Category: Uncategorized

Making sense of what I need to learn.

This fucking sucks. I’ll just say it. I fucking hate how relationships tend to take me over. I am 36 and can’t seem to break away from the tendency to just want to jump in too soon without giving people time to fully reveal themselves. How do I slow this process down? How do I remove the anxiety around the beginning of relationships, the part where you’re trying to figure out if this is going to be something or not? Why is dating such an unclear thing for me, it’s either all or nothing when I feel like it’s something good. And this dude did too. He told me two weeks after meeting me that he thought he was falling in love with me. We had only been getting to know each other for 6 weeks. We were scheduling future plans, small and big. Even had talked about the holidays. How in the hell was I this stupid so quickly?

I feel like I have such a good handle on people, that I can read them so well, and can see things that other people can’t see. I’m an empath, so I tend to really feel who people are after spending time with them. But this whole thing has made me doubt my abilities with this part of myself. Maybe I’m not as capable as Ive been thinking. Or maybe I am, but just not when it has to do with me as much, when my heart is involved, because my romantic whimsy seems to carry me away. And I don’t know if this makes me unhealthy, like I don’t know if this is something that I need to work on, or if this is just who I am and I need to just be cautious about finding someone who actually understands me. I’m sure it’s somewhere in between. I know I need to work on my listening and observing, rather than seeing what I want to see and taking people at face value. Because I did take him at his work, at face value. He was saying all kinds of things that included forever, pointed towards love and compatibility and promise and running off into the sunset together. I mean there was so much of that. So much, all the time, and he guided the majority of it. I know I ran with it in some ways, but I never would have done that without taking my cues from him. And he was apparently unable to give any type of boundary related cues, until he was just breaking under the pressure and done. Until he knew I was “collateral” as he called me. Just hours after he told me he was committed to me and loved me and grateful for our magical weekend we’d just had together. And it fucking was magical. It was comfortable and exciting and domesticated-feeling since we barely left my home but a couple times. We danced in my living room, sang for each other and with each other, held each other, he cried in my arms as he realized and allowed himself to understand how much he was going to miss his little girl when he finally moved out next week. Fuck. Even as I’m typing this I’m realizing how incredibly stupid I was to believe this could have lasted. He’s going through complete turmoil. And I was foolish enough to think that we were already solid enough to make our way through it. My staying with him through the process of physically separating from his family would have never been healthy for him. He’s gonna have to feel all of this on his own so that he doesn’t associate me with his strength and growth. Just as I am now associating him with my new apartment. This feels like shit to be here knowing that he won’t ever be here again. I’m hopeful because today is the full moon and I can attempt to truly cleanse this space and start over.

Fucking hell. This hurts so much. Hurts to look at myself yet again and realize that I still have work to do. I feel like sometimes that I have so much about myself figured out, and then something like this just derails me. Fills me with doubt. Doubt in my growth, doubt in my strength, doubt in my worth, doubt in my ability to find real genuine happiness with someone else.

I guess no real growth is ever just comfortable. This hurts like fuck because I’m needing to learn something. I just can’t believe how deep this actually hurts so quickly into something new. And this scares me a lot to go forward. I don’t want to keep going through this.

Tender Embers Burning

So here I go then. I’m single, 36, and living on my own for the first time. Been in my new apartment just under a month and in that time, I’ve already experienced a new and lost love that jolted me. To my core, I should say. I really feel that this is only the second time in my life that I’ve been jolted by this type of feeling, the type that seemed like such a sure thing in my head, when it was anything but on the surface. I let myself see the fantasy, I let myself hear his hopes for us more than his abilities for us. I let myself run with those hopes as if they were real, and placed my hopes with them, that are real. But none of it was possible, and here I am again spinning out, seemingly having learned nothing, but really just not taking the time to apply my lessons until it was too late. I wanted him. I wanted the picture in my head of what we could be. And I only just met him in person 26 days ago. How does this happen?

He ended everything abruptly and without warning two days ago. I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. I was on cloud 9 and felt a physical violent slam back down onto earth. No warning on the surface. Since then, I’ve been engulfed in the feels and going through the motions of wondering what the fuck just happened. I have to dive into this so that I can understand it. I have to figure out where I went wrong, and why this huge hole was here waiting for me to literally fall into. I have to learn from this so I can spot the huge holes in the future. Or maybe, again, this is all wishful thinking, and sometimes love makes you so fucking blind that all you can do is ride it until it crashes and burns. Was it him that made my embers ignite? Or the idea of him? Was it really just me projecting? Yes to all of the above. Was it also that I’m feeling vulnerable about living on my own for the first time ever? Sure. That’s probably a bigger part of it than I really realized to begin with. Because ever since I’ve known that he would never be in my space again, my space feels triggering, more empty, a scary place that I need to fill with something else. I’ve always been introspective and inquisitive, but right now I’m scared to be in my own thoughts. This is foreign to me. But I’ll persist, nevertheless. The only way out is through, as dude has said a few times.

I’m super lucky at this point in my life to have a close circle of key people around me that I’m able to talk to, bounce things off of, and figure things out with. One is an old friend who was once an ex, but who is now my best friend, we’ve known each other off and on for 15 years and I can’t imagine my life without her ever again (her gf recently said “whatever she knows, she knows” pointing at one of us and then the other haha). Bff is super good at reeling me in when I need to be looking at something from a more logical perspective. She is fiercely independent and strong, and we know each other so well that it is now fairly easy to be completely raw and open with each other, and hold the mirrors up for each other. Another is a newer friend that I only just started getting to know this year through Facebook, and she and I had an instant connection and understanding of one another from our very early conversations, and she totally gets me in a super personal way because we are scarily so much alike. She is the person who I am able to be my most ridiculous with, she lets me spiral into my thoughts with her, and offers caring and loving and constructive advice and perspectives from the heart, and then she does the same with me. One is another brand new friend that I also just recently met for the first time, he is very intelligent and introspective, and he was a huge comfort the night of my shock, and subsequently helped me figure out a huge factor that lead to the demise. He is kind and compassionate, and I enjoy his energy and passion. And the last who just helped me figure something out today, is my sister, who I have never really been close to, but who has been very helpful to me since my big breakup from my partner of 8 years, which happened a year and a half ago. And ever since the breakup, one of my biggest lessons is how important it is to find your people. My chosen community is becoming more and more important to me, and I want to keep putting energy into building lasting and cherished friendships. For so many years, I put all of my energy into only my partner, and it was something that ended up closing me off from so much. Plus, having various perspectives around us is so healthy as we make our way through life. I’m so grateful for these connections right now.

These connections have variously helped me figure out these key points about what the fuck just happened:

He’s in a completely unstable spot in his life right now. He is starting so many new things right now. He is going through the beginning of a divorce from a 15 year marriage, with an 8 year old daughter. He is about to be physically separating from his wife, even though the actual separation happened months ago, and the end of their marriage happening more and more over the last couple years. He’s about to start a new career. He’ll also be living on his own for the first time as well soon. Lots of big moves and moving pieces, lots of emotions, lots of anxiety. Lots. And everything is coming to a head quite literally right now.

He isn’t in his right mindset because everything is in flux. He also is on medications that he is changing the doses of right now, which in hindsight is horribly and unfortunately short-sighted, being that he needs to be as stable as possible as he goes through all of these big changes.

He had told me that he was the “ideas” guy, but he did lack follow-through often times. I didn’t realize at the time that that theme was so strong in his life, that I was an actual idea to him too, not a person. It’s remarkable to me that I had even asked him a couple of times to mull over the fact that I am just simply the first person he’d spent time with following his marriage, and that I wanted to be sure that he was realizing that I was a person, and not just something shiny and new. He said my name, and said “I see you.” He seemed so clear too, so confident as he looked me in the eyes to convey his seriousness. But guess what? Ideas ring true for him in the moment, but he doesn’t think through all of the consequences, or what his actions could mean to other people. The first time that I displayed a level of disappointment in the fact that I was missing him, he realized I was needing to be expended because he couldn’t handle the responsibility of taking me on as an actual person with feelings. Which is probably understandable, since he was never planning on falling for me, he was only looking for a hook-up in the beginning.

But what about me? How did I just spend the last year and a half getting a solid footing and finding more independence than I’ve ever had, and then fall into the idea that this man who barely knew me, loved me? How did that sound ridiculous in the moment, but I gave into the idea of a fairytale, even though I knew he was facing so much that was going to be incredibly difficult? Maybe neither of us realized how stressful it was going to be, but I do now. And I think he’s just starting to feel some of it too.

So what I’m learning about this for myself though, is that I’m compiling an even more extensive list for non-negotiables that I will never again bend on when considering a new partner. And also growing my list for things that I really want to find in someone, because there was so much about him that I really did like. I laughed so much with him. We had great chemistry and a passionate connection. We were both really into music and we did a lot of communicating through music together. Music was something that was always a point of contention in my 8 year long relationship, as we had very different musical tastes, to the point of arguing. Feeling music with someone else in the same way that I do was incredibly hot, for lack of a better word. It felt so deep so soon. Like we just got each other. Until we didn’t.

What I didn’t realize, is that our versions of what our words meant were very different. He was speaking to me with hope that his words were true. I was speaking with true words, because that’s just what I do. We didn’t realize there was a disconnect there. He wanted to love me. He wanted to picture forever with me. He wanted to believe that happiness was just right around the corner. And I was everything that his wife wasn’t for him. I was her polar opposite. I was his dream girl, literally. He had two dreams about me before we even met.

There were red flags, but I overlooked so many. The first one that really did catch me off guard though, was just one day before he ended things. It was a Sunday morning in bed, after some gentle cuddling and love making, he asked me “so when are we going to talk about your rapes?” as he was holding my naked body and looking me straight in the eyes a couple of inches away from my face. I was so thrown, that I just went right into it and relived my trauma in his arms, all the while feeling self-consious because I hadn’t yet brushed my teeth and was having to tell him my story with his face right next to mine. And he seemed truly sympathetic in the moment. But in hindsight, seemed even more distant after he went home that day, but I also think that has way more to do with being away from his daughter all weekend, and getting to catch up with her. But I didn’t even realize how ridiculous this was until I told my new guy friend about it the night of the breakup. And he reacted so strongly to it, and said that he was actually pissed off about it (he’s gone through training to be a Victim’s Advocate), I saw it in a new light. This was fucked up, and incredibly careless of the dude. You’d think that would have been more clear to me, but that’s the endless cycle of learning all of the ways we can be treated as objects. The fact that he asked that of me in such a vulnerable way, and ended things the next day because they got too hard for him overnight, I mean, really. Really! This realization doesn’t actually make me upset with him, it just makes it clear to me that he is not as introspective as I was thinking he was, and he really just doesn’t get it. And like hell am I going to be someone’s teacher again. Meet me up here dude (even if you are almost a foot taller than me, which I think is YUMMMMM lol).

Two days later, I’m really starting to calm down on my own. I spent a lot of time by myself in thought today, I’m pretty much completely unproductive when I’m in my head like this, and have a hard time keeping focus on anything else, so I’ve taking off the past couple days so that I could get through this as quickly as I could. I don’t function well in heartache, especially when the shock value of it all hit me so hard. We were comfortably talking like we were all set with knowing we were gonna be around for a while. I’m noticing the many more red flags that I had overlooked, and realizing that this was never going to make it anywhere, as compatible and blissful as we felt together. I was his fantasy, and as soon as I turned into a real complex person that challenged him once, he called me selfish, and sternly reminded me that he had a daughter who would always come first (although this was something that we readily talked about as a positive, and that was never in question, and completely unrelated to my feelings of disappointment).

I feel like there’s so much more I could list here, but at this point it’s just sad and pointless to keep up with this. I fell hard for him. I really wanted him. I really thought it felt right. And I allowed myself to believe without giving it real time to unfold. That is my fault. That is my lesson. I went too fast because I thought it was safe to build off of his cues. But he wasn’t prepared for me to take him too seriously. And that fact just really couldn’t be helped. We’re in two completely different places, and there was no amount of wishing that could have hurried his process along. He wasn’t ready for me. And I’m still making choices off of a lower self-esteem than where I need to be. But these are the kinds of lessons that will help me to grow in all the ways. Heartbreak does worlds of growth when you get back up again. I know this will serve me. It just feels like a physical punch in the gut every time I realize a new trigger. Thankfully, I think I’ve felt the majority of them (or I hope) and they are starting to be fewer and farther between. Yesterday was more brutal, and the night before was just shock and pain, mixed with distractions of my sweet friend who had already planned to be visiting that evening anyway. And mmmm!! What distractions he provided. What timing. What a way to feel something new, and damn. He actually knows what he’s doing.

Okay. So I don’t even know what I was expecting to write about in this, but here’s what came out of needing to get all of this out in front of me. This is just the beginning of giving myself a space to explore what it is I really want to write about. I have been thinking about writing for a long time, and I finally feel such a strong pull towards it again that I just had to do this today. I know I’m becoming even more obsessed with human psychology, and the inner workings of people’s brains, and how it effects how we all interact with each other. And this is something that I think I have a natural strength in, and I want to explore what I actually want to do with this ability, as well as wanting to write. So I’m starting here. We’ll see what takes shape. For now this is my space for exploring what unfolds next.

❤ -KMJ