building new constructs from here to there
I just had the strangest and nicest conversation. And in an alternate universe, I’d have the most interesting friend and we’d be so freaking close (at least for a time) and it would be lovely.
In this universe, the ground doesn’t stand solid for me.
I’m too much me and she’s too uncertain.
But for five minutes, that was really nice.
I let the universe take care of me today. I let the people who love me turn my day around.
After I posted earlier, I went outside with the boys, but it wasn’t enough. My body needed to move. My mind needed to turn off. I employed R’s help with L and took off. I wasn’t even intending to run. I just needed to move.
I walked the first half, and then, suddenly, down a hill, barely with permission from my mind, my body started running. Experience tells me it was probably a minute thirty. It felt so good. Then I took off again after a short walk and that was probably 45 seconds. Then came the section I ran last night in two minutes. Today I timed it and it was a minute 45 and I didn’t want to forfeit the fifteen seconds, so I ran more. And then more. And again.
Fucking two thirty! Amazing.
I needed a little extra walking time, so I added another side street, making the walk almost two miles.
I got home and my Chris was there, celebrating right alongside me. Fistbump explosions for days. Beaming with pride.
And then he let me just vent about my feelings. And then we came in and I needed to give a very dirt-covered L a bath. And I wasn’t expecting the company, but the company felt so fucking good and Chris and I just sat in the bathroom and kept talking while L took his bath.
He showed up for me so hard today. It means everything.
I’m momentarily coming to the end of my mental rope with friends not showing up for me. I’m sympathetic to the fact that people are going through things. And also I need some connection and I’m reaching out and they’re not reaching back.
What a strange and hard and beautiful weekend.
Friday was a long day after a long week. Saturday was me trying to learn to navigate in the face of all the everything….while also doing a 12 week goal challenge, maintaining my home, decluttering, mom’ing 24/7, attending virtual Al-Anon meetings, showing up for myself, backpedaling and flailing around in my progress, etc etc etc.
Saturday Chris and I successfully and safely walked through a conversation about overwhelm and needing help and support. Neither of us seemed to jump or get defensive and while I was reacting to the overwhelm, he wasn’t reacting to me and that brought us to a really great place.
I also talked to my sponsor on the phone for the first time. It’s something I wanted, but not something I felt “enough” to initiate. That’s an interesting thing for myself–not feeling my enoughness. I’m also navigating people and old friendships and new ones and common denominators and trying to feel a bit more whole. And I got to talk about that with someone who knows the right things to say back. Someone who is a good active listener and who can role model active listening. I need that. We talked for an hour on Sunday too. I could cry for how fulfilling it is.
Then Saturday night amidst all the pandemic and quarantine, we had a tornado touch down less than an hour from here. Downstairs we went at 10pm.
Don’t let this happy face fool you. Just moments before, my sweet 75 pound pup had to be carried down the stairs because she was petrified.
My favoritest girl. (And a trash run that needs to be made. Ha.)
The tornado (and R) helped me to realize that we need a better tornado plan. And I am ready to get back to work on the basement. I don’t know that it will happen soon, but I can at least put all that stuff in the car and make a trash run. Or I can start putting some of it out for trash little by little. But yes. No more basement stagnation, even with a bunch of other things going on. A five minute timer each day.
Overwhelm turned action.
Sunday brought us one last day of Spring Break downtime.
The boys made a gingerbread cake and, later in the night–when it felt late and like the night should be wrapping up–S asked me to roast Brussels sprouts. I retorted, “help me then.” And he did! And we chopped together and took quality time and listened to Martin Sexton play on facebook and it was goodness and turned a hard weekend into pure beauty.
There is this thing that happens in my brain? I don’t get any say in it? I am aware of it. Sometimes. But a lot of the time I am unaware of it. I’m usually only aware of it when I mention it and someone else finds it absurd. Or someone mentions something that triggers it and then their mention feels absurd to me.
I’m getting ahead of myself tho because I feel like I’ve lost you. Lemme start again.
I am unaware of my affect on others. Like, on a deep level. I heard last week that this is a pretty significant enneagram 2 thing. I cried. I feel like maybe I should write about that soon. But for now I’ll say that for me, for the most part, I assume I am pretty disposable to people and I don’t really matter much one way or the other. People feel fine to have me around, but also, outta sight outta mind–I’m dispensable and forgotten. And I say this relatively ambivalently. It feels like fact more than feeling. It is what it is and it’s been a reoccurring theme since childhood and I’m used to it. (Or…I should be.) I don’t think to think about it too often and I don’t feel the need to feel about it even less.
But then someone will say something. Like yesterday. Chris and I were talking about the inbetween time of our relationship. Where we knew one another existed and we’d said hi, but hadn’t started dating yet. This was a four month period. We were just people that passed one another and we were both unaware that the connection was deeply and entirely mutual.
So we’re talking yesterday and he says that even if we never got together. Never became more. I would have always been the person in the back of his head he compared people to. Other people would have come in and out of his life and still, it would have been “they have beautiful eyes, but they’ll never be Jill’s eyes” or “I love when they smile, but it doesn’t quite light up the room like Jill’s smile” and he kept listing things “like Jill’s <fill in the blank>” and–this is the thing absolutely no one who knows me knows or could possibly comprehend.
Seven years of a relationship later, Chris can say this to me and my only thought is “…he knew my name?”
And I can only weep. Weep so inconsolably. Because how absurd and pathetic is that? Of course, logically, he knew my name. But logic doesn’t exist here. Only feeling brain exists here. And feeling brain tells me no one sees me and I’m not worth seeing.
It only serves to validate feeling brain more that so many people I love deeply have disappeared from my life. It feels impossible that I matter at all, if people like Kristi and Mandy can just abandon me without thought. That my dad could and my grandmother could and my mother could. Then how could I believe anyone would ever want me at all? And I know reasonably that anyone who leaves me left because of themself and not me. Left because something in them made it so they couldn’t stay. But reason does not exist in this part of my feeling brain. Only feeling exists. And feeling dictates that I am not enough to stick around for.
And I can’t stop sobbing and I can’t catch my breath and L is sitting here playing legos and I am falling apart.
. . . . . . .
I took a minute to pull myself together. And in doing so, my feeling brain has already switched itself off.
I am sickly good at the compartmenalizing.
When I sat down to write this, my intent was not this. My intent was only to give an amusing anecdote about my skewed perception. It was not so much to say I don’t have any ability to understand what I mean to people. It was not so much to say that no one has the ability to comprehend how acutely incapable I am of believing my worth to others.
And yet…here we are.
My sponsor says “catawampus.” I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite thing about her. But it’s definitely up there.
This hilarious thing happened. Where I was listening to the Rise Together podcast and Rachel and Dave were fucking geeking out about their enneagrams and I wanted in on it, despite having previously been vehemently (read: quietly) against taking the quiz. So I stopped the podcast and took a quiz. And apparently I had gone and decided some expectations beforehand because of all of my growth and accomplishments. I thought my results would give me further fuel to kick ass and take names amidst my personal growth journey.
And then I got a 2.
And I was like “what the shit is this?!”
Here I’ve been working on personal growth and growth mindset and so much me me me for a really long time and now I have this thing in front of me saying I do everything for everyone else and at my expense and to top it all off, I disrespect others’ boundaries.
I was not pleased.
To add insult to injury, I had been chatting with Chris about it beforehand and I felt like he had completely dismissed my everything about it. Which then triggered me to remember the random things he has dismissed in the past that mean something to me.
(Side story. The first time was back in 2014 when I went to a neuromusculoskeletal specialist (MD) who gave me an adjustment I was ill prepared for and I experienced my first…I’m not even sure what to call it. I had to navigate trauma that was released from my body. I sobbed. Like, sobbed. The doctor called me a delicate flower and he said it in such a sweet and loving way that he made me feel loved and worthy and strong in a way I had never felt before.
After I navigated this experience I felt so at peace and free and practically giddy and I relayed the whole thing to Chris on the drive home and he was so….mad. And he was so….oversteppingly protective. And then suddenly I felt invalidated and stupid.
This memory hurts. I know he never wants me to feel hurt. I know he wouldn’t want to be the thing doing the hurting. I also know that the reality is, we hurt people without realizing, especially when we ourselves are hurting.
I can view that part objectively. It doesn’t ease the hurt. Both things exist simultaneously.
I don’t purposefully hold onto this. I have never mentioned it to him, tho we did talk about it shortly after it happened. I don’t hold it over his head. It’s not usually any source of resentment or ill feelings. It’s not a chalkboard checklist of ways Chris has done wrong. It’s mostly just a feeling that resurfaces when I feel triggered by invalidation, if I feel unseen, or if there is something I’m interested in that is…not tangible.
The interesting thing to note here is that Chris has interest in things that he himself deems as hokey. It must hurt a lot to follow something, to take stock in it, to have it have meaning to him….and to also invalidate it as crap. I wish he could see that believing in something “other” or spiritually unexplainable doesn’t make him less than.
So it shouldn’t surprise me when he dismisses love languages and enneagram and whatever else could help give him insight into himself or me or our children or the relationships that intermingle all those things.
Also, I want to say, that I have never been anything less than wholly supportive and compassionate about anything he has ever had interest in, be it Jesus/god, when he was super religious, or cigars or pipe tobacco or vaping, for that stint, or when he was blending tobacco or making snuff (ground tobacco) or blending juices and making his own mods. I was present and stood next to him for all of it. Even when he drank. Twice. I show up every time. He could never say I don’t show up. I am there and I support every endeavor and every mistake and every rabbit hole. I listen through every news blip and political rant and all the Joe Rogan and UCF fights and Sargon of Akkad.
And some days I have real, tangible pain that I don’t feel the same in return. Not all the time. Not every day. But enough.
And I know I should say something. And I would. If I had any idea how to. Without it sounding needy or ungrateful or petty.)
So, back to today. I was trying to talk out my feelings about maybe being a 2 (77%). Or perhaps even being a 5 (74%) and he went the route of talking about coding those kinds of quizzes and how stuff like that is easy, and I…I closed off and shut down.
And there was no good way to say “but I want to talk about me”. And…it was such a 2 thing to do and to think.
And even tho it happened 10 hours ago, I’m laugh-crying about the irony and sadness and amusement of it all. I’m certain that any person who was well versed in 2s would say “oh, sweetheart” and envelop me in their arms and I could cry about how much being alive hurts and how much pressure there is and how I never feel seen and usually I’m okay with that, but today it just hurts, and they would get it.
But I don’t know any enneagram people because I don’t feel like I have any connections with people and it is a chasm that deeply aches.
So I’ll cry my good cry and I’ll “through; not around” and I’ll keep chugging along anyway. ‘Cause while I may be a 2, I’m also a fierce fucking fighter and I refuse to ever feel stuck.
Yesterday I suddenly became so freaking excited about all the things I’ve got going on–the growth mindset and decluttering (which is starting to feel really tangible again) and my very own website that I’m diligently working to launch. And fast as that realization hit, it was pulled from me.
I have no one to share it with.
That’s not entirely true. And it’s not my intention to discredit the people I have in my life, whom I love dearly, if I need something. But it’s not the same as having someone (or multiple someones) to be giddy with. It’s not the same as having someone who has known you for five years or fifteen. And despite my want for trying, I have no idea how to make up the difference.
Yesterday I navigated by leaning into the sadness and loneliness. I cried. I reached out to a new friend, someone who feels like she could be my people. I read al-anon passages. I watched Allie videos where she preached that I was worth clothes that make me feel good and uncluttered spaces and peace.
Slowly I walked through the grief.
And it sucked, while also feeling like progress. It was both. And I take comfort in the fact that it could be both and not just the suck. Still, tho. That suck is pretty sucky.
I find myself wondering often why my friends aren’t my friends anymore. Was it me? Was it them? Were we just not compatible for the long haul? I understand maybe they were just for a season, but…I miss them. I miss the me I was sometimes able to be with them. And I don’t know why they left. I wish I knew. It feels like maybe I’d better know how to keep friends if I knew why they left me. And yes, it does feel like the people I have in mind all personally chose to leave. To slowly sever the connection. It feels like if I could understand it, I could move on.
Reaching out to find out the why doesn’t feel like a good path tho, so I will continue to move along.
The notable progress about yesterday, apart from the through-not-around, was that food-as-comfort never crossed my mind. Food wasn’t on my radar at all. Pretty cool.
Today I am meeting two new friends for lunch. See what I can do about this loneliness business.
The question is…
How do you proceed when you know so much about growth mindset, and the situation just sucks, and you want to reach out to someone, but don’t want advice and just want the comfort of someone’s knowing presence?
For all intents and purposes, I had a really great week.
I had my kids home all week. My in laws (whom I love) came over for Christmas. I’ve had a bizarrely great relationship with my mother for the last week or two. She sent Christmas presents, which she hasn’t been able to for many years now and I sent her presents.
But amidst what was goodness, today I still feel forgotten.
I don’t know what part is truth and what part is perception. But it probably doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day (or the beginning, as it were) it still feels kinda crushing.
TectonicDraft 