. I have barely written for the last two years. Much of that was due to school and work and health and child obligations. Much of it was due to my not feeling it was worth it.

DH told me years ago that I should stop writing, that blogging was nothing more than an echo-chamber. He was vitriolic in his assertion that only my friends cared about what I had to say. I know he was wrong, at least to an extent. But it also became apparent as time went on with Rango that he didn’t care to read what I had to say, although he would encourage me to write. He understood it was cathartic for me—effectively making it nothing more than a publicized diary—but that he had no interest in engaging my thoughts in this forum. This week, I’ve been told that I should just blog what’s bothering me and find a way to fix my messy head, but that he is uninterested in either climbing a wall of text intended for him or in talking about our problems.

At heart, he’s a good man. He is generally kind and generous. He loves me and loves my sons. But he often seems dramatically different than the man I met and fell in love with. Time has passed; we have changed. But where I thought we both wanted to grow and change together, he believes he hasn’t changed at all and that I shouldn’t expect him to.

When I did finally break down and really talk to Pandy, she said I deserve more. She is sweet and whole-heartedly believes I deserve to be in a healthy, committed relationship, receiving the same love I so freely give.

But she’s wrong.

I don’t deserve to be loved. No one deserves to be loved. As I said a few posts ago, the only thing anyone deserves is an eventual death. I used to believe that there was some cosmic force that somehow wanted good things for me, that maybe if I did good things then I would receive them in return. I believed in deep, abiding, passionate love that was reciprocal and maybe (just maybe!) destined. For a little while, I believed that I was worth enough to get happiness, not to be faced constantly with disappointment and hurt.

But I was wrong. There’s nothing up in the sky but air.

No matter how hard I try to be good, to be accommodating, to be considerate, I cannot make someone else do the same. I cannot make someone be or do what I think is ideal—or even what I think is a reasonable compromise. I can’t force them to hear me or try to see anything from my point of view. I can only accept them for who they are or not. I can live with their personality and eccentricities or move on.

I don’t expect perfection from anyone. I’m even learning not to expect it from myself. I have worked really hard to not overreact to emotions, to sit with them and understand their locus, to act appropriately in response to those emotions. But I can’t not respond to them.

So, there is sadness and grief, hurt and probably some anger. I’m sure more will come later. I’m sure it will abate eventually.

But I’m not berating myself that I deserve any of these feelings, either. So maybe I did change for the better, after all.

 

 

Underneath my lucid skin, the cold is lost, forgotten.

During an ongoing conversation with a friend about happiness, I asked him what it is in his life that keeps him from being happy.

“What does this elusive happiness look like? What do you believe will bring that happiness? How will it manifest—will you find it, will it find you, or will you make it? What are you struggling against, that you feel is keeping happy away for more than short bursts? What are you willing to change or eliminate in order to make room for this happiness?”

Of course, this banter comes on the heels of my own burst of unhappy this weekend. I have been frustrated that life isn’t necessarily how I want it to be. Since DH moved out of state two years ago, he has had very little interaction with the boys. Phone calls and email have been sparse, and visitation totaled 28 days in that two-year span. (Though I am happy that he has been making a much more concerted effort to rectify that, as of late. <fingers crossed>)

That has left me with very little time in which to connect with myself on my terms. His absence coincided with my starting college and work, so I have lived in the constant pace of mom and student and employee. Constrained by obligation and time and money, I have had to forego a lot of the time to be “free” I’d previously had when the boys were with their father.

Because the boys were getting older and more self-sufficient, I’d been able to take some time away from them, a few hours for class or work or the occasional (bad) date. Then I met Rango.

“Wow,” he said during our first date, “with so much going on, how do you find time to date?”

“If it’s important to me, I will make time for it,” I replied.

Eventually—especially once GOAL was added to my plate—I started to butt up against real limitations. There are only so many hours in a day in which to accomplish what needs to happen in our life. I had to make serious adjustments.

Of course one of the first things to go was working out. If the exhaustion isn’t enough to drop me in bed by 9:00, household chores or schoolwork keep me busy. Now that I’m at Mercer in a program for working adults, my day starts at 6:00 a.m. and often doesn’t end until class lets out sometime after 10:00 p.m.—plus the drive home and the unwinding before I can even sleep before I get up and do it again. Having the boys for nearly 100% of the year also added substantial additional cost; it turns out teenage boys eat a lot, and their school/social activities are time-consuming and expensive.

This week, again, Facebook popped up with my “memories”—pictures from that day in years past. This time it was from a specific night three years ago with Pandy. I looked at the picture and thought, “I miss my purple hair. And I miss my collarbones.”

Toward the end of my marriage, I rebelled against the domesticity I’d created. I felt trapped and struggled to find meaning or purpose that didn’t stem directly from my role as wife and mother. Never happy in the medium, I swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it, at times, wreaked havoc on my life.

So while I desperately miss the freedoms that come with fully embracing the Sassafras O’Malley persona, I am also careful to remember the confusion and static and sheer craziness that often came with that liberty. Sassafras has a tendency to be where she probably shouldn’t be.

Right now I’m living the life I need to be living: working full time, taking care of and providing for my children, going to school more than half time in order to finish as quickly as possible, succeeding by everyone’s metrics, including mine. And I have the support of a life partner who helps with as much as he can.

But sometimes, I still feel unhappy.

While doing homework over the weekend, I read a quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”

Because I’m not able to do what I want, when I want, I often feel stagnant. I feel trapped by circumstance that’s changing far slower than I would like, given my incredibly impatient nature. Sometimes I feel resentful when that circumstance is to blame for the lack of freedom and the feeling of stagnation. And it doesn’t matter that my head knows better; my gut is screaming that it feels wrong, that it feels too much like my life before, and my heart gets angry.

When I feel those emotions, I have choices in how to react. I can scream and go off my fucking rails, which very people have ever seen. For everything I have experienced with Rango, he has never been witness to a full-fledge Stephie Meltdown. I can choose to hold it all in and just pretend it’s not there, cycling slowly through more resentful. Or I can feel it and acknowledge it and let it go.

Knowing myself the way I do, I usually choose the latter, but Rango called me out on my methodologies. He complained that I become cold and distant, obviously struggling with some emotion that I refuse to let escape the icy surface. He’s right. I eventually found that the quickest way out of my own head was to jump in, dropping into it as quickly as possible, and then use that downward momentum to push off the inevitable bottom, letting the pressure release as I rise back to the top in a stream of my own bubbles.

But as long as I feel like there are things missing or that I am bound by circumstance, I will still have moments of discontent. I will still have impetus to feel unhappy at times.

Maybe happy isn’t the goal. My former therapist told me once that happiness is a fleeting emotion and that content is likely the healthier alternative I am most likely to feel content when I am living my life on my own terms, in my own way and at my own pace. But because I have relationships with other people, especially those three men who live in my house, I am morally obligated to take their contentment into consideration as well. What I want is sometimes in conflict with what they need.

So for now, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to make those small changes I talk about in my GOAL speeches, to pick up the pieces I keep dropping and put them together in the ever-expanding mosaic that makes up my disco ball. For once in my life, I’m thankful to have these big hands that let me hold more than seems possible.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it. 

 

I'm sorry to interrupt. It's just I'm constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you.

Two evenings ago, I went to the grocery store, as I so often do during the course of Mom Duty.  I stopped to put gas in my car (which I hate to do more than anything in the world).  Just as I switched off my ignition, my phone dinged with a message from an ex and another one drove by.  Simultaneously.

Oh hell!

Over the last year, I've been out with a couple dozen men.  Most did not get a second chance.  I currently have a listed of 18 blocked numbers in my phone.  (FYI, on an iPhone, texts from blocked numbers are lost in the ether with no response to the sender.  Phone calls will go straight to voicemail.  Anything recorded stays hidden unless you unblock the number, at which point they show up in a special voicemail directory.) 

I didn't shoot them all down immediately.  I'm still casual friends with a couple of the guys I met.  (At least four of you are Facebook friends.) 

But there were a select few who drew my heart into theirs.  We moved past the point of casual chat to an actual relationship.

I've talked at length about my super ability to attract Fragile Cats.  I swear some days it's like my front door is wide open, and they just saunter across my threshold and demand to be fed and pet, twisting their long tails around my legs and tripping me up before I even realize they're there.  Ultimately they are skittish and unavailable, whether emotionally or logistically, though they'll almost always declare that's not the case.  One even swore he wasn't a cat at all—that he was, in fact, a coyote. 

When I realize they're skittish and about to run, I always offer them time and space.  Always.  They never take the chance.  Inevitably, they freak out and bail and let me down in some ludicrously soul-wrenching way.  I toss them out in my anger but always relent a few days later, letting them stew in the sun on my front porch.  Where I leave them a saucer of cream.  And the key to my back door. 

(There are a lot of always in that paragraph.  Note the pattern here.)

I am impossibly accommodating with these men.  I am equally forgiving and supplicating, because I completely understand how they work; I get why they're so easily spooked, and somehow I continue to hope that they will see something special enough in me to be worth their effort to at least try to correct their behavior.  For themselves and for me.  I care about them—hell, I even loved two of them—so of course I would do everything possible to make it work, to give them reason to meet me halfway.  Or at least a quarter of the way.  (I'm a long-legged resourceful girl; I can close the gap myself.)   

I'm unable to just cut someone like that out of my life at the slightest provocation.  It feels inherently wrong to me, to disregard someone you care about so much.  Because of my history and expectations, I have an unusually (annoyingly) high tolerance for douchebaggery.  I'm incapable of writing them off right away, though God knows the Castration Committee wishes I would learn how. 

But when they fuck it up again, that's when I'm done.  Usually.  Or I try to be.  (Again, my issues with boundaries.)

What pisses me off, though, is the text or email or phone call a few months later, telling me how much they miss me, how they think about me and wish things had gone differently.

You miss me?  Fuck you!

Every single one of them had the chance at something extraordinary.  They knew it at the time and while they were letting it go.  They would profess their care for me while throwing up their hands, apologizing for hurting me while they slapped me across the face.  (Figuratively, not literally.  The Castration Committee would harm me if I let that shit happen.  Again.)

I'm not a toy to be discarded and brought back out months later, when you realize you'd forgotten how much fun it was to play with me.  I am a really spectacular woman who cared deeply for you, and you dismissed me with a multitude of reasons and excuses.  You told me to my face that I mattered while you crossed your fingers behind your back. 

Fuck you.

And with all of them but one I am able to comfortably and happily live in a healthily detached state.  It is still a struggle, every goddamn day, to keep that one in perspective, to actively remind myself of the bad that came with him and how it almost sucked the good out of me. 

That's the one who appears when I least expect it but when I am least surprised.  That's the one who lives the closest, who I sometimes pass on the road... the one who reads my blog regularly because he misses my voice and this is the closest he can bring himself to hearing me.  The one who got away but it is never far away at all—even at 3 a.m. when we're both lying in bed missing the other.  The one who altered everything, for whom I altered everything, but who can't get his big, beautiful head out of his ass long enough to admit that he fucked it up and shouldn't have given up so goddamn quickly. 

He will read this.  He'll know it's directed at him.  He will likely continue to lurk, waiting for the time he sees that I've moved on with someone else and am in a safe enough space that he can be my friend again. 

But he's also the one I can never be friends with, even though I miss him like mad.  He's the one I loved so deeply and so passionately that the wounds of losing him are still sensitive and raw.  They'll heal eventually, but I'll be left with more scars that leave numb, faded spots on my surface. 

Maybe those are the mars I'll finally tattoo with chains, turning something ugly into something beautiful.

The rest of them can go to Hell.  He's the only one I'd follow into those depths to bring out or join, whatever it took to keep him safe. 

Some of the others will read this, too.  They'll start to think it's about them and then feel the pang! when they realize they're mistaken.  Again. 

But to every single one of you, you had your chance.  You can miss me all you want.  It doesn't change a thing. 

Unless you're that one.