It’s Always Good Until It’s Not May 26, 2009

I wonder just how long I’ll have to live before I can write a memoir about love, and about what makes a relationship work.  Is it the genuine love for and support of one another?  Is it intellectual compatibility and stimulation?  Is it someone who makes you laugh?  Or is it nothing more than our own attitude, with almost no relation to the other person involved?  What can be compromised, sacrificed, before we say uncle and find greener pastures (or mirages)? For the first time I can remember, the NYT had a female same-sex “Vows” column, and it set off nearly all my little land mines: one proposed to the other on their second date.  How very “U-Haul” lesbian.  One was vegetarian when they met, the other decided to cook them up some yummy beans…with bacon.  Nice.  But they both love words, have sharp senses of banter and intellectually-toothsome careers.  I know exactly what I’m doing – I’m comparing my insides to their outsides.  Yeah, yeah.  And I was so happy most of this day, most of this weekend, until suddenly and immediately I wasn’t.  I must be such a joy to be in a relationship with.  Moody, distant at a second’s notice – only a few days ago I was sure I was going to fuck up this greatest relationship of my life, and here I am in a matter of milliseconds questioning whether she and I are going to make it.  Oh, ye of no faith whatsoever.

There is good news, folks – I didn’t act out on it, I knew what I was doing, and even though C is the most emotionally sensing person I’ve ever known and has definitely picked up on my struggle, it hasn’t ruined anything.  But the bigger questions are these: if love is a decision, how do we decide to keep making it?  Is it the level of compatibility that allows some people to not constantly question and doubt, or a personality trait?  In one of the “State of the Union” columns, one spouse credited the success of her relationship to the fact that she said she simply never allowed doubt to creep into her mind, even during the hard times.  Part of me wants so much to do that, to just buckle down and say this is the person with whom I’m spending the next 40-odd years, so let’s start getting used to it and nail up all those back doors.  Something about that is so appealing to me.  And I do have so much here – so much support, love, humor, ease, pretty great and getting better sex, food likes, affection, expressiveness, generosity, a great dog caretaker – so much.  I don’t truly think I could get more in one package.  But the wit isn’t there.  The intellect isn’t there.  And I doubt it will ever be.  And sometimes that is so incredibly okay.  Until it isn’t.  And I need to get better at soothing myself during the “isn’t” moments so I don’t blow them all up and have nothing but charred bits in my wake.  I know how good this is.  What I can’t and don’t know is if it’s forever.  And learning to accept that is really the greatest challenge – that we make plans and God laughs, that I can try to force my will upon my life like shaping pipecleaners, but it’s really not mine to mold.  I can just pray for enough light to take the next right step, and know that every time I see a future – be it shining or desolate – it’s nothing more than a figment of my imagination anyway.  Maybe if I could put a little less stock in the happy-ever-after convictions I have sometimes, I could learn to put a little less in the sturm-und-drang ones, too.

If I Had No Love to Give, I Wouldn’t Give it to You March 21, 2009

I never quite understood what that lyric meant.  Joan Armatrading, assuming you’re reading this, could you please explain?  And yet, it knocked at my brain to be the title for this post.  This reader-beware post that will likely be more 15 minutes of neurotic panic than anything insight-bearing.

How can love just vanish?  My sponsor reminds me that it always comes back, and so far she’s right, but in the moments when it’s gone, it’s the scariest fucking thing.  I’m waiting for C to arrive, which was a change of plans as I was going to go to her tomorrow (today), which by the way I also resented because I’ve been doing so much driving this past week and it takes an hour and a half to get to her, and I’m putting on something a little nicer than the stained white turtleneck I’d been wearing most of the afternoon (it wasn’t stained when I first put it on, but that’s another digression), which I probably also resented as I was making a lot of headway work-wise and wouldn’t necessarily have stopped then, much less to prettify myself or change the sheets or tidy up the place, and I suddenly think, “this isn’t going to work.  I don’t enjoy talking to her.  I’m not intellectually stimulated by her.  This isn’t going to work.”

Now, if this were in any way new information, I might have reacted differently.  But this, sadly, is the flaw I bump up against every goddamn time I’m feeling distant from her.  And when we’re good, I’m fine with it: her emotional IQ is off the charts, she’s smarter than I first gave her credit for, I tend to be drawn to women who are not as intellectually agile/informed as I, yadda, yadda, yadda.  But it’s been 6 months, and my entire relationship life is peppered with these existential crises about my partners, only this time it’s not that she’s not loving enough, or doesn’t make enough money, or isn’t communicative or thoughtful enough – oh, no, all that’s perfect beyond my wildest incarnations.  She’s just a little slow in the verbal department sometimes.  A little obvious.  Lacking in subtlety. Boring. Repetetive.  Nothing at all like this rant.

I’m not going anywhere, so it’s pretty clearly an opportunity to distance myself and not feel love.  But why?  Why am I choosing to protect myself rather than be close?  Because I feel encroached upon?

I’m off to a meeting.  That always helps.  Self-care, in general, usually does.

The Ego Giveth, The Ego Taketh Away March 20, 2009

Being human is just so darn funny sometimes.  I gave C my key, which after 6+ months and having a key under my welcome mat (yes, I am a living cliche) of which she was aware the entire time, I figured no big deal, right? Ha!  Not in my disease-addled brain.  Pretty much from the minute I casually handed it over, I started looking for reasons why she wasn’t good enough for me.  And, as my therapist has pointed out on many occasions, I could find something to pick on about anyone.  George Clooney – couldn’t you just stop being such a prankster for once?  Mother Teresa – that burlap really doesn’t do anything for your complexion.  I know, I know, but in the moment it all feels so fucking real – the committee is saying the same stuff I pull out every goddamn time I’m feeling threatened, and we all know the power of sirens…like a zombie, I return, repeating “she’s not worthy, she’s not worthy…”

Thankfully I have a sponsor whom I believe in and whose relationship I respect, so when she tells me it’s my disease picking the fight, I listen.  And then something magical happens – I find out she’s right, and get to see my own part in the drama.  And that’s always the biggest relief, honestly, to find out it’s not her, but me; that I can’t control what she says but I can control my attitude about it, where I decide to take it.  I am a verbal snob, ridiculously nimble on my conversational feet.  If I have to choose between someone who is loving and grounded and communicative versus someone whose energies go into being a good sparring partner, I’ll gladly take the former, and besides, it’s not a Chinese menu, I’ll take one from column a and one from column b and in neat little containers with a set of chopsticks comes my perfect mate.

I just wrote to an old friend that there is good awaiting us of which we cannot even conceive because we don’t yet have a template for it.  If most of what I got as a youngster was criticism, anger, and volatility, how can I possibly conceive of a different model on my own?  We have to be shown new ways in order to live them ourselves.  That’s where other people come in, where the growth potential is infinite depending on who we choose to walk with.  Someone in one of my meetings said that perception is merely evidence-gathering for our own beliefs, and I think that’s so profound: we don’t see reality as it is, we see reality as we are.  We notice what stands out to us, and what stands out does so because of our own histories, because of what has been made apparent or familiar to us.  So the trick is to get that shaken up a bit, but in a good way.  The trick is to step out of one’s comfort zone, but in a healthy direction.   Therapy can do that if it’s really good, and 12-step meetings can because people share their experience, strength and hope through incredible adversities, and because they don’t judge one another for the lessons that get us there.  The other day, someone in an open AA meeting was counting days, and he had 6.  6 days of sobriety, and when he said it out loud, everyone clapped loudly.  No blame.  No finger-pointing.  Just welcome back, you’re in the right place, the prodigal son returns.

What I vigorously don’t believe is that we can do it alone.  With only my brain, I can only think my thoughts, through the filters of my experience.  That limits me tremendously.  I realize meditation can serve as a channel to something higher, but if my translator isn’t familiar with the language, I’m not going to hear it or understand.  So I keep coming back.  To meetings, to my sponsor, to my girlfriend, to sources of wisdom I believe have been placed in my path as loudspeakers for the messages I need to hear.  My job is to remain open to them, but the rest comes from humility and connection.

Love Heals December 29, 2008

If I could convey one message in the span of my life, it would be that.  Love heals.  it is the safety net that catches me when I try something new; it is the launchpad from which I grow and experiment and ultimately, seemingly, take off for heretofore uncharted and unimagined destinations.  It’s been over 8 months since my last post, and having now read them over, I cannot believe how far my life has come in that time.

The Quell of Loneliness (get it?) February 29, 2008

Someone whose blog I liked very much has deleted it.  My head spins – why?  Where did she go?  Away from potentially critical, questioning readers?  She’d been miserable in her marriage and in relationships in general, started on a journey of self-discovery, and then met a man via this medium whom she decided was the answer to all her questions.  Many people congratulated her and wished her luck, but one or two cautioned her that she seemed to be repeating history.  I guess my fantasy is that she didn’t particularly want to hear the naysayers, wanted to remain blissfully ignorant and throw herself into the (unquestionable) joy of the beginning of a relationship without the buzzkill of cautionary tales.  And maybe she will, in fact, be blissfully happy.  Maybe for some, it’s possible to change a tune without learning a different instrument.  I’m probably jealous, more than anything.  Yes, I want what my higher power wants for me, blah, blah, blah, but I’d also like someone besides my sponsor (though she’s been right so far about everything else) to tell me that life will keep getting better and that I absolutely, positively will meet someone and be capable of a loving relationship.  Because most of the time, I honestly don’t believe it.

Being with my mother and the goddamn Blackberry that’s surgically attached to her thumbs for twelve days didn’t help matters any, to be sure.  I’ve never been so lonely in someone else’s company, yet here I am, sitting next to her, seeing the world and dying to talk to someone about all of it.  We might as well have been driving through Elizabeth, NJ for all she paid attention, yet we were driving through the streets of Mumbai and Manila, past local culture and sights unseen.  For sure, my recent ease in my own company helped me tremendously, but it was still incredibly lonely.  It made me miss B: suddenly I’m back to looking for her on Facebook, Googling her…someone with her name, living in her area, won honorable mention in a squash cooking contest.  A f–king squash cooking contest?  All she could cook when we were together was macaroni and cheese from a box and fried eggs.  So I start wandering down the road of “has she grown up?,” “should I contact her?”  Yuck, yuck, and yuck.  At least I know better than to listen to myself at this moment.  It’s just little drops of the drug, still stored in my veins somewhere, come out to haunt me.

One thing I WON’T do to quell this loneliness is sleep with boy C again.  All it did was make me miss women even more than I already did.  How do straight women deal with 5-o’clock-shadow-burn?  Or with all that hair?  If only I felt as much of an ease flirting with women as I do with men, I’d at least find someone to sleep with.  But that probably isn’t the answer, either.  I need to get back into my groove, to fill the emptiness myself.  I need to do what I think – correctly or not – my blogger-in-absentia was unable to do, to become truly at ease in my own company so that being with someone else never again has to mean abandoning a part of myself.  It’s a wonder I’m not emotional cheesecloth after being with my mother for twelve days: let me give myself the time to return to my former level of contentment before I start making any big decisions.

Transitional Objects January 27, 2008

I’m thinking about getting voice recognition software. I’m a quick hunt-and-pecker, but I wonder if my thoughts would go down differently if I didn’t have to wait for my fingers to catch up to my brain. Though I do like the tap tap tap on the keyboard, and I’d much rather learn to type quickly by touch, but will I, after all these years?

I have a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head. Sometimes I miss having someone to fuss over – to clean the house for in preparation for her arrival, to prettify myself, shave, smell nice for. I miss the drama of flirting. I attended a book group on “Eat Pray Love” this morning, and one member of the group was talking about how David was just a “transitional object:” that he was there to help catapult (my word) her out of her marriage and onto whatever was next. I started thinking about B in those terms: is that why the relationship only lasted a year? It happened a mere six months after C moved out of my house, and C and I were still sleeping together even in February of that year, I think, so I really think it’s possible that I jumped into the relationship with B in order to make a full break from all that was so unsatisfying with C. It only matters because it puts the relationship with B in a slightly different perspective – that she wasn’t really a serious relationship candidate, but more of a symbolic stand-in of sorts. And she did introduce me to my spiritual teacher (Al-Anon), and she did crack me wide open so more light could come in – she served her purpose incredibly well. But I don’t want to be a dog at the dump with a can stuck on my nose – I don’t particularly miss her, and I am realizing all the ways the relationship was a compromise for me, but I don’t have anything to replace it with at the moment except for excruciatingly cheesy episodes of “Beverly Hills Bordello” and “L Word.” I so so so so don’t want a relationship right now, and I know I can’t even choose well yet, but there are moments when I miss the lust, the electricity, the excitement, the…do I miss the distraction? Wow, less and less. I am becoming so much more comfortable with my life – even the fact that it’s a Saturday and I’m completely content to be home by myself, writing, reading, napping. I don’t feel lonely, I don’t feel afraid of being left alone with myself. A book called “The Joy Diet” was recommended by someone in the book group (even she conceded it was an awful name), and apparently one of her remedies is spending time with yourself and being still. I don’t know if she means meditation, but I do see that the universe can speak to me much more often and more clearly when everything around me is quiet. Just this afternoon when I arrived home, I was squatting down to put something away in my kitchen, and my cat clambered up onto my knees (one of my favorite things that he does). As I’m sitting still and petting him, I start looking around, and I just happen to notice that there is a leak under one of the radiators. How else would I ever have noticed, until it actually became a serious problem?

See, a friend just called and I didn’t even feel like picking up the phone. Sometimes people are a lot of work, much as I might love them, and as I’m becoming more at ease in my own skin, I find that being with myself is kind of fun and easy. Not to mention my dog just put his nose by my lap and my cat is flanking me on the other side.

I wonder how many days I could not shower and still not be disgusted with myself? I’m going on at least four days now, and with my hair up, you really can’t tell how long it’s been. At what point could I just not stand the smell or feel of myself anymore? Will I shower today, or wait another day? Stay tuned…

Content vs. Happy January 17, 2008

I wrote so much more than that measly paragraph yesterday, but I did it on my SmartPhone and the other 3 lengthy paragraphs suddenly did a disappearing act, only just like on that CSI episode, they were really gone. Funny, though – the first paragraph (the one that made it) really says in a nutshell all the rest of what I was allegorically (anecdotally?) telling: this has been a time of such intense growth, this 35+ period. I let someone move in with me for the first time , I had a commitment ceremony (both families, a Rabbi, breaking the glass – the works), I ended the relationship less than a year later, I sold my home and moved up here, I got into the most intense, satisfying, maddening relationship of my life, I started going to Al-Anon (yes, fuck anonymity, it’s Al-Anon and it’s saving my life so I’m damn well going to say what it is), I got dumped, I hit an all-time bottom of drug-withdrawal-like, desperate, eviscerating heartbreak, I went to meeting after meeting and got a sponsor and slowly but surely got pulled out of the chasm, I started teaching, I started cooking again, I started taking better care of myself, I started setting boundaries and “cleaning out” any friendships that were not healthy for me, I stayed single, I kept going to meetings. For over 8 months now, I’ve stayed single, and for at least the last two, I can honestly say I’ve been happy about that, and more content with my life (notice how I’m not saying happier) than I’ve ever been. It’s not the kind of happiness I experienced during the good times with B: that unbelievably heady mix of attraction and connection. That was rarely a “feet on the ground” kind of happiness, and as a result, the other side of it was always a crash of one sort or another. The happiness was neither coming from inside me, nor in any way controllable by me – it depended on the intensity of our bond, on the level of intimacy I felt with her.

This contentedness is different. There’s a book out there called “How We Choose to be Happy,” and while it’s been some time since I read it, part of what their participants said was that real happiness was something steady, almost quiet, like the subtle hum of a generator, rather than the crescendo of the Star Wars theme (okay, I made that analogy up, but it gets the point across). I like my life, very very much. But beyond that, I have come to trust more and more that what is meant for me will not pass me by, that with my cooperation, my life is unfolding just as it should, and that whatever is in store for me is beyond my limited imagining. That’s already been true: I could never have imagined that at 37 I’d be well-off; living in a beautiful, cozy home; surrounded by people who see me and know me and love me. My life is incredibly rich, and in the scheme of things, I’m still quite young. There is much more to come.

But I’m feeling equanimitous (made that up, for sure) at this moment, which isn’t always the case. Just a couple of days ago, it wasn’t. I’m hopeful this blog can serve as both repository and reminder for me, and as always, I greatly welcome the thoughts of anyone else who happens by.

The Truth About 35+ January 16, 2008

is that it’s a woman’s chrysalis time: someone could have warned us, but it wouldnt have made any difference. can you imagine some beautiful, wise butterfly approaching a caterpillar and saying “yeah, that leaving the coccoon thing? it’s gonna hurt something awful, but you’ll be so much freer after it’s over.” big help. we have to be broken down. cracked open, terrified and in unbearable discomfort in order to make truly life-altering changes, otherwise why in god’s name would we do it?

Back to Life, Back to Reality January 7, 2008

Isn’t it kind of funny that the next lyrics are, “however do you want me, however do you need me?” I’m reading the blogs of all these incredibly neat women in their 30s who are “waking up,” in a sense, realizing they are living lives that feel inauthentic in a variety of ways. I wrote to one of them, “do you think this is what happens to women between 35 and 40, but no one ever told us?” I feel very lucky I don’t have children or a spouse I need to step back from in order to find the contours of my own skin – I do think it can be done, but I’d imagine it’s harder to stick to your guns when someone else is persistently there asking if you wouldn’t prefer theirs. Or simply assuming yours and theirs are one and the same.

Every day, I get to ask myself what I want to do, and by and large I get to do it. I’ve started getting back into bed in the mornings after feeding my dog and cat, and reading/napping for a couple of hours. I still get up at 9:30 so (who am I defending myself to?), but I am finding I’m not nearly so overwhelmed by the mornings when I know I can get back into bed for awhile. I’m now reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, and when I got up this morning, I came to the computer and bought cheese-making cultures online (www.cheesemaking.com). It’ll be my cause of the moment, I’m sure, but the notion of living more softly on the earth by growing my own produce and making my own cheese (and maybe bread one of these days) is kind of exciting to me. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll likely have buffalo wings for dinner tonight, or something equally inorganic, but I adore food and the process of making it, so the notion that I could literally feed myself from my own larder is exciting to me. And what better use of my time and space now that I’ve moved outside the city in pursuit of a healthier existence?

One thing that has begun to change for me is that I’m enjoying my own company much more. Truth be told, I’ve always liked my own company once I got past the terror of it, but now I think I’m easing more and more into comfort with longer spates of time on my own. When I think about gardening and cooking organically, though, I definitely think about a group of friends sipping wine and cooking together – by myself it feels too lonely. Not to mention the cleanup’s a bitch when I’m alone. I don’t yet have a community of friends my age here…yet. I’ve generally preferred the company of older folk, partly because that’s who I’ve met through my program, and partly because they’re far less of a threat to me – I can be myself with them (and okay, also feel like a bit of a star) without a sense of competition. Yuck. I don’t feel competitive with people my age who are invested in authenticity, but I haven’t found many in my lifetime, of any age, and most have not lived close by. How would I find more such people, I wonder?

The best time of my life was at a summer college program for juniors in high school. It was the first time in my life that everyone wanted to really talk and be close and be real – we would have daily pile-ups, where we would all lie on each other’s bellies and talk for hours. We saw “Harold and Maude” and cried, made Cat Stevens’ music the unofficial soundtrack to our days, tie-dyed every white piece of fabric we could find, and just loved each other with a completely innocent yet utterly intimate and authentic love I think I’ve fruitlessly searched for ever since. One difficult thing about being lesbian (for me) is that it automatically categorizes contact between women as sexual, making non-sexual affection hard to ask for or realize. It’s really only been in this last year that I’ve been able to give and receive hugs or back rubs without any self-consciousness or worry of someone “taking it the wrong way” – I’ve had to become self-confident enough to know my own designs and not care what someone else assumes. It was an utterly paralyzing thing, especially for someone like me who craves affection, who would have hugged my friends with abandon if that fear hadn’t always gotten in my way.

To find out who we truly are, to fill ourselves all the way out our edges rather than being shaped by the inverse image of others’ molds, that is a worthy journey. What makes me laugh? What turns me on? When do I feel like the “real” me, even if different situations elicit different facets of that identity? Can this blog continue to be a place where I’m able to explore and express that real self? How do I find others in the company of whom I can still nourish that evolving identity?

Happy New Year? January 1, 2008

It’s early, way early for having finally fallen asleep around 2am. I didn’t even think I’d make it to midnight, but there’s some fight in the old girl yet.  I’m debating whether or not to get back into bed – on one hand it feels very decadent, on the other it depresses the hell out of me. Do you ever not know which “voice” to trust? The one that beckons soothingly, almost seductively that I’m tired, wouldn’t getting back into bed feel so good? Reading a book and falling back to sleep? Versus the voice that says you know what path that leads down, and it’s often not pretty, so why don’t you get up and be productive and shake whatever last cobwebs of sadness or melancholy are curtaining your mind. But then, it’s my mom who always needed to be productive, who told me my ass wasn’t going to get any smaller by keeping my nose in a book, and I can pretty much do whatever I damn please because I’m a full-fledged grown-up now. So it’s back, then, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s question as the mantra for my days: what do I really, really, really want?

I wanted an e-mail from B to be waiting for me this morning. Yuck, but it’s true. I don’t know what I’d have done with it, but I wanted it there, forcing my hand. I almost wrote her yesterday. My sponsor and I were doing part of the 4th step and talking about love, and she said that she thought I’d very much been in love with B, and she with me, but that in choosing her, I’d gone as far as I could go without making some major transformations in myself. I hit a bottom in our breakup the likes of which I’ve never seen and hope never to have to see again. I may actually have to go get “Eat, Pray, Love” and quote directly from it, because much to my then-splintered heart’s relief, I think she captured what happened to me.

“a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it” (p.149).

That’s what she did to me, for me. And I almost wrote her to say thank you, that I’m okay, even better than okay, and that I was grateful she had been the best I could do for myself with the tools that I had at the time. She “broke my heart open so new light could get in, made me so desperate and out of control that I had to transform my life” (ibid). She made me feel what it felt like to be truly seen and truly loved.

But I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, and that may just be how it is for awhile. I’m 99% sure we’re not going to be together again – have you ever been with someone where the feel of their name in your mouth just wasn’t natural, and it made you think “how could I be with this person in the long term if saying their name doesn’t feel right to me?” Am I nuts? But her name never felt right in my mouth.

And now, I am learning what it means to love and be loved, to love myself without exception, to see that the moments when I feel nerdy or loser-y or alone are not really me, just some old records with really deep grooves. I am learning to be alone and not lonely…in her blog “And the Damage Done,” the writer speaks of how being alone may be the way to discover who we truly are, but fears we may not know that before we’re in our 60s or 70s, and then what? I don’t believe that’s true. I think life is a journey and that each person who enters it in some significant way is here to teach us more about ourselves that we could not learn in the absence of that outside influence, but that there is a point when the work pays off enough to start bringing more positive people into our lives. I’m learning so incredibly much about myself, about how loving through joking sarcasm still slices and puts me on guard, about how full of light I feel when I am able to express my true feelings and be myself without thinking.

I saw Chris Noth in a Starbuck’s on 8th Street the week before last. The reason I’m bringing it up here is that his dark eyes made me swoon, regardless of the body that came along with them – B had very blue eyes, and while I grew to love them (and I am a major sucker for crow’s feet, which she had as much from smiling all the time as from 20 years of smoking), I fall into warm, brown eyes much, much more deeply. My girlfriend before B, C (I’m not kidding) had brown eyes, but they were cold somehow – not lifeless, but not expressive most of the time, either. Like her. So brown is good but warmth is better. Anyway, Chris was much better looking in person than I’d have anticipated: quite tall, casually but nattily dressed, and really, such huge, dark eyes. Yum.

So yes, I think, Happy New Year to all. If nothing else, it marks the start of a new year in which anything at all can happen. At this time last year, I’d never have predicted I’d be here now, so who in God’s name knows where the next 364 days will take me. But life is good. Still hard, but good. No regrets.