I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.
But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.
I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.
I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)
Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.
In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.
I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.
All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.
I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.
When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?
I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.
Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”
I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.
He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.
And he told me it was for my own good.
I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.
But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.
Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….
Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.
I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.
And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.
The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.
This breakup with Bumblebee has been foundationally shattering. Over the course of a few days, my plans and my beliefs about my life just shifted. Grad school and work and boys are still ongoing. I’m still getting ready for an upcoming surgery to repair a blasted Achilles’ tendon that has bothered me all year.
But I’ve also mourned. A lot. I haven’t slept consistently, and most days the thought of food makes me nauseated. I’ve seen 4:30 a.m. most mornings this week, eyeing the tear-blurred clock blearily.
I’d forgotten how hard this part is.
In reality, I begged him not to make me remember. From the very beginning, I laid out what I was afraid of and why. More from self-awareness than from self-fulfilling prophecy, I knew the depths of despair I was likely to fathom if another man let me down in those ways.
Alas, here I am.
My therapist praised me for having been truthful and honest and open from the beginning, for giving him the literal playbook to prevent my being hurt. Don’t do this to me. For giving him the opportunity to take the responsibility for his actions within my boundaries.
“But maybe most people can’t handle that,” she said. “Maybe most people not only can’t be themselves, but they also can’t handle you being yourself.”
Fuck. This is hardly the first time I’ve been faced with such musing, from someone else or from myself. I have a tendency to see straight into other people, especially emotionally avoidant men, call them out on their shit, and tap my foot impatiently while hoping they will step up and make the changes they need to make. I know how hard that can be. I’ve done it. I’m still doing it.
It took me a damn long time to realize I wasn’t going to be redeemed by anyone else. No other person can ever make up for the shit that has been done to me—or for the shit I have done to myself. That responsibility lies squarely with me.
But the redemption comes not from meeting someone who can not do the stupid shit that undermines my tenuously-reintegrating psyche. It comes from my not making the same choices, not having the same limited emotional responses to similar stimuli.
And this time, I did do it differently. It still wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t enough.
But I am a girl who believes in Love. Deeply. Completely. Yes, in its redemptive power.
It took me decades to realize that my paternal grandparents had set the example for what love was supposed to be. More than fifty years of commitment and love and songs trilled across the house to one another. No fights, just “discussions” and intense care and open affection, no matter what. (At least as was shown to me.)
The daughter of an abusive alcoholic who fell in love with a magician and lived happily ever after.
I have spent my life looking for literal magic.
To love someone is an act of grace. It is to be willing to accept their flaws, to offer forgiveness before slights are committed, to promise to be there and to accept them, no matter what. Love is a mercy, both to them and to yourself, and that spark is as close to the divine as we may ever experience on this Earth.
“I think you need to rethink what it is you want from love,” Queen Frostine said to me. “I know you want that redemption, but maybe it comes in a different form than you want.”
I get her point. I do have people in my life who love me, whom I also believe will be there for me, no matter what. She is one of the few, and she knows it.
But Queen Frostine or Pandy or any of my Psyrens can’t be there in the middle of the night. They can’t be there to hold me or to share in deep ecstasy. They aren’t the ones with whom I want to craft that magical life.
I am afraid that the likelihood of my ever getting the empirical proof of the mystical, of what I know exists because I am borne of it, grows smaller and smaller with each passing year and broken relationship. The reality is that I am unlikely to end this life with that resolution, both because of other people and because of myself.
It seems as if my Holy Grail will be forever ensconced in gauzy veil.
And it is frightening to me, to think of becoming the thing I hate the most, of turning into the monster that hides under my own bed.
This is what I begged him not to do.
I understand that I still have the power to make me and to make my life what I most want it to be.
Except what I want isn’t happening. Still. Again. And it’s deflating. The only way I know to make the cycle stop is to get off the damn carousel, but I keep reaching for the brass ring one more time. Just one more time!
I’m dizzy from the trying.
Maybe it’s the last bastion of adulthood. It begins with realizing your parents are simply human. Maybe it ends with accepting your own mortality, closing the binding-worn Fairytales and shelving it forever.
What if that’s not what I want?
Maybe what I want is delusional. Maybe my love of myth and tortured epic is the fairytale I get. Maybe I am fated to live out my life as a Grimm protagonist.
Except I know it exists. I know couples who commit to respectful, equitable, mutual reciprocity, who gift one another with care and affection, whose passion ebbs but also flows for decades.
I don’t know how my story will end. I almost gave up on Bumblebee in October, and I made the decision to try again. It still went unexpectedly south, but I tried. I will try to keep trying, though I’m unsure I will ever be successful in that endeavor.
Yes, my girls will still be there, no matter what. There are a few others. More importantly, I will still be there, no matter what. And I will continue to be exactly who I am—open and honest and clever and smart and loving—because I don’t want to be my own monster.
On the first Friday in January, after my New Year’s Eve had gone awry, I was driving home from work, anticipating a long, lonely weekend. I was a little agitated, my anxiety still unreasonably high, worried about how another weekend alone would go. But Bumblebee called, as he often does in the early evening, asking how I was.
“I’m tired,” I lamented. I hadn’t slept well for several days, and it was starting to take a serious toll on my overall health.
“What will help?” he asked.
“Sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.”
“What if I’m there to sleep with you?” He paused. “I’m giving you three hours’ notice, as you’ve asked. I’m on my way.”
And just like that, he drove on a Friday afternoon from Birmingham to Atlanta to see me. We still missed a midnight countdown and champagne, but we did manage to see Bumblebee in the theater (as we’d planned for months) and to get pho (as we’d planned for two weeks). We managed to escape into our beloved bubble, tucked away from the world and focusing on us (We. Oui.) and recharging our shared battery.
All of my disappointment from the screwed up New Year’s Eve, which had ballooned a growing anxiety into an almost-panic, was assuaged by his showing up. As I’ve discussed so many times before, much of my anxiety both comes from and drives my fear of emotional abandonment. Often in my life, love meant leaving, it meant disappointment, it meant hurt—all of which my internal system interpreted as Stephanie simply wasn’t worth loving.
In October, the logistics of the long-distance relationship had started to take their toll. What I need from a partner is hard to maintain across such distance, especially my need for physical touch and consistent, reliable interaction. Hell, I’ve broken up with more than one local man for not being able to make time to see me, because “to date someone requires actual interpersonal engagement within a certain physical proximity.” I swore off the possibility of long-term relationships—until this started with him.
But looking back to the series I did last year on what I value in myself, in a partner, and in a relationship, there was no question that Bumblebee more than meets those criteria. He is brilliant and kind, humble and funny. He is extraordinarily patient, especially with me, and he is deeply and readily passionate. Even with the distance and the circumstances of our lives, the apprehension of love again after divorce, he acknowledges his fear and chooses to be open and available to me anyway. We maintain regular contact and conversation, although sometimes our schedules make it hard to have more than a few minutes of talk on a given day. He is physically and emotionally the safest partner I’ve ever known. The girls have welcomed him as a part of our family, and vice versa. We are slowly moving forward, together, even if we aren’t sure what exactly that will look like.
The difficulties of the distance were outweighed by the reciprocity and depth of emotion and care that we share, and we decided we could not let this relationship go.
But… long distance relationships are hard. We don’t get impromptu lunches or random Tuesday nights together. When I wake from a difficult dream, or just rouse to the Litany of Bullshit that Might Go Wrong, I don’t get to reach for him in the middle of the night. I don’t get to comfort him with a hug after a long day at work, or to care for him when he’s sick. Even if the physical distance of 180 miles isn’t that difficult to overcome, visitation schedules and divorce logistics and family commitments often interfere. Given the still-budding nature of our relationship, almost none of our mutual friends know we are dating, and our time together rarely includes anyone but us.
The inconsistency is both cause and effect of our current posture, and it can be frustrating. For me, it can drive my anxiety to ridiculous levels. For a girl who hates to feel like she’s trapped in a box, the necessary compartmentalization that comes from a long-distance relationship can be terrifying. Not being an active, open part of his day-to-day life can sometimes leave me feeling like an option. On the worst days, I feel like a dirty little secret, which can trigger years’ worth of trauma around shame. The parts of my internal system get conflicted, imagining different outcomes that almost always end in despair. Some days, I break up with him in my head a dozen times or more, simply out of fear that he might one day leave me.
But… the distance does give us opportunity to practice communication. Unless we can manage a FaceTime call, we are limited to text and voice chat. Without the benefit of non-verbal cues, we have to make a very concerted effort to listen to the other. Misunderstandings do happen, but we tend to address them very quickly. Having lived the damage caused by unspoken resentment in relationships, we are usually quick to politely air our grievances and move on, not allowing small scrapes and bruises to fester.
It’s impossible to foresee every twist and turn our relationship may take—and we have been sideswiped more than once by some pretty ugly unexpectedness. But we are both sensitive to not repeating the same patterns and mistakes that caused other relationships to fail.
“You know,” I said to him over breakfast on Sunday, at the end of a 15-hour visit, “maybe it’s good that we’re not in the same city. If we were, we’d be seeing each other every day and just doing what we do--”
“—settling into a groove.”
I shook my head disdainfully. “You know I’m never going to let that happen, right?”
“Baby,” he replied evenly, holding my gaze, “I’m counting on it.”
I am superstitious about a few things, and New Year’s Eve is at the top of that list. How I spend that night is often indicative of the entirety of the following year. I can regale with tales of New Year’s Eve Omens for almost as many years as the Valentine’s Curse.
But New Year's Eve, in particular, freaks me the hell out. There's something about the day or so surrounding the marking of the new year that seems to set the tone for the 364 days that follow. If it's a good night and following day, the year generally goes well. If it's harrowing—a car wreck with friends or a two-hundred-mile distance in the middle of a strained marriage—the rest of the year always seems to follow suit.
For a multitude of reasons, 2018 seemed to be an especially trying year for me and mine. It was a year of upheaval for so many. Pandy lost her grandmother and her father. Cookie got divorced. Queen Frostine survived a Mob hit while we were on vacation in NYC. Max graduated high school, cycled through a few fleeting relationships, spent a month in Germany, and we all survived his first semester in college. Another surgery and back problems for me.
And in the middle of the most difficult year of therapy to date, I stumbled into a long-distance relationship that has presented both unimagined challenges and unexpected joy.
I spent last weekend with him, Bumblebee, and with my girls. We all sat at a restaurant together, laughing uproariously in a back room where we hoped we wouldn’t disturb other patrons (and their children) with our loud, foul mouths. All of us seem to recharge a bit when we are together, whether one-on-one or in little groups of twos and threes. This was actually the first time the Castration Committee had been together in its six-part entirety in the same room.
In fact, Queen Frostine suggested a change in moniker, because “Castration Committee” has, taken on an unacceptable tone of man-hating. One or two of us have managed relationships with good men, and four of us are raising sons to be good men. Ideas were tossed around—from Jugaloons to Side Show by the Sea—and all I can remember for sure from the uproarious discussion is the word Psyrens. So there we are, a group of smart, loud, singing women who just know the others, no matter the distance.
And I needed the time with my girls. I’d just survived my first Christmas on my own, ever. The boys were gone. Bumblebee and my girls were all hundreds of miles away. I’d gone into it with the intention of being brave and calm, my Self leading all of my internal parts calmly and safely through an emotionally-charged 36 hours with mulled wine and good food and the cats.
It ended up being far sadder and more miserable than even I could have predicted, and I am not allowed to be alone like that again.
But New Year’s Eve was looming, no matter what. I’d been worried about it for weeks.
“If something happens,” I told Queen Frostine, “and we aren’t together for New Year’s—”
“Then you aren’t together,” she finished.
It’s not an ultimatum, of You-be-here-or-I-won’t-see-you. It is my perception of an emotionally traumatic history that happens to be cataloged by decades of bad New Year’s Eves (and worse Valentine’s Days).
And I’d been clear, that my coming to visit him for the weekend prior did not absolve him of being with me on New Year’s Eve. I love time with him whenever I can get it, but New Year’s Eve is its own category of agitating for me. We planned a low-key evening—early movie and dinner at the same restaurant we’d frequented since our first weekend together—to just be together. But I could not let go of the possibility (probability) that it would not go well.
“Try to let the fear go,” Pandy said on January 30th. “What if we expect the best?? Do we then invite the best into our home/heart?”
Shaking my head violently, I responded, “I can’t expect that best. I can’t. There’s waaaaaaayyyyyy too much history for that. That’s asking to get shattered.”
But I spent that evening readying the house. I made the grocery list and checked the showtimes for the movie. Bumblebee, of course. I laid out the Princess Bride Blu-ray for our breakfast viewing pleasure. I washed the special glasses I’d bought just for toasting with mimosas.
“I’m afraid I jinxed it,” I told Frostine mid-morning, New Year’s Eve.
“You didn’t jinx anything,” she chided. I could practically hear her blue eyes rolling in her curly head.
And then he texted midday, while I was getting ready to leave work early, that he was sick. He was violently ill, unable to travel down the street, let alone the 200 miles to my house. On top of it, he was upset about how this would upset me.
I understood. I know the illness that was plaguing him. Hell, our Thanksgiving got cut short by my being sideswiped by the flu. Of course it wasn’t what I wanted, but I knew this wasn’t intentional, not malicious or even negligent. Wholly unexpected and unwelcomed by both of us.
If he’d just not shown up, no explanation, or if he’d shown up late, no explanation, or if he’d shown up rude and mean, no explanation, and then expected me to accept it and understand it and not express any confusion or hurt or displeasure, or blamed me outright for it, then I would’ve been let down.
I know, because I have been let down in those ways by men who professed to love me. Over and over and over.
But he got sick, and he told me. We came up with an alternative plan to wear each other’s t-shirts and snuggle under blankets and talk and FaceTime kiss at midnight, to save the champagne until we are together and can get a do-over.
And I was completely cool with that. I was centered and calm, accepting and still felt both loved and loving.
And then the anxiety struck.
Fighting off a nasty cold, I didn’t feel well. A short nap on the couch was discombobulating. Given what had happened just a week before, I steered clear of the wine and sad movies. But by 9:45, I was well-ensconced in my reluctant acceptance that 2019 will be a year of sickness and distance and thwart and tears and anxiety, that we will likely find ourselves frustratingly separated by illness and trying to make up for it when our already-difficult schedules allow.
“Baby, do not do this,” he admonished over FaceTime, his brow furrowed. “This is self-fulfilling prophecy. We are not subject to the whims of a capricious non-entity.”
Of course I know that. I am too smart and too well-educated not to understand the logical fallacy of my fear of being thwarted by fate or Fate or the Ghosts of Relationships Past. But the reality is that I have been conditioned over four decades to expect disappointment. I have learned to set the bar for other people so low that I just need them to show up. I don’t need them to do anything or say anything or bring anything. I just need them to be there, to be present with me.
My entire system is on such high alert, constantly scanning the horizon for potential disappointment:
Is this something that might hurt me?
Is this something that is likely to hurt me?
How much hurt could I feel?
Does that possible hurt stem from a previous trauma?
How do I feel about that trauma now?
How have I successfully dealt with this before?
Can I avoid the hurt altogether?
Is there benefit in feeling the hurt?
Is there possible reward that’s not hurt?
This is how anxiety works. It is a constant cost/benefit analysis of people and experiences and moments, examining how they may impact my emotions and what future influence they may impart. It is eviscerating discernment, and it is neverending judgment of others and of myself, in desperate attempts to stave off hurt.
“Eventually, I have to stop,” I told him.
“Stop what?”
Stop hoping. Hope means the possibility of disappointment, of more hurt, of more agitation, of more anger, of more self-recrimination, of more tears and heart palpitations. Hope is an inherent expectation of good, of not-hurt.
If I have no expectation, then the good that comes can be met with exuberant joy and delight. And I do feel those things, regularly. I love deeply, and I am deeply loved, by my sons and my friends and my boyfriend and my family.
But that is not enough, and may never be enough, to assuage the perpetual angst that all comes down to basic value judgments made about me by other people, before I had clear, conscious memory. I cannot undo those choices others made, and I struggle to rectify my learned responses. At times, it is a gaping psychic wound that may never fully heal, only close over for some indeterminate length of time. I am always on edge, waiting for the next slice into an ever-refreshening scar.
I know: only my reactions matter now. How I choose to treat myself and others in light of my emotional makeup is what matters. And I try, so hard, to be present, to be mindful, to be kind to myself and to others, to carefully bring my concerns into balance before I act on them.
But when you feel like you’re drowning, it’s impossible not to thrash toward the surface with a desperate breath. When the anxiety hits, it is like waterboarding myself over and over with my own tears.
I am not, generally, unhappy. I am not so afraid that I have trouble experiencing the world, as I was when Max was a baby. I do have occasional days, when the benefit of staying in to read and binge watch whatever is greater than the potential cost of detached interaction with suburbia. I am far more than merely functional in my life. I am engaged with my wonderful, active sons, my dear friends, a man I love deeply who loves me just as much, a job at which I am very good, and I just applied to grad school.
Sometimes, though, I trip over a deeply existential crack. Usually, I can right myself and carry on, maybe with a momentary limp or scrape. Every so often, I fall into the chasm. Mostly I’ve learned to hold onto the edge and pull myself back up. I have no interest in traversing those depths ever again.
We missed the midnight countdown. There was a brief FaceTime at 12:02. I fell into a cold-medicine-induced, tear-stained sleep a few minutes later, the sound of raindrops and neighborhood fireworks outside, wrapped in his t-shirt. I woke this morning, fed and pet the cats, started a new book, watched the last bit of Leap Year while I prepped a Gouda-and-bacon frittata, started chicken stock and chicken salad for later in the week, prepped vegetables for roasting this evening, and did the dishes.
I often do more by noon than a lot of people do in a day.
I don’t write about these things to shame anyone else or myself. I don’t write to find sympathy from anyone else. I write, because there is someone else out there who needs to know they’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed, especially at times when we are expected to be happy and joyful and hopeful. I write because it’s cathartic for me, to help me cull so many simultaneous thoughts and emotions into better focus.
And maybe, just maybe, there comes the day when it all makes sense, my Epiphany, when I can close those old wounds for good.
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.
What a year 2017 has been. Whether personally or politically, I wasn’t expecting the dramatic changes this year brought. I’m not quite sure what to expect for 2018, but I don’t imagine that it’ll be quiet.
After 27 years, I finally finished my bachelor’s degree. After more than ten years of pain, I had three levels of my cervical spine replaced and rebuilt. After three years, I ended my relationship with Rango. I had 182 Détente Days with DH—and I’m thankful for every single one.
The greatest lesson for me this year was that almost nothing will come according to my time frame. No matter how hard I work, how thoroughly I plan for any and every contingency, things occur at their own pace. The best-laid plans and all that jazz. It helps when I’m working with a goal in mind, but sometimes I still need the reminder to slow down and at least acknowledge the journey, regardless of the destination. Life is most pleasurable when I can enjoy the trek, but sometimes my path has been littered with difficult obstacles that were, at best, life lessons waiting to happen.
Because there was so much to deal with this year—which was really just a culmination of all the previous years—I went back into therapy. I’ve written a good bit about the Internal Family Systems model and how I’ve used it to deal with decades-old trauma that continues to impact my day-to-day. Part of the process includes understanding the role each subpersonality plays, the burden each carries, and the job each performs to keep the whole manageable and safe.
So, what happens when I know all of that? If the burden is lifted from the subpart, what the hell is she supposed to do now?
As I began the slow process of unburdening, I found different parts—Cissie and Stephie, Harley and Quinn, Pearl and Buttercup—who were lighter of load but who also couldn’t stay trapped in their compartments inside my head. Their work was done, and it did no one any good to keep them trapped in a dusty house, struggling to feel the light of day through an old, dirty window.
I imagined a garden for them. In my mind, it sits off to my left and back just a bit. I can hear the birds and see each blade of grass or petal of flower ripple in breezy sunlight. I can smell the earth and the life. It looks much like the yard in front of my actual house. As each subpart is unburdened, I invite them to go to the garden to play. I invite them to join Cissie on the trampoline, jumping until they’re breathless with laughter, hair mussed and clinging to their sweaty, warm necks. Sometimes Buttercup sits at the edge, bare legs dangling from the porch, dirty feet bouncing against the cool brick, and she sings. Her songs are sometimes little more than she or I can hear, but there is a hum of love whose confidence waxes and wanes but which never really fades away.
Sassafras still struggles. Sometimes I feel her very close to me, close on my immediately left and in need of reassurance when she feels overwhelmed by longing and nostalgia and confusion. But I remind her that we are still working, that I am still working. Although love may not come in the ways in which her heart has desperately imagined, it is always with her. I am always with her. But she is always free to put her burden down, just next to me, and join the others in the garden, even if just for a little while.
There are nameless, numerous others, only some of whom I’ve been fortunate enough to engage yet.
I am still working.
But if I am carrying each of them, and they are each carrying their burdens, then I am also carrying those burdens.
So tonight, as I close one year symbolically and open another, I am inviting those burdens to go into the garden, as well. Whether they be ghosts of Christmases past, unhealthy choices of present, or fears of what the future may or may not hold, I am opening the door for each of them to be free—and to be free myself of those weights.
I am offering one last toast to disappointment, to broken promises, and to unfulfilled dreams. I will drink once more to each and every lost love, all of whom mattered and will always matter, but who cannot continue to keep me mired in the past. I have accepted my fault, and I have accepted theirs, but I cannot continue to define expectations for my future based on the past actions of people I will never see or speak to again. They had opportunity not to be ghosts; I am cutting their chains loose and setting them free.
I wish each of them well as I sweep their dust out the door into the garden.
I’m going into 2018 with few expectations. I expect to continue doing my work and making myself healthy and whole. I expect to attempt new things. I expect to discover new things about myself.
I am superstitious about a few things, and New Year’s Eve is at the top of that list. How I spend that night is often indicative of the entirety of the following year. I can regale with tales of New Year’s Eve Omens for almost as many years as the Valentine’s Curse.
This year, I specifically chose to be at home with my babies. We cooked dinner together and piled up on the couch to watch The Little Prince. I rolled my eyes at the short-sighted, closed-minded grown-ups. I cried when he found his rose too late, overcome by baobabs. I gasped at the sudden lurch of my heart when the he met the snake in the desert one last time.
And I hugged my babies and told them I loved them for the millionth time, because I never want them to know what it feels like to question my love and my support. And I never want to know what it feels like not to give that love and support unconditionally.
So, I don’t know what’s coming. It will be what it is, when it is. But for now, for tonight, I am peacefully in my happiest of places, surrounded in love and comfort, quietly bidding farewell to the past.
As I wrote about a few weeks, I have been seeing someone new. I won’t wax poetic here; it’s simply too early to exalt him to the status of Blog Fodder, in and of himself. I hadn’t necessarily intended to get into a relationship—though maybe it’s still too early to even call it that—while also trying to work on my own stuff, much of which was highlighted and exacerbated by the ending of my relationship with Rango. But the fact is he presented as an opportunity worth exploring while I was beginning the process of self-reintegration.
Whether coincidental or due to some meaning I have assigned (or even thanks to that fickle bitch Fate), there are things about him that remind me strongly of Bounder. He is not another alcoholic, though he may well be overcoming a history as a dismissive-avoidant. He is not Bounder, however, and it is unfair of me to make direct comparisons. They are two different men, with different histories and stories, but there are moments that are striking, to say the least.
Because of this thing with Finn (so named because he is my huckleberry) and because of the end with Rango and because I sometimes pass him driving on the road between our houses, Bounder has been on my mind a lot. A lot a lot. It makes sense that he would be, but it set me off on a path of re-analysis and overthinking (again). I think I’ve dissected that relationship for the millionth time over the last few weeks, still looking for where exactly I went wrong. Because his shit is his shit—I can’t control how he acts or reacts or fails to act—all I can do is try to figure out what I screwed up. He told me numerous times that it wasn’t me, and I generally believe that, but I always dissect to the point of vivisection, flaying myself to a bloody, psychoanalyzed mess.
I do remember getting a text from him, a couple of days after we’d met. He said he was glad we could take things nice and slow. Except we didn’t. We started intensely, quickly, and that’s exactly how it continued. Within two hours of that text, I was making out with him in the parking lot of his office, a quick drive-by on my way home.
And that is where I failed him. Hurricane Sassafras was coming, no matter what he did. I didn’t really hear him and slow down. It wasn’t terribly caring on my part, no matter how unintentional the push was.
Finn also said he wanted to go slowly, I have tried to honor that. I have tried to dial back my impulses to forge full-steam into his world. There is something there worth exploring, and I don’t want to do it all in hindsight.
Which brings me back to Bounder.
Working within the IFS model, I have become very mindful of my feelings. I don’t just mean my emotions. When I feel something—anger, grief, sadness, longing, affection, attraction, love—I take note of where in my body I am processing the emotion. There is usually a physical locus of that energy. Because my strongest emotions are often tied up with what a subpersonality is processing in a given moment, I feel them in different places, which is effectively where each of those subparts resides. Harley and Quinn and Stephie and each of the others sits in a specific spot and pulls on my center from her point of reference. When I feel a subpart whose name I don’t know (who maybe I didn’t even realize existed) pull at my center, the emotional and physical feelings are often coupled with anxiety.
Because there has been so much thought of Bounder over the last few days and weeks, my anxiety has been really high at times. It has often felt like a pull from the right of my stomach. Sometimes it has been so bad that I would get nauseated and irritable, desperate to make the pain stop.
“What is that she’s feeling?” my therapist asked. “She may just want you to acknowledge her feelings. Can you tell what she wants?”
“She wants relief,” I replied. “She is hurt and angry and confused. She doesn’t understand how anyone could have something so precious as that kind of love in their damn hand and just walk away. It makes no sense, and it’s infuriating.”
This, of course, is wholly indicative of my fear of emotional abandonment. While that’s rooted deeply in my childhood, the feelings of hurt and betrayal and confusion are never more profound than when I think of Bounder. While I’m still angry at Rango for how he handled the boys during our break-up, I have dealt with my feelings toward him, kept what I needed to keep and shed the rest. Same for DH and Rex and others whose names and memories don’t really matter or impact me all that much anymore.
I explained to my therapist that the feelings are seated in this very specific location, that they can be overwhelming at times. And when I am most overwhelmed by something, I tend to dive into it head first, hoping to reach the bottom quickly and resurface cleansed.
But that never seems to happen with him, and I am forever in a loop of self-flagellation.
“Well,” she said, “first of all, she needs to know that you are simply witnessing the trauma again, a memory of it; it’s not actually happening again. You’re not being traumatized again.”
“And,” she continued, “she doesn’t have to feel that anymore. You don’t have to feel that anymore. That’s a lot of burden to have been carrying around for so long. She can let it go. You can let it go. Let the elements have it—they can take it—they can take a lot more than that. But she doesn’t have to feel that anymore.”
Wait—WHAT?!?
Even I could tell that my facial expression shifted in that moment. I was stunned, utterly baffled by the idea that it was okay not to keep feeling those emotions over and over, effectively retraumatizing myself every time. I have dealt with it repeatedly, and there is no healthy in dragging the futility of it all around, night after night.
And it makes sense. I had stopped feeling similar things for others long ago, in a healthy timeframe and in healthy ways. Why is he so special that I should continue to carry that burden?
In part, I think, it’s because he wouldn’t. Part of what happens during the emotional abandonment is that I’m left to feel whatever with no support, and I’m the only one feeling it. Maybe the other person is feeling something, but it never seems to be anywhere close to what I’m feeling, especially when the other person is a dismissive-avoidant who is so well-versed in compartmentalizing emotions away to protect themselves.
I have often railed against feeling like I was carrying it for both of us, because that was sometimes the only way to prove that the thing had ever happened, with no acknowledgement of grief coming from the other person. I am sure Bounder felt it in the darkest of times, but I know that he never faced me to tell me he was sorry for hurting me. His not acknowledging me and the hurt he created, his ignoring of me when he damn well knew it was the worst possible way to hurt me, made me feel worthless, especially to him. But that flew in the face of his telling me he loved me, of his moments of showing me deep, incredible love, and I could never reconcile the conflict of extremes no matter how much I psychologized him and myself.
But to think, to realize, that I don’t have to do that was foundationally shifting. I could feel the anxiety and the tension to the right of my stomach abate immediately. There was a deep sense of relief. She’s there, and she’s a little antsy about what she’s supposed to do now. If her job was to hold all that baggage, what is she going to do now that still allows her to be of use to the Self?
I had a dream once while Bounder and I were dating, one of those lucid nap dreams. I was standing outside a tall, wide, stone tower, trying to figure out how to get inside. I could hear a knocking from the inside, and I needed to let whomever was in there out. As I looked more, I realized the tower was his face, the details of his mouth and eyes and brows built from each brick. I climbed some scaffolding and began to chip away at this one high, white stone. It was the speck of light in his left eye.
Months later, he told me that I’d been like this force knocking on his walls, over and over and over, until he eventually poked his head out enough to see what was in the light.
I let light back into his darkness, and somehow that wasn’t worth staying for. And it’s not that I wasn’t worth it; it’s that he didn’t see himself as worth me. So convinced that he would hurt me in the end, he made it happen, pushing me unaware into the dark pool so that I felt like I would drown before I could resurface.
But in the same way I did it for him, I must do it for myself. I get to be the disco ball for myself, to reflect light and shine it brilliantly into my own dark corners. Disorienting and distracting at first, yes, but eventually it becomes a beautiful swirl worthy of dancing.
It is odd, a little unsettling, to think of life without the possibility of him. I gave up the possibility of him as a romantic partner long ago. Our life goals are different, and he would never be able to consistently meet my needs. But he was always this driving force of emotion and thought, even when we weren’t together, sometimes in contact and sometimes not. Music, in particular, became a daunting prospect for me, because everything could remind me of him.
And that’s her job now, that’s what she is supposed to do, to dance. She is lightened of her load. And she gets to pick the music she wants to dance to. She’s not trapped by the years-long playlists of Bounder songs. She doesn’t have to be afraid of hearing one of them in the grocery store and bursting into tears. She doesn’t have to listen for him in every new song. She can move freely again, not weighed down by his burden or mine. She can find the path that she lost, can move toward light and laughter and love, because she deserves that.
This wasn’t her fault.
And if we pass him on the road again? I don’t know. I could feel something; I could not. I may well never see him again. I’m not going to dwell on what might happen. Now I have different roads to explore and a different Stephanie to discover.
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.
Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.
I was listening to the new Mynabirds record, Be Here Now. Their first two records were especially poignant for me during and after my divorce. I hadn’t had a chance to hear this one, so it seemed a great choice for a three-mile walk on a lovely autumn evening. The record is quite good, and I added several tracks to various playlists, as I’m also prone to do. But something—and I can’t be sure what—in the song “Wild Hearts” set me off. It’s as lyrically fantastic as any other song Laura Burhenn has written, but something sent me spiraling toward epiphany.
As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.
As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.
Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.
And if I created them and they created her….
Yeah.
Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.
She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.
She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.
Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.
Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.
Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.
“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”
And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.
Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.
But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.
The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.
But I’m doing it to myself.
It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.
Yesterday, I reached out to the Hive Mind that is Facebook, and I asked about the logistics of post-divorce dating. Having been separated and divorced for five years, I’ve had some experience with it. Three years with Rango, the months that turned into whatever with Bounder… plus the dozens of others I entangled myself with to varying degrees.
But having unexpectedly met someone threw me for a loop. I am often hypersensitive to others, and I’m constantly on high alert for warning signs of disappointment (read: abandonment). I am persistently in a state of overthinking everything. Everything.
Ah, the joys of anxious attachment!
I wanted to know about the logistics of dating. I didn’t actually date in my teens and twenties. I married DH at 21. Though I’d been in a four-year relationship prior to him, it was abusive and tumultuous. Dating again five years ago was weird, for sure, and Rango was intended to be the last one.
Best laid plans, man.
So now having unexpectedly met someone, I have been struggling to determine if my feelings of anxiety and agitation are warranted, i.e., did he really pull back, or are those flutters and weird pangs in my chest just my own insecurities in a panic?
With rare exceptions, all of my romantic partnerships during the last five years started intense and immediate. We exchanged lots of messages, dates’ worth of information disclosed over the course of a couple of days via text and chat. Phone conversations were rarer, but it’s hard to talk when you’re both working and managing kids and lives.
Dating after divorce is hard. For everyone, there is the complication of past hurt, of trying to honor your own internal struggles and pain without getting caught in the same loops again. Those best laid plans were decimated, and it’s daunting to consider opening yourself to the possibility of hurt again. The demands of adulthood make finding time to connect even harder. And when one or both of you have kids, the scheduling difficulties and emotional concerns expand exponentially.
But what turned out to be my normal experience with dating again maybe wasn’t very normal at all. That constant connection felt fantastic, because it satisfied my tendency toward anxious attachment. While this new guy and I did have days of constant chatting and a couple of fantastic dates that first week, the communication dropped back. There are lots of logical reasons (see above), but the loosened connection made me agitated, sending me into days of hyper critical thinking.
Is the lack of constant, effusive attention normal, or is he an avoidant who's about to bail?
The thing about anxious and avoidant attachment styles is that they are inherently insecure--that’s why they’re not part of the secureattachment style. But secure attachment requires attachment to something (really someone). Even if I were secure in my own talents and attributes and accepting of who I am (which I’m plainly not), that doesn’t necessarily mean I could be securely attached to another person--though it would certainly improve the chances. An attachment is only formed in connection to an Other.
For me, this has most often manifested as this pathological dance between anxious Me and avoidant Them. We both want intimacy, and we connect immediately. When the feelings and connections become very intense, they run. Right on cue, I chase, trying desperately to maintain the lack of agitation that comes with being connected.
What I have finally learned is that the lack of agitation does not mean the attachment is secure. An absence of fluttery pangs in my chest does not equate to happily-ever-after. Because of the inherent insecurity on both sides, they are likely to bolt when they feel trapped by the intimacy they commanded. I’ve done the dance a dozen times and know the warnings signs, so I am always on high alert.
My rose-colored glasses can make even the whitest of flags look like they’re signalling the riptide that will drown me.
So did the new guy pull back, or is it normal dating behavior?
I don’t know.
I have polled my friends. I sought roundabout advice from the Hive Mind. No one knows, and I sure as hell don’t. The consensus is that I should wait and see, play it cool and just wait.
But I am impossibly impatient. Because I am not throwing everything at him at once, because I’m not demanding answers from him, I am agitated. At times, it feels as though my heart is about to claw its way out of my chest like a lovesick Xenomorph.
I don't know what to do with the agitation. I'm walking again, which helps. I'm down nearly 20 pounds since Rango and I split. I'm writing, though I recognize that almost no one but me sees these words. They are cathartic for me, however, and that has its own importance.
But the writing and therapy have shined a glaring light on my insecurities. I know why they came about, how they were formed, just not what to do to make them better. And not doing things how I always have, not demanding that he give me the weight of answers I may not want to hear, is uncomfortable
What worked before isn't working now, because I'm not letting it.
But this is driving me crazy, and there seems to be no peace to be found. The firefighters are at odds with one another, fighting inside me over how best to help me feel calm. All I can do is plod ahead, hour by hour, and do the things I need to do. I know that’s the managers, though, distracting me with to-do lists and minutiae that feels all too important.
I may feel like I’m coming apart from the inside, but at least my toilets will be clean.
