It’s been 6 years.
I keep popping up in ye olde blog and yammering on about my feelings.
Buckle up buttercups, experiment 698 underway.
I have spilled my guts in here, my messy, yucky, stupid guts.
Some of it is hard to write. Some of these stories stayed hidden from even myself because of the shame and absurdity of the choices I have made.
I contemplated quitting this last week. No more blog.
But I am here.
This is my process and half a million people seem to like peeking in at my life and seeing what shenanigans I am getting up to this week.
I just hit a real half a million, I must have missed it. Yay me.
Quarter million on the corresponding Facebook page and I walked away from that too. But this is different.
I follow probably a hundred or so pages on Facebook. My little stained-glass window into the world. And god I envy the poets. They can sum shit up in 50 words or less that has taken me a thousand words in each of my 700 posts. Like a lot. I try not to compare myself to others, but man, I know some really amazing people.
But one woman in particular prompted me bolting to my laptop in the middle of the night last night, she posted a story about how she ended up in a bad relationship.
Some follower of hers chimed in saying ‘you write a lot about your past’, like it’s a bad thing. I rushed in, sword blazing.
The pen is the sword.
I replied, “we examine the past to build a better future.”
I do. Why else would I write this stuff? Why else would you be here?
Some of it is downright embarrassing. Some criminal. Some painful.
But it’s mine. And if I don’t learn from it and figure out what I am doing here, there was no point in living through it now was there.
I gave the PG rated Cliff’s notes of the last 30 or so years of my life to the guy I accidentally messaged from high school. I didn’t just vomit them up, he asked. It was a requested regurgitation. And you know what he said?
I better not develop feelings for you, or I might get crushed.
Please don’t.
We call that a self-fulfilling prophecy ‘round here.
But truth is, this is all just a little bit of history repeating, from high school no less. Not the dude I was talking to, but how things are.
The more things change, the more my life looks like revamped reruns with new actors in old roles.
But him saying that did feel like a light slap in the face.
I actually had to sit down and count how many times this has happened.
Pretty much all of them.
I have the choice now to stop it or embrace it.
Now, I don’t know how far back you have read but I need to tell a little story here.
All about having one foot out the door for 26 years and finally earning the wings I have tattooed on my forearm.
12. 13. 14
The car wreck removed a lot of dates and chunks of my memory. Lost some vocabulary too. I got that back playing scrabble, but the memories are gone. And while that pains me as an archivist, some are probably better off lost.
But I will always remember that one.
It was post car wreck. Post farm emancipation. And almost a calendar year into me deciding to go it alone.
I was never really alone.
And therein lies the problem.
I see all these memes and poems and declarations, usually from a feminine perspective about not wanting to be loved by halves.
Fair. I survived the sisterwife situation, but I was getting around 17% there. He wasn’t every good at loving and I wasn’t terribly lovable. And I loved him by less than half.
And here is the 5:10 epiphany, right on time.
I have spent my entire adult, waking, dating life with one foot out the door.
Gee, I wonder why none of that ever worked out.
One word, one hint of commitment from high school sweetheart and I would have bolted from any of the lives I lived in the middle of the night.
Not terribly fair now is it.
While I was hoping, wishing, and waiting to finally be enough for that one person, there were men right in front of me hoping, wishing to be enough for me. Sorry guys.
In my defense, I was not consciously aware of this. It started when I was 13 years old, I had never been any other way, so how could I know.
He was 3000 miles away living his own life and checking in at random. He did save my life once, and for that I am grateful.
Then the great cataclysmic events of 2013 occurred, and I went on a journey of self discovery.
I thought no one ever loved me because they didn’t really know me because I never really knew myself.
That’s a fair statement. I don’t really think it’s wrong, just not all of the problem.
And then I just repeated the same shit over and over.
I had Sunday for 2 years.
I would have to look it up, but I would bet the farm that as soon as that head was severed, Giant sprung up in his place.
Not the same. Just similar patterns. I never loved Sunday. The dates and days themselves were lovely. I enjoyed having something to look forward to, but we had an old married couple routine about a month in and I clung to the familiarity of it for far too long. Messed up a couple good things with potential because of my need for a safety net.
Giant I love. But in a ‘I can happily watch him be happy from a distance and that’s enough’ kinda way.
Took a couple years to get there with him too.
But he is not an excuse, nor an out, nor a net.
He did set a beautiful precedent for what it feels like to be loved in my entirety, in the moment, messy bits included. I have forgotten (especially on that island) to hold myself to the standards he set, which is probably the reason he is afraid for my mortal soul when I go back.
There is another article brewing that involves him. But I digress.
12. 13. 14, after a month (or 5) of intense late night conversations with high school sweetheart, I realized it wasn’t just that I didn’t know myself, I didn’t know him either. 26 years had elapsed, and we weren’t who we started out being.
And I realized what a huge block he had been in my heart and my life… and he really didn’t treat me that great, historically speaking. What he was offering was not enough.
The bar for what I wanted and how I allowed myself to be treated was so low it was buried in the sand on the beach from when we were young.
Maybe if we had been brave enough to be honest at the beginning things would have been different. But we were just kids then, and the person I became didn’t really like the person he had become.
So on December 13th 2014 I let him go.
26 years loving the same person.
But as I put my phone on the charger that night and fell asleep in my perfect green room in the Milton house, I did not know if I was going to exist in the morning.
I have written about this before. At the time is was terrifying and traumatic. Then it was liberating.
A week later I got wings tattooed on my wrist. Almost got 12. 13. 14 on there too, but I knew I would never forget.
The last day of our acquaintance.
The day I became free.
My heart did anyways.
For once I was finally in possession of the whole thing. And while quite large in size, my heart is very light, like a cloud full of love.
Everything changed for me then, as it continues to change. But I know I became much more myself that next morning. The me that exists now, and other than a few fuck ups and foibles, I like myself.
I don’t regret holding on and I don’t regret letting go.
I am proud of what I did, not the chaos it caused to other people, but that I made a decision and held it sacred for 2/3 of my existence. That I was able to love someone unconditionally with no strings or rewards, just because I did.
I am also proud that finally, after a 26 year habit, I quit something that was no longer serving me.
I know what I am capable of holding onto and letting go of and the general consensus is that this makes me dangerous.
I don’t see it that way.