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.

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?

While My Tea is Steeping (no, really) December 13, 2007

I forgot to add one rather colorful detail to my last post. I came home to an ecstatic puppy, his head covered with what looked like semen a la “There’s Something About Mary” (yes, I’m a lesbian, and yes I’ve still seen my share and is there really anyone out there who likes the smell or the taste of the stuff? I mean really, really, not just “I love you so I love how you taste.” I think it smells like bleach and I pretty much gag at the smell. Women, on the other hand, have a range of flavors and scents – I like my own smell and taste a lot.). Inside, I find an open garbage can (my fault – it’s a trash compactor and I left the door open), garbage strewn everywhere, and the mucilaginous remains of cake batter I started to prepare and then threw away when I saw WORMS in it (the expiration date was MAYBE one month ago), spattered across the floor and kitchen rug. Like I have time for this? Of course I have time for this! How better to spend my time? I’ve cleaned the floor but I still haven’t washed off my sweet batter-smelling dog. I figure that’ll be my next study break.

This is it December 8, 2007

It took me over ten minutes, I think, to come up with my name.  What signifies me, yet isn’t obvious?  What sounds like me?  Why am I not more creative?  At any rate, I think I like what I came up with.  An astrologer I respect once told me this lifetime was my last time around: hence the name.  This life has been hard, so I’m kind of hoping he’s right about that.

So I’m writing a blog because I need to spend more time in my head, if you can believe that.  this seems like an interesting way to do that, since eventually people may happen upon my blog and comment on it, so it will be public and personal at the same time.  I’m afraid to spend time alone, in my head, so I over-fill my days and feel incredibly sorry for myself when I don’t have stuff to keep me busy – a friend of mine says that being alone is being in enemy territory, and I’m very sad to say I think that’s true for me.  I should probably be meditating, but at the very least I’ll try getting back into journal writing in this electronic format.  I think the trick will be to stay true to myself, to not write as though there is a potential audience, to speak the same secret truths that I would if I were writing in one of my spiral-bound, Pearl-Paint journals.  I think I’m going to try to do this a la The Artist’s Way, writing for half an hour every day, ideally every morning.

So where am I in my life?  I’m 37, female, somewhat recently single (< 1 year), I’ve been attending a twelve-step group for equally as long, and I’m trying to learn how to truly love and accept myself, without limits or exceptions.  My father is dead and I think I probably still don’t know what that means to me, except that I am avoiding a best friend whose brother just died because I still can’t really deal with cancer and death (why I’m avoiding her, not why he died).  She deserves better than that and I’m not even sure she knows I’m avoiding her, but I know.  And saying it here makes it real.

Really, how long can these things remain completely anonymous?  If anyone who knew me read this, they’d know it was me already.  But I live for connection with people.  Literally – it’s what I care about more than anything in the world, is feeling connected to people.  So maybe this needs to be a calculated risk – I want to be myself and connect with others as myself, which puts me at risk for people finding out more than I’d ordinarily tell.

So my dad is dead and my mom is a handful and a half, larger than life, but not the reason I’m a lesbian.  She is not affectionate and makes me look like a colossal slacker by comparison – she really manages to fit 37 hours worth of activities into a 24-hour day.  She’s also in a miserable relationship and without a doubt has a vortex of self-hate at her core that is what keeps her running so fast, fearing she’ll get sucked in if she slows down at all.  I don’t want to be like her, and I don’t want to be in a relationship like hers with either my dad or her new partner, nor do I want a relationship that’s anything like my sister’s, which just mirrors the contempt and disrespectmy mother had for my father.  who we are affects who we choose, so how I can I possibly choose well until I’m happy with me?  I’m infinitely more okay being single now than I was four or five months ago, and I think it will just get easier as time passes, but I think the one thing I truly doubt I’m capable of is a loving, supportive relationship.  Elizabeth Gilbert says that every day we should ask ourselves the question “what do I really, really, really want?” (apparently the 3 reallys are essential) and write down our answers.  I realize I’m not ready for it yet, but I really, really, really want a healthy, supportive intimate relationship.  I think the two things I want most in this world are to keep discovering my passion and pursuing it, and to be in a loving relationship.  But I must say, my program (which needs to remain anonymous, even here) is helping me grow and change so much that I have to acknowledge I don’t know what that is going to look like six months or a year from now.  It may well be that the fantasy I now have is really something I need to be for myself, and that once I feel more whole, my image of whom I want to be with will shift, as well.

Okay, I think this is enough for tonight.   But this seems like a good thing – something I’ll look forward to.  Good night.