Me Shiny

So my last update was 11/23.  It hardly feels like that, my life has just launched in new and unexpected ways and I've been so busy.

Since I began writing this blog, I've faced down some of my deepest, darkest shit, and it's changed me.  I'm not who I was, I'm like Me-turbocharged, Me Shiny.  In fact, if I was going to write another blog, or name the next chapter in my life, that is what I would call it- Firefly reference intended.

When your perspective about something changes, everything around you changes.  It's so true- all that we think and feel is through our own lense of perception.  Change your perception and what you're looking at - it's not the same.

Relationships are not the same for me anymore.  I have leveled up somehow, I'm not even sure how.  I'm stronger.  My heart is more open.  It feels like a crazy miracle.  I can feel pain and not shut down.  I can feel disappointment, and not shrink away from it.  When I feel these things, I know my strong beautiful heart is working, it's loving, and it's okay to lean into it in some ways, to feel all of it and know that this is my one wild and precious life- and this is my heart, and these are my relationships- and I aim to more fully experience all of them.

Integrity is huge.  Abused kids learn shame and work around strategies for dealing with stuff-  and those strategies have not served me well in my adult life, while I honor my need for them when I was essentially figuring out big shit as a little person.  

My understanding now is that I can be in my heart and I can walk around in the world and love people, and connect with them, and because my heart is mine - all I need to do is love with integrity and even when things don't go the way I would like, even when there's pain, disappointment, or inner turmoil- I have who I am - I have this heart and way of being that make me, me.  That feels so important and difficult to articulate, so maybe I need more perspective before I can, and thankfully the blog will be here when that time comes.

Everyone is on a path.  Everyone is struggling.  What I need, it's really inside of me, and that is the source from which my needs are filled.  But that wide gaping hole of need that can never be filled, no matter how much external love or light is poured into it-  that feels mostly gone.  It feels like it is so much more healed, and so much more strengthened, than ever in my life it has been.

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed

Wildness

In 2004 I backpacked sections of the PCT in OR and WA- and so related to Cheryl Strayed's PCT account.  These last months, I've walked a fuck ton of miles in a wilderness of a different sort.  The difficult choices- they really come down to this and my insular focus on going forward, feels less like retreating into a cave of woe and more like real growth while being with it.  I hope so!!

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
― Cheryl Strayed

Spikey Bangs

Every time I post up something uncomfortably real about what I'm going through, I think to myself:  "That's some really unflattering self disclosure there, lovey- best to keep that tidbit to yourself."  But when I read back, I am SO grateful I wrote it down. 

This agonizing unflattering self disclosure is what makes this blog actually useful, so here it goes.  I can barely bear to type this out:

I unfriended him on facebook to help me move on, but all too regularly I go back and check his wall/timeline/fuck all.  And since the day he told me he didn't want to see me on a kid free weekend, that he was busy and had a gal pal from recovery visiting and staying in his house for the week, and was too busy to see me--- since THAT day- he's had the picture I took of him up as his profile piq.

It's really not one of his more flattering photos, I must say.  His bangs are spikey and weird looking, presumably from many hours of heretofore never experienced amazing sex.  I nearly said amazeballs, but that would be misleading.

Why won't he change the picture? I ask myself.  I think today is day 7 of this picture, ugh.  It's the picture I hesitated long and hard before deleting from my computer, and then a few hours later, there it is again.  In that picture, he's looking *at me* when we were completely init.  In that space I'd always imagined I'd get to some day be in.

As an aside, I've always been fascinated by the expressions people wear when specific people photograph them.  I've made it somewhat of a study, and part of what I enjoy about candid photos is figuring out who took the photo based on the subject's eyes and expression.  I can almost always tell who photographed my dad, for example- almost always.

Reading my last entry- I'm so grateful I wrote that stuff down, all of his unhealthy weirdness that is so turmoil-inducing, it makes me grateful we're through even if I haven't exactly moved on yet, those truths are big game changers pointing my heart and spirit in that direction.

Yet, at some future moment, probably sooner than later- he'll have changed his profile picture.  And it will be gone, because I did not save a copy of it.  And some new wave of grief will wash over me- but not really, it will be like a tiny outgoing wave that just hits my feet, or maybe not even my whole feet, just enough to let me feel how cold and unwelcoming that vastness really is. 

Living With Integrity II

I wish to develop this thought-  What it means to live with integrity.  It's damned important, and it's almost as if a finely calibrated instrument that helps me to operate with integrity, was installed into my psyche.  It's something I've been working hard on for a long while without realizing that's what I was going for.

In my relationship with Mtn, I felt inspired and safe. Then I felt funky and I challenged myself to grow up a little, to become in the relationship, what I needed in the relationship.  It was big transformative stuff and it happened and keeps happening and I don't want to lose it roll backwards, I want to develop it further. 

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to
succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
― Abraham Lincoln

Living With Integrity I

Too tired to develop this thought too much tonight, but I feel as though something has shifted within me in the last few months- where I put myself out there in a more complete way, and despite some pretty crappy circumstances, I gave what I wanted to receive and behaved in a way that felt right to me- above board, all the way.   That's important to me.  I loved with integrity.  And I'm going to keep approaching relationships with integrity as I figure the rest of myself out- because it's important, and I can feel it deep in my stuffs that it's just the right way for me to be. 

“Living with integrity means: Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships. Asking for what you want and need from others. Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension. Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe.”
― Barbara De Angelis

An unhealthy man chases me when I'm not in contact with him, and rejects me when I'm living and loving with integrity. 

Regretful

As I deal with what is, in a new position I'm serving in- I realize how regretful I am that I left my well paying data job to get pregnant and birth a bub.  I have loved mothering more than anything I've ever done- but I could not see then how my marriage would fail and I'd be left standing-

solo.

no retirement.

no career trajectory, advancement of my skills, yada.

My ex husband keeps advancing and moving forward professionally, and spends his work off time with our son.  But I am always on.

I wouldn't have it any other way, and yet--- this is my biggest regret. 

It's the thing I've got to figure out- part time, or resort to the dread after care.  I can't imagine being away from my precious young son, more than I already am.  sigh.  dread. 

Insular

Like  a wound closing in on itself, it's felt more healing to be mostly insular these last couple of days than to allow the pain to ooze forth as words in this blog.  Still, they feel pretty green and icky and pus like, the way wounds do when they're healing.

The sideways freezing cold rain has come, which puts the kibosh on my hiking schemes out here, and that is always a difficult time for me, since I use these wild spaces out my back door to escape to.  It's just no fun when it's high winds and freezing rain, maybe if I get some expedition style rain gear- I could do it and hike/laugh instead of cower/shiver.

In trying to assess where my self unfucking is at-  I feel like opening my heart has been a huge step forward, but it's also really tough.  Feeling stuff- it's difficult and I'm struggling with emotional regulation.  The feelings I have surrounding my breakup are very tough to take.  I feel needy and raw and pathetic, frankly.  Yet I know this is what it feels like, this heart straining disappointment.  I can't say my heart is broken, because my relationship never got that far, and for that- maybe I should be thankful.  But it got far enough to feel a lot and to hope for a lot. 

What I was looking forward most to- was partnering with him on stuff in our lives that matter.  I was looking forward to adult attachment, in all of it's neurobiological wonder.  I was looking forward to experiencing that and smooshing our lives together, and making something awesome together.  And I KNEW it was too soon to want any of that, but still I wanted it.  And I will never be able to put words to blog, how freaking amazing and fantastic our physical chemistry was.  I didn't know it could be like that, we were both taken by surprise by it and it could feel overwhelming.  It was tough to make sense of it- and I never got that chance.  And that's what sizzles my bacon now- to be so curious about something without ever getting to explore it to my satisfaction, not even close.

I feel used and swindled and done so wrong- but he's just a fucked up guy on his own path with, clearly, severely messed up ideas about intimacy and romantic love.  Severely messed, and they have nothing to do with me.  I remember him leaving my place on a Saturday afternoon because he was worried about getting his lawn mowed and seeing his daughter off  before her homecoming dance-except she had no idea he was coming home and never even went to his house.  That's weird, right?  Like, do you let your daughter know you want her to bring her date around, since your house is 5 minutes away from her mother's place, or do you just show up and wait and hope without letting her know?  I remember thinking at the time he just couldn't relax and be away, he could not do it.

Oh there is such a long list of those weirdnesses, and if I understood the spectrum of human behavior better, I could probably point at it and say, "Aha!" and name it.  But I don't, so I can't.  I can just recognize that we could have had a whole additional night together on a precious kid free weekend, and he chose to bail for no reason. Or, he could have arranged to be a part of an important milestone in his daughter's life, but lacked the ability to communicate with her about it.  And- he could have had both if he had made arrangements in advance all the way around.

But throughout the whole relationship- he began treating me like I was sapping precious time and energy away from his LIFE- like having a romantic partner, that was all gravy, not the stuff of real life.  He showed anxiety and resentment about it, that I didn't understand at the time.  He didn't want to miss *anything* happening in his life- it was critically important to catch up with old friends in town that he hadn't seen in 9 or 10 years, on his one day to see me one week, for example.  The man has loads of acquaintances, but I would say that he actually feels that accepting invitations from every person who invites him to coffee, is more important than seeing his girlfriend- even if that's the only time he's got free.

Blah.  And so the thoughts go round and round.  A little tequila in my creamy coffee tonight and some zombified tv later, and a new week with big projects on the horizon, and making the goal of attending more social opportunities with my friends no matter how much the cold, dark, rain makes me want to hibernate and insulate- I dearly need their friendshippy warmth.

~the end~  (that's the thing about daily writing, it's not always going to be a complete well written thought, but it's down and it's here.)