Autumn Equinox 2012

My absolute favorite time of year!!!!  Happy happy autumn equinox to you all.  Slow down in some aspects, tie up loose ends, prepare for a rest before creating the new.  Plan to be and practice who it is you are bursting to become.  I have found that now is that time.  Perhaps for others it is Spring (another great time to renew) but for me, I find that Autumn is that crinkling of the old, burn it up like a pile of dry leaves, molt, shed the skin, it's a new year.  

It's been quite a year for me.  So much unhappiness and confusion swelled to a crescendo and doubled back, doubting itself only for my soul to go all "Bitch, we're going auto-pilot and taking care of business" while my heart stood there, clutching a teddy bear, and saying, "but maybe this time....?"  Auto pilot is good.  It's what your heart, your lungs, your whole body does at every single moment.  It knows better than I do.  It's wired.  And when I get into a situation that isn't good for me, my system gives me awhile to make decisions on my own, giving me signals.  Drawing graphs, putting up billboards, making afterschool specials about it.  My blinders are tailor made by Pollyanna though.  It can Change!  Auto pilot buzzes off my two braided hairdo, smacks me on the ass and suddenly I hear myself saying things like "I'm moving out" even though inside I'm freaking out.  It got me into emotionally and psychologically safer digs.

  An abuser though, will make you feel like you are crying 'abuse' like a politician wearing a rainbow pin at a gay parade.  You start to wonder....well, there really wasn't anything physical that happened...really...a couple of small things but nothing really.  So was it abuse?  Yes.  Cutting someone down and destroying parts of their psyche to suit how you need to run a household is abuse.  But the kicker is - what if they are not completely aware of themselves?  That's a toughie.  I don't want to be on the jury for that one.  But I suspect on some level, they know.  Especially if they have a history of relationships crashing against the wall in high drama most of the time.  Patterns. Patterns.  Listen to their stories of past relationships.  If you're in a sucky situation, you might pick up on something.

My ex happens to be obsessive about emailing me constantly now to blame or cut me down.  I have tried to stay true to my karmic ideal of going out on a feather and not blasting off on a fiery rampage.  Finally after a long period of time, I finally said (in an email) that I am no longer responding to the cut down emails to the tune of Same Old.  Instead if he has a question, I will answer it.  I've been baited.  I've bit.  But I've tried to bit down with the flat teeth, not the canines. He's created a victim narrative where although with everything that I've done for him, for us, I've become the user.  Might I add, when he worked, he was a fabulous salesman.  He has a number of awards for it.  He could convince anyone who has the slightest crack in their foundation, of anything.  I had some cracks...now a cavern would be more like it.  Like a decaying tooth though, you remove the decay, you remove just a tiny bit more, and then immerse in something to neutralize, then germinate and flourish.  Ok, a tooth doesn't flourish.  But I like the pretty words so we can just agree that it makes sense? 

I'm sitting outside right now on my porch, actually cold with a light jacket on.  It's a beautiful gray day.  I'm hoping for some camera type inspiration but trying to let go of it as a Must, or else there will be disappointment.  My desire to run out and find photogenic opportunities clashes with my desire to stay home and write, read, clean guinea pig cages and just be.  One of these things is not like the other....dare you figure it out?  And seriously, while I sit here, I can hear my downstairs neighbor's AC on.  It is SIXTY SEVEN DEGREES outside.  Is he a snowman??

So I've taken this beautiful morning (lie, it's really 12:38 at this point) and used it to purge myself further of Flip.  It's like an infection though....just have to keep ingesting and living in the salve that will slowly take care of the complete septicity.  Someday it will cleansed to the point where it's not on my mind so much - or at all.  When my second marriage ended, it consumed me.  One day, months down the road, I realized that I wasn't thinking about him much anymore.  How freeing that is!

I did have a dream last night about Flip.  We were broken up still, but I realized that I was pregnant.  And I told him that I was.  But with tears in my eyes told him that he would have to realize that we probably couldn't go through with it due to health reasons.  He was not warm during any of this.  And in real life, he would have been excited to have a child.  

My interpretation is thus:  At the end of things, a late seed has been planted....yet one more opportunity to do what is easy and stay in it.  A solid opportunity to stay bound.  The hard thing to do is reject the comfort (and yes!  even being in something abusive for years or degrading can be comfortable to your psyche - it's what you get used to) and whisk your own self away to stop the cyclic insanity.  Whisk your own self away.  Not wait for someone else to do it for you because it won't happen.  And in most cases, if it does, then you didn't experience the emotional parfait that you needed to in order to really stop the cycle and get better.  You could end up rejecting a wonderful partner because you aren't aware of your comfort with the abusive, co-dependent, whatever negative relationship.  Or you may find yourself in the hands of Same Shit Different Penis. Worse, if you trade down into eerier circumstances.

I've done this.  I am aware now - I pushed away someone who, if I were to write a checklist of all that I wanted in a man, would take home prizes for every category.  But I wasn't aware.  I was brought up in a violent home with a very critical and unaffectionate parent.  Breadcrumbs is what I learned.  Take the crumbs, whatever you can get. Hang on to it.  Once you get a crumb, that means you've gotten that hard won approval - finally!  Yes!  He SEES me.  He cares!  I win!  But it's just a crumb.  It isn't going to sustain you for very long.

Just for the record, my parent has changed in the later years and all is forgiven - unspoken forgiveness. We are human, there are no instructions and our parents can only do what they learned if they aren't aware either.  While it is one of the best things to happen that we can have a 100% better relationship than when I was little, it doesn't mean that my issues disappeared.  Now I'm on an island, no longer in that relationship with my father, and am stuck with the bill.  Now that I am aware (due to therapy, self reflection and lots o time listening to podcasts and reading on the internet) I can choose to do something with it.  It's not something I would bring up to my father, I'm sure he has his own thoughts and guilt about stuff.  But as a self-aware adult, I can stop choosing relationships that repeat the cycle in some way.  I can create a welcome sign for the guy who meets the checklist.

Phew, told you this is a new year.  A renewal.  My autumn.  I'm going to marry it.  

Happy Equinox!!!  

The Last Aftershock to Record, I Hope

I had a little lesson in listening to my conscience.  No crickets with purchases from a haberdashery were involved.  And OMG – I am writing this post without a beer. 

I had a moment of the slippery slide of emotions that was so greased, I couldn’t keep ahold of it.  Granted, I held it long enough to edit the really unnecessary stuff out that were blatant indulgences from pent up years of feeling repressed, attacked and what would be the equivalent of an all night mindf*ck every night. 

On an unrelated note, and a brief one, why do I have do take the NPR media player out to dinner, desert and beg for it to play straight through while I use the internet simultaneously?  It’s like walking through a house of bubble wrap in brick shoes trying not to wake a baby.  *Conclusion of rant.

So I decided in this last very long round of Break-up Aftershocks to try try try and stick to the point, and at all costs, if I can’t keep myself from going off in a backward direction, to at least be respectful.

Not so much last night.  I suddenly found myself exhausted of all his special rules – when I first moved in, little by little I learned that if I acted certain ways or said certain things, I was going to trigger horrible fights.  Even trying to compliment him, I triggered fights.  (I still haven’t figured out how that works.)  I molded to what was needed to keep peace as much as possible (and it didn’t work many times but was good enough when it did).  It also meant biting my tongue, hiding my thoughts, not sharing who I really was in order to make the world that he seemed to want, available. He had a vision of how Things Should Be and I thought he was so smart and must be right.  When I caught on that maybe he wasn’t right per se, I found out that by challenging things, I would just make the household undulate in anger, resentment, blame and indignation.  Then there was me for a long time – confused.   

Flip never divulged his severe depression to me for over a year.  It wasn’t until I tried to leave him the first time that he fessed it up. The fact that he had been out of work for over a year, years earlier due to depression.  Maybe it would have helped to have known.  Instead he blamed me for everything and I had a hard time understanding his logic.  So much that I thought I was just aging faster all of a sudden.  My brain was in a fog.    

This all adds to a build-up.  All these things that have been put into my head – certain boxes – ok to do this, not ok to do this.  And then he does things that he would freak out if I had done.  Anyone can say, “Well, you don’t really know what he would do.”  Anyone in a long term relationship gets a little view into the patterns of their significant other.  Sometimes – rarely – they can be surprised by their partner’s reaction to things.  My guesstimate is that more often than not, you know exactly in what realm they will react.  Will they end blasted to Saturn from a freak out?  Or will they ground, take you into their arms and slather you in compassion?  I don’t know what that last one is.  That’s foreign to this relationship for me.  I had basically one person who this type of compassion came naturally to.  That was El. 

I’m not exactly sure whose emails he is reading but I certainly don’t think I am worthy of the comment telling me that I am psycho and “out there”  For such a smart guy, he never could understand points that I made during anything resembling a disagreement.  He rarely offers a reason as to why I deserve to live and breathe on the planet but is quick with the insults.  (See The List).  It’s only natural that I would ask him again - why are you hanging on to me, why do you want me – the Embodiment of Evil Who he says cuts him down constantly?  I’ve barely heard him say a bad word about his ex….he told me her Cosby Sweater “colorful” story but he told it in a gentle way, like he felt bad for her.  Through her serial cheating and drug addiction and child abandoning while on drug binges, at least he had compassion.  Always “Saint So and So is a good person” no matter what she did.  (I did resort to calling her Saint.  I did.  Can’t I be just a tiny bit bitter? Enough to be part of a cocktail?)  I am told how “bad” I am on so many levels. Even though financially I kept the household running for a couple of years and made sure he had health insurance for his many ailments and psychologist.  Even though I paid off his jeep so that he wouldn’t have a car payment (even though I still had one).  I’m still paying for the jeep.  I took the loan against my 401K and even though it’s been 2 years, it’ll be about 2 or 3 more.  I’ve been there for him through surgeries/procedures and to care for him afterwards.  I don’t know how to achieve his good graces at this point.  Flip hasn’t fessed up to any wrong doing or heart breaking at all. Instead I get the random email at night about how I’ve broken his heart.  Once again.  Geez hon, ever think there is a reason that I moved out twice and am so dissatisfied?  Ever think there is a reason that the cops had to be called in three of your relationships (ours thankfully did not have such drama grandeur). 

But this morning I have a Hate Hangover.  It feels like Restraint Failure to have gone outside my boundaries of what I would want to have actually said (as opposed to what I was really thinking) and diving right in to the emotional purge.  I admit, the plunge felt refreshing at the time.

So I decided to send a follow up email this morning to say that I apologize for the barbs but that the accusations are true for me.  I just could have stated it better the first time instead of the tar and feathering that I gave him last night.  I felt better apologizing for basically not speaking my feelings in a more respectful way.  Do you imagine that he returned my email with anything remotely warm, even 5 seconds on high in the microwave?  I believe I was called a horrendous, backstabbing blather-dee blah.  Something to that effect.  I fell asleep mid-insult. 

What exactly happened to cause all of this?  Oh so much over time I suppose.  I would have been hung by nosehairs and fishhooks if I had been conversing with my exes for one, but especially if I had said during the relationship that I outgrew that friendship, that I didn’t really need to be friends with that person anymore and then went further to run to them every time Flip and I separated, pouring my soul out to said ex.  How on earth this ex of his has such magical radar to suddenly call him whenever I’m out of the picture is unreal.  He was on the phone with me the other day and the other line rang.  He mind fumbled.  He said to me that he’d let it go to voicemail, then garbled what I had just said to him.  The conversation turned elsewhere in topic.  I drove it back because the red flag stabbing me in the gut was too sharp to ignore.  “Who was that?”  He paused and then said it was Saint, the ex.  He then went on to say that well he’d only spoken to her once – a couple of weeks ago.  So just once, right in all this time?  But that’s weird, she happened to call you in May as well.  That’s twice (that I know of).  Ok so minimizing the truth.  And attempting to let the call slide without saying anything.  Now in many other relationships, this sounds really like, so?  It probably would have here, had he “trained” me differently years ago.  But he trained me to cut off my male friends or deal with a lot of interrogation and unhappiness and withholding from affection.  No, he never Said to dump my friends.  Anyone who has been through the same thing will totally see how this works.  Then he mentioned that well, yeah, they call each other during hard times and so now, she has become Saint Shoulder.  Well that’s nice.  I’d love to see his reaction to the same situation if it were me.  Especially if the same ex kept recurring whenever we were apart.  And we’d just been nekked the night before. 

So things hurt. Or have been hurting or can hurt.  I can make decisions based on this.  I can go into that lull of rumination (oh wait, I did that here) and do the back and forth with him, fighting for my feelings to be validated, but they won’t be.  These feelings would have to go on a waiting list – there are still feelings from September of 2009 waiting to get in the Validation Club.  Or I can really just say, wow, I’m tired of talking about this.  Regenerate already!  Get out of this once and for all, erase the early 80s and start connecting with what is right now.  From there I can figure out who I want to be.