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The daily breakup
Aug. 20th, 2021 09:40 am
( Every story has many sides and this side is my bitterness )( And this is my uncertainty )Ugh. I'm tired and I'm not doing any of the things I'm supposed to. That's enough writing for now.
Aug. 20th, 2021
( Every story has many sides and this side is my bitterness )( And this is my uncertainty )Ugh. I'm tired and I'm not doing any of the things I'm supposed to. That's enough writing for now.
The daily breakup: Whiplash
Aug. 20th, 2021 05:59 pmOkay.
Weeks back, maybe months back, when Tucker planned this trip he asked for what I needed around it. Asks number one, two, and three were not even near being on the table, they weren't a consideration. Ask four at least got a quick check-in before it was refused. Ask five was for some time to talk during the weeks he was gone, after his days with Sarah and not a week or two afterwards either, where we could reconnect and where there was space for me to talk about my feelings. Eventually (if she was going to be gone and he wasn't going to the convention yet anyways, and then after some pressing it would be created to work with either of those) he committed to a couple hours Friday evening (that's tonight) to talk.
A couple weeks before he left we had the "idk how you feel unless it directly affects me" (otherwise known as the "protect me from your feelings by not telling me about the hard ones because that's what people who love each other do" seriously do people live like this? deliberately?) conversation.
The weekend he left we has the "talking is hard, let's not do it much" conversation (otherwise known as "I'm getting emotionally overloaded and can't deal with so many feelings, can we take it down many notches").
We'd knocked around the idea of talking in the evenings he was gone, but my emotional regulation decided to try text instead, which is the context in which he stood me up that one night and gave the slight headtilt in the direction of apology an said he was doing great but just having these emotional experiences and didn't feel like he could compartmentalize them away to let me know he couldn't talk, or whatever (again running with the least charitable lens, I don't have an alternative lens on this one yet).
I sent a message saying that was kinda shitty and he said he thought he could stop being happy long enough to talk with me and I said he could be happy as long as he showed some fucking empathy (deeply paraphrased but probably pretty evenhanded). This was all by text.
After awhile he came back and said he'd still like to make time to listen to me on Friday, that he missed me, that he cared about me, that he was processing how he'd make the mistake around essentially standing me up, idk all the stuff. We had a meta-conversation about what kinds of things I wanted from that conversation (to be listened to while I talked about how I felt, to be validated, to be reassured, to hear how he was doing, to have my feelings understood as reactions and not as judgements) and what was on offer and so I decided to do it.
So this afternoon we were going to talk, but ended up text chatting instead. This whole week I was using text chat in communication with him deliberately to slow down the feedback loop, to keep intonation and expressions out of the picture and avoid misinterpretation there, to gauge how engaged he was and how interested. Basically we'd do a couple chats back and forth and if it felt terrible my thought was to then disengage; much easier than hanging up on someone.
And over chat he was... loving. As forthright as I've ever seen him. Reassuring. Communicative. Empathetic. Careful to double-check his assumptions. Concerned. So we stayed in chat for a couple hours having a "wtf has been going on and what are we going to do about it" conversation, one that was a reasonable follow-up to the mismatched needs conversation from before he left.
He said everything I wanted to hear, had been wanting to hear. He said it in the ways I wanted to hear it. He gave some reasons to believe things might go better in future, though I probably fed the setup for most of those in.
This is the hardest. It's the hardest part. It's the part where someone is scared enough of the real consequence of the end that they pull together every ounce of people-pleasing to be the person you want, instead of the person they need to be. It could also be what I always want it to be, what I always hope it could be: the correction of a misunderstanding, a river that will never stop flowing simply shifting its banks to a more favourable bed. That's happened to me, but it's not the most likely outcome.
I was given everything I wanted. I want it, so much, and I don't trust it to continue. I shouldn't trust it to continue, this concern is legitimate. How do I approach this? Do I reject it? Do I try it but stay suspicious? Do I just... go into it, and wait until next time it hurts?
I don't know. I'll sleep on it, and wake on it, and butcher pork on it, and clean the house and get the second bed ready and receive Josh on it (so many highways between here and there are closed he'll likely be delayed till late tomorrow), and cook with Josh on it, and harvest grain on it, and make pickles on it, and winterize the snowblower and tiller on it, and kill chickens on it, and can chicken stock on it, and catch up on work email on it, and go to the field to work on it. I'll feed the animals on it and peruse classifieds for a pickup truck on it. I'll live with it day to day and my heart and my body will want it to be true and if nothing suspicious happens they might convince me that it will be ok.
Either way I'll keep reaching out to my people, to the folks who supported me through the last week. I'll build that community and keep building it.
I don't know what happens next.
I hate being given what I want. It makes it worse when I lose it.
For so many years my heart was this badass standing wave of ground glass caught in a swirl of wind. Now it's just a lump of seeping muscle, oozing myoglobin and coming apart with any exposure to air.
Weeks back, maybe months back, when Tucker planned this trip he asked for what I needed around it. Asks number one, two, and three were not even near being on the table, they weren't a consideration. Ask four at least got a quick check-in before it was refused. Ask five was for some time to talk during the weeks he was gone, after his days with Sarah and not a week or two afterwards either, where we could reconnect and where there was space for me to talk about my feelings. Eventually (if she was going to be gone and he wasn't going to the convention yet anyways, and then after some pressing it would be created to work with either of those) he committed to a couple hours Friday evening (that's tonight) to talk.
A couple weeks before he left we had the "idk how you feel unless it directly affects me" (otherwise known as the "protect me from your feelings by not telling me about the hard ones because that's what people who love each other do" seriously do people live like this? deliberately?) conversation.
The weekend he left we has the "talking is hard, let's not do it much" conversation (otherwise known as "I'm getting emotionally overloaded and can't deal with so many feelings, can we take it down many notches").
We'd knocked around the idea of talking in the evenings he was gone, but my emotional regulation decided to try text instead, which is the context in which he stood me up that one night and gave the slight headtilt in the direction of apology an said he was doing great but just having these emotional experiences and didn't feel like he could compartmentalize them away to let me know he couldn't talk, or whatever (again running with the least charitable lens, I don't have an alternative lens on this one yet).
I sent a message saying that was kinda shitty and he said he thought he could stop being happy long enough to talk with me and I said he could be happy as long as he showed some fucking empathy (deeply paraphrased but probably pretty evenhanded). This was all by text.
After awhile he came back and said he'd still like to make time to listen to me on Friday, that he missed me, that he cared about me, that he was processing how he'd make the mistake around essentially standing me up, idk all the stuff. We had a meta-conversation about what kinds of things I wanted from that conversation (to be listened to while I talked about how I felt, to be validated, to be reassured, to hear how he was doing, to have my feelings understood as reactions and not as judgements) and what was on offer and so I decided to do it.
So this afternoon we were going to talk, but ended up text chatting instead. This whole week I was using text chat in communication with him deliberately to slow down the feedback loop, to keep intonation and expressions out of the picture and avoid misinterpretation there, to gauge how engaged he was and how interested. Basically we'd do a couple chats back and forth and if it felt terrible my thought was to then disengage; much easier than hanging up on someone.
And over chat he was... loving. As forthright as I've ever seen him. Reassuring. Communicative. Empathetic. Careful to double-check his assumptions. Concerned. So we stayed in chat for a couple hours having a "wtf has been going on and what are we going to do about it" conversation, one that was a reasonable follow-up to the mismatched needs conversation from before he left.
He said everything I wanted to hear, had been wanting to hear. He said it in the ways I wanted to hear it. He gave some reasons to believe things might go better in future, though I probably fed the setup for most of those in.
This is the hardest. It's the hardest part. It's the part where someone is scared enough of the real consequence of the end that they pull together every ounce of people-pleasing to be the person you want, instead of the person they need to be. It could also be what I always want it to be, what I always hope it could be: the correction of a misunderstanding, a river that will never stop flowing simply shifting its banks to a more favourable bed. That's happened to me, but it's not the most likely outcome.
I was given everything I wanted. I want it, so much, and I don't trust it to continue. I shouldn't trust it to continue, this concern is legitimate. How do I approach this? Do I reject it? Do I try it but stay suspicious? Do I just... go into it, and wait until next time it hurts?
I don't know. I'll sleep on it, and wake on it, and butcher pork on it, and clean the house and get the second bed ready and receive Josh on it (so many highways between here and there are closed he'll likely be delayed till late tomorrow), and cook with Josh on it, and harvest grain on it, and make pickles on it, and winterize the snowblower and tiller on it, and kill chickens on it, and can chicken stock on it, and catch up on work email on it, and go to the field to work on it. I'll feed the animals on it and peruse classifieds for a pickup truck on it. I'll live with it day to day and my heart and my body will want it to be true and if nothing suspicious happens they might convince me that it will be ok.
Either way I'll keep reaching out to my people, to the folks who supported me through the last week. I'll build that community and keep building it.
I don't know what happens next.
I hate being given what I want. It makes it worse when I lose it.
For so many years my heart was this badass standing wave of ground glass caught in a swirl of wind. Now it's just a lump of seeping muscle, oozing myoglobin and coming apart with any exposure to air.
