I'm thinking it might not be the wisest of ideas to post some of my deepest innermost neuroses and musings in a public forum, especially one that connects to my MySpace page. A realization such as this might be self-evident to most people.
I am not most people. I am an idiot.
I think esoteric, tangential ponderings might be safe. But anything connected to specific events perhaps should be avoided. Cuz I could really fuck some shit up.
Ugh. Experimental theater.
Again I say ugh.
I went to a friend's show tonight. It was a little piece of CRAP mounted on the lower east side. That kind of thing makes me glad to not be involved in theater at the moment. Good god I am so sick of seeing BAD theater. I can't even remember the last time I saw a good show.
I'm so not into theater right now. Was I ever, really? I was into doing it, just not so much watching it. It's like when I played piano. My favorite to play was classical; but I've always hated listening to classical music. And singing? Loved singing showtunes; but hated llistening to them. As a teenager I loved writing poetry. Never liked reading it.
What's up with that divide? Is it a common phenomenon? Common phenomenon. That's fun to say.
Now, when it comes to health and counseling stuff...I like doing it, I like reading about it, I like researching it, I like talking about it, I like the people involved in it.
Integration, I think, is what's happening here. And it's way cool.
My uncle is dying. Any day now.
I've been saying those words for the last six months now.
He's dying of smoking induced cancer. It started with emphysema and graduated to cancer. Now it's riddling his body and has insinuated itself into his brain. About eight months ago, he was given about two months left to live. I like to say that he's past his expiration date.
It is so unbelievably taxing and draining to have someone constantly on the brink of death. Imagine forever having that tickling nose like you're about to sneeze--but you can't. Imagine being right up against that moment when you're about to come--but never achieving full release. Imagine hearing Shave and a Haircut, but never the Two Bits.
Simplistic, corny and inappropriate metaphors. I'm trying to convey the stress of this edge and I'm doing a piss-poor job.
I'm not even close to my uncle. If this were my mother was was taking so very long to finally let go? I can only imagine that drawn-out pain.
With my distance, though. I feel no guilt in knowing that it is time for him to LET GO. He needs to release from life and in turn release his loved ones from being shackled to his never-ending ever-impending death.
I do, however, feel guilt with my anger. I'm angry at him for still holding on. I'm angry at him for refusing to pass on. I'm angry at him for valuing his life of no remaining quality enough to drain the quality from the lives of those he is leaving behind.
At first, I chided myself for thinking that way. It isn't very generous, loving or light-filled.
Maybe it isn't the blissed-out super spiritual tack. But it's real and it's valid. I'm not ignoring or denying the anger, even if I'm not entirely comfortable with it. Anger at the dead or dying is not the most socially sanctioned of emotions, but it's more common than people like to admit.
And it's even more common than that.
There are really a limited number of ways you can meet a new dating prospect. Of course there are millions of permutations…there are so many different ways two people’s paths can cross. But all of them can pretty much fit into two basic categories:
Someone entirely new is just that. Maybe you met online, maybe they asked for your number after talking with you for twenty minutes at a random bar. Whatever the circumstance, for you they have NO CONTEXT.
And herein, for me, lies the problem.
When it is someone entirely new, I HAVE NO CONTEXT! I don’t know what their personality is like; I don’t know how they are with other people or how they are around other girls. I don’t know if they’re always that way, or if just with me. I don’t know if they’re a poseur or for real. I don’t know if they’re a superstar or a superdork.
Sure, sure. I know I should only rely on my own instincts and fairly give them every chance and analyze the situation with an open mind and blank slate. Yadda yadda. Ew. I just wrote yadda yadda. I’ll try never to do that again.
Anyway. My issue isn’t so much with whether or not I figure out if they’re a loser or not. I just don’t know what to do about reading the body language.
I went out with this new guy last night. Second night we’d met, first night we’d gone out. So far, I totally dig him. Intelligent, creative, complex, well-rounded, funny, cute (fuck cute, he’s hot!), warm, blah blah. Good things. A couple hours into the evening, he kissed me. And damn was it a nice kiss. Absolutely lovely, as a matter of fact. So throughout the rest of the evening, there was lots more kissing. Lots.
But it wasn’t that lusty, urgent, “I must have your panties in a bunch on my bedroom floor in the next twenty minutes” kind of kissing. It was passionate, yes, but it was also warm and tender and gentle. And it wasn’t just kissing, it was the arm around my waist, and the leaning into me and the cuddling while listening to a band play. Basically, if an objective observer had seen the body language between us, they would have thought we’d been going out much longer than just a first date.
THIS IS THE KIND OF BEHAVIOR THAT CONFUSES THE HELL OUT OF ME.
A big objective part of me says to just take it for what it was…nothing more than the enjoyment of bodies and closeness and all that jazz. But the primal, basic part of my brain feels that sort of body language, revels in it, but wants to know WHAT is this guy’s agenda?
Is he always like this with girls? Is he one of those super flirty super affectionate guys that leads women on not with his words, but with his actions? Or is he forthright? Perhaps he was truly feeling that kind of closeness. Was I the “pretend girlfriend” of the evening, hardly to hear from him again? Or maybe he is genuinely interested.
I’m not ACTUALLY stressing about this like the post makes it seem. But I was left wondering a bit after last night. It's strange...I'd know better where we stood if we'd just fucked. It's that sweet, sensitive stuff that I've never quite gotten a handle on.
Tricky thing, dating. Hell, getting to know ANYONE completely new can be uncomfortable. You never know quite where you stand for awhile. That tenuousness is so disconcerting.
All that being said…GREAT fucking weekend. Seriously.
The last weekend workshop I took part in was a workshop on closure. something we all need and seldom get in the way we truly desire. At the time of the workshop, I had JUST broken up with my last boyfriend. So I wrote this closure letter to him--of course never meant to be mailed...simply an exercise.
Most of the content is no longer relevant, but there's one phrase I keep revisiting, because it wasn't so much about him, but more about my own repeating patterns. Anyway. Here's the whole thang:
Tim-How surprisingly difficult it is for me to call you my "ex-boyfriend". Not that you were my boyfriend for such a long amount of time that now the added prefix is a hiccup in my speech...but that I never really had a definition for what we were, so how do I define what we now are?
There was nothing in our coming together that was completely whole--it was always lacking (Clyde's word, that, the "lack"). And now, in a way, it is still the same partiality, the same lack, that exists. But I do need a precise definition, I think, because the limbo is killing me.
We can't have lovely days anymore. We can't have evenings where we trick ourselves into feeling that a beautiful relationship still is there. Because then when we have the conflict and the ugly arguments, the contrast is for me too great. It is jarring and painful and confusing. It is unhealthy and it makes me behave unhealthily.
You are a good person. You are not toxic. But the way we are interacting right now is. Still--how hard is it to rip off that bandaid? Neither one of us wants to do it, but once again I'm finding myself the one whose shoulders that burden falls upon.
I'm a self-sufficient person. As are you. We've both spent so much time in our lives alone and needing no partner. So when we came together, we reveled in that luxury of "ally" perhaps a bit too deeply. Like a starving child, we gulped the feast down far too quickly--and so quickly we were sick.
Now we've got to go it alone once again. And what should be familiar and easy is somehow a challenge neither one of us expected. For me, to suddenly be "without", to have lost my ally, to feel the distance widen and the connection vanish--it has been so very painful.
We've talked about how sad this all is, how we wish it could be different. And we know that it can't be. We've talked about how we have no regrets and how the love still exists even if the reality doesn't work. We've talked about needing the other still in our lives. I do feel that way and I also know that it just isn't good. I cannot be with you and not be with you. I will be able to--but not now. It's wreaking havoc on my body and my mind.
I have no idea what else to say. I feel that it has all been said--in some cases talked to death--and all that's left is now to cope with and tolerate the messy aftermath.
So. Obviously in the intervening couple of months since I wrote this letter, the circumstances have greatly changed. The situation no longer pains me like it did. I have in fact seen him several times without any reverberating emotions. That in itself is a little sad, as it always is when love dies. But it feels wonderful to have let go of something that was very broken. I knew before he and I even started that it wasn't going to last; but I was curious enough to want to find out where it would go. I never expected actual feelings to be stirred!
But the bit that I keep going back to is the part about being a starving child and subsequently overindulging. Not in any literal sense, although my past behaviors mimic that as well, but more so in the energetic frame. It's as if once I get a little taste of something I discover I need or even simply desire, I am bent to go overboard. I meet someone who sparks my interest and I suddenly want to be near them all the time. And that's not just in the romantic realm. I get friend crushes, too. I'll meet some chick I think is just amazing, and I suddenly want to be her BFF. And am hurt when I am most understandably not!
It ain't logical. It feels veeeery young. I know some of the sources, but I'm still digging to find the real root. In the meantime I seek to cope with the feelings that come up in a healthy way, and to continue prodding so that the pattern can eventually fade into nothing.
Stuff I love:
See? I CAN write a positive post.
So There.
The last 10 to 15 minutes or so of my yoga class consist of laying in the corpse pose in silent meditation. At the start of this final pose, my yoga instructor, J., chants. It's the most amazing sound
His voice vibrates and resonates on an auditory plane that cuts right to my inner energy. It's as if I'm an infant in my crib and my daddy is crooning a lullaby; I'm a woman in my lover's embrace and he's singing me to sleep; I'm pure spirit in a cloud-like nest and the universe is cradling me in its giant arms.
And after that...silence.
While the spiritual/physical connection is always wonderful, today I wasn't quite as "in" it as usual, which is why I think the following affected me as it did. During the silence, I heard people talking out in the lobby. I heard a man's voice, and I had a moment of panic. I thought, for a second, that J. had walked out and left me and my classmate alone. Suddenly I felt abandoned.
It only took a matter of seconds to realize that J. was indeed still in the room with us; but that fleeting moment of panic was enough to set my wheels spinning.
What deep fear did that moment tap into?
What does it mean to be seen? To be watched over? To be validated? To be protected?
What does it mean for someone to care?
As an only child, now grown into an single adult woman living alone in a big bad city...I've become quite used to solitude. I'm familiar with entertaining myself, mothering myself, disciplining myself, playing with myself--the basic gamut. But it's all easier when someone cares.
For Rob Brezsny to care to have us write down our most painful issues so that he could take them home, pray over them, and burn them...that moved me to tears.
For J. to care to stay in the room with us in our silence, holding the energy of the space to keep us safe...I need that.
For Samantha to care to call me because she hadn't heard from me in a few days and was concerned because "that wasn't like" me...it made me feel loved.
It would be nice to be self-contained enough so that I wouldn't care if others cared. I wish I could be that blase. But I'm not a good liar and my face never succeeds in concealing my true emotions. I CARE. I need people to care about me.
Earlier I indulged myself in a little pity party: nobody made sure I had Thanksgiving plans..Nobody wonders what I'm doing this weekend..Nobody is curious what I'm doing right now. Blah angsty blah trite blah poor fucking blah me.
I tried to type that crap in earlier, but I couldn't do it. Well, obviously I could cuz it's THERE. But I couldn't leave it sans self-referrential context because it was just too fucking LAME. I'm sure that in reality, there are indeed people out there who care. Not just my mother, but real live other people who aren't obligated to give a crap just because we share the same DNA. Sometimes though, especially when the days get shorter and colder and the season steals people away, it can be easy to forget.
The holidays fucking suck.
And it ain't even December yet.
Lisa -- I tried to write a positive post. But shit is up right now and although I can act, I can't pretend.
Recognize yourself. Take a look.
Okay, everything externally is unfamiliar. Okay, the interactions, the patterns, the structure, the style, the LIFE is unfamiliar.
But look in the cosmic mirror.
See that bubbling silver surface?
It wants to show you something. It wants to help you say hello to yourself. It's there for you.
Lean into it embrace it kiss it lick it make love to it worship it.
Fuck yourself with tenderness.
Viciously self-love.
Sometimes even those of us who are so actively striving to be the healthiest we can be,
Those of us who work towards assisting others in achieving balanced health,
We who desire to free everyone from fucked up food relationships and
Damn it.
Sometimes I still do fucked up shit to myself.
I can try and make it seem poetic and enlightened and acceptable as part of the learning process.
But, damn it.
It's.
Fucked.
Up.
