One of my favorite books is Looking for Alaska by John Green and there’s a phrase the famous-last-words-loving main character, Miles Halter, uses that are allegedly the actual last words of a 15th century French writer; “I go to seek The Great Perhaps.” I think of this phrase so often in my idle time, frequently while I am walking to or from work and my mind is wandering off from whatever podcast isn’t quite completely ensnaring me. Even more frequently though, I think the intention of that phrase in the context of my own existence would more accurately be “The NeverEnding Next.” And yes, just like the Story from our collective childhoods, in mine, it is just one smooshed together word with a magical capital letter nestled in the midst. Obviously.
This idea of a NeverEnding Next has stuck with me for several years now and I think it’s probably been reinforced by, if not born from, listening to a multitude of celebrity podcast hosts and guests wax poetic about their trajectory to stardom and how no matter what hill they crest or mountain they summit in their careers, they never really feel like they have arrived or finally “made it.” They talk about (allegedly) never feeling financially or professionally secure, never truly fulfilled, creatively free, whatever. I believe them even though I also can’t help but roll my eyes because it’s all relative, right? To some extent, I relate to the financial and professional sentiments but I think I understand it more as it relates to personality, perspective, self-awareness, the quest for self-actualization, etc. Maybe the feeling as it relates to feeling? Is that too meta?
What I mean is, aside from the intense seasons of overcoming, persisting, resisting, or rising above, in those times in life where everything is just kind of … good, why do we lack the ability to just be present, observe it, notice it, and revel in it? “We” start looking for the next thing to tackle, the next task to complete, the next tribulation to overcome, the next riddle to solve. At least I do.
Maybe it is hard for me to identify times in my life where I have felt content because there exists a decided lack of those times; there is too little evidence to examine further. Or maybe I just cannot abide letting those times last long enough to register when I eventually have the time and distance to look behind me. Am I alone in this experience or does this resonate?
I think this is one of those times and I want to notice it.
I started a new job this week and the cultural difference from my last role is already so starkly remarkable that it is genuinely dysregulating. I have spent months, years really, talking about my job in terms of the toxicity of the environment, lack of leadership, lack of respect, lack of change management coupled with continual transitions, untenable workload, and the countless hours of effort (and tears) I put into the job search to get unstuck. It has finally happened. I experienced the spectrum of emotions over this very long time coming. For nearly half of the past four years now, the work trauma was both exacerbated and compounded by my personal life imploding. But it also became secondary to the acute need to extricate myself from the vicious black hole that became my personal life before I could justify giving any additional energy to getting out of a bad work situation. Therapy has helped with both, of course, and I’m sure the medication doesn’t pick and choose whether it is sedating the terrible boss stressors or the lying sonofabitch betrayal stressors. But now that neither of those enormous, insidious, black storm systems are hanging over me, sucking up all the fresh air and zapping all the color, I do not feel ecstatic or even all that peaceful. I thought I would! Like the celebs, I mistakenly thought there would be a glorious mountaintop upon which I would get to plant my flag and say, “This! This is what I worked so hard to achieve! I can finally stop!”
Instead, it is far more subdued: Grateful that I made it through. Thankful for a markedly healthier work environment. Humbled by the myriad life support I received along the way. Proud of the muscles I strengthened and flexed and, frankly, invented as I fought. Hopeful about learning to love my new work after two decades of my tank being filled daily by teenagers. Eager to meet this mythical work-life balance I’ve heard so much about.
All of those wonderful things are true.
I am also waiting for the next shoe to drop.
And feeling unsettled about a brewing internal frustration that is like a tin cup clanging against the bars currently keeping my mind contained; a niggling, annoying racket, and a signal that the calm cannot possibly last, that my thoughts will eventually break free, seeking the NeverEnding Next.
Whew. Long time, eh? My mental hinges are creaking. I haven’t sat down to write in so long that reluctance to begin has now kept me from it longer than lack of inspiration which perpetuates the problem. Seven months or so since I drained my brain for public consumption. I have missed the release and the interaction but, mostly, I have been intentionally focusing my thoughts and efforts outside of myself. It seems antithetical but not focusing on myself has actually helped me heal, or at least move forward. As reflection over the decades has taught me, moving forward doesn’t necessarily imply healthy, happy or resolved but, in this present, I am mentally healthy. Physically less so but that’s what a year or so of eating and drinking your feelings will do to a body. As for resolution? The jury is hung.
Last November, I found myself with such an obscene amount of use-or-lose leave in the busiest time of my work year that I had mere days to decide how to use it. One thing was certain though, I sure as heckfire was not going to lose it. So I took an entire month off from Veterans’ Day Weekend through mid-December, just in time to take more vacation days over the holidays to spend with family. I left all of my work for my insufferably incompetent boss to shoulder and, I shit you not, within hours, I was jet-setting to Europe and didn’t even peek at work email for 30 days. Am I still a workaholic? Oh yes. Like addiction of all forms, it’s never not there. For a month and some change though, I got to experience life without financial stress while also without any commitments to anyone but myself.
On Super Tuesday in November, my friend and I were texting back and forth as election results were rolling in and, by the time the stench of the voting cesspools that are Texas & Florida reached us, we decided we just didn’t really want to be in DC (or America) for the next week. Thursday was going to be my last day of work for a month anyway so, Wednesday night, I bought a plane ticket on a budget airline. Thursday at lunch, I left work early (without telling a soul) and hopped on a flight to London.
I spent a whirlwind four days there with a great friend and, aside from a panic-attack on the Tube from my lingering post-COVID respiratory complications one night, it was magical!!! We packed in so much in those four days, barely slept, and made memories for a lifetime. I fell in love with Churchill, my kindred spirit, explored so many quaint neighborhoods, historic places, green spaces, great pubs, and I could have spent a month in London, say nothing of the rest of Europe.
And so I did. Sure I spent a week just putzing around DC doing nothing in particular but reading, streaming, and touristing, a week in Pennsylvania with my folks, and a week in Rhode Island with my brother over Thanksgiving, but I spent the final nine days of my month in Sicily. I experienced every crack and crevice, climbed mountains, saw Etna erupt (from a safe distance), reveled in ancient Greek and Roman ruins, met incredible people, danced with strangers, walked through magical Christmas-decorated streets, marveled at truly unbelievable ancient cathedrals decorated in tens of thousands of tiny mosaic tiles, had wine at a 12th century abbey in the countryside, explored a cave that Caravaggio walked through in 1600 AD and dubbed “The Ear of Dionysius,” and ate more tomatoes, pizza, and aperitivos than you could ever imagine. I also had more Sicilian wine in nine days than the total wine I’ve probably consumed in my life. Every part of Sicily is incredible: Palermo, Cefalu, Syracusa, Savoca, Noto, Ortygia, Monreale, Catania, Castelmola and of course, Taormina. I fell in love with the Mediterranean Sea and every day was my favorite one.
I also forked over €300 on a ceramic head, and spent at least six of those nine incredible days searching for the perfect one. And now I have basil growing in abundance from the morbidly beautiful ceramic skull of a Moor, which sits in my bedroom window. It brings me symbolic but vengeful joy every single day. Do you know the story of the Moor’s head?
In 1100 AD, in Palermo, there was a beautiful girl who loved to take care of flowers on her balcony. One day, while she was watering the flowers, a young Moor, who was walking in the street, saw her and fell in love at first sight. She didn’t disdain his attentions, despite she didn’t know he was married and he would leave Palermo in a few days. When she discovered the painful truth, in a rage, she cut off his head and used it as ornamental vase for her balcony. Day by day the girl filled the vase with her tears until a basil plant grew.
There’s also a version of this where her fellow townspeople actually killed the Moor and brought the skull to her because they were outraged on her behalf. Personally, I like that story even better. All over Sicily, not just in Palermo, these ceramic heads are used as planters on balconies. It is impossible to go there and not hear this tale. It seemed serendipitous to me that my journey throughout that year had seemingly randomly led me to this island that hadn’t even been on my radar of places to visit, beyond Italy in general. I am so grateful that fate led me there though and, because seemingly every single person who heard that I went to Sicily asked if I had seen Season 2 of White Lotus, I did eventually watch it after I came home. Although the show captured the beauty of Taormina well, it certainly didn’t scratch the surface of Sicily. I did very much enjoy all of the ceramic heads in the sets though!
So that was the end of 2022. It was an auspicious beginning to 2023.
Last summer sometime, I did a very adult thing and got myself a financial planner. I highly recommend this to anyone and strongly encourage you to start early! I mostly wanted to consolidate all of my investments, IRAs, mutual funds, and retirement accounts from previous employers in different school systems and states into one place. I hated receiving all those different statements and tax docs every year and, since investing might as well be Japanese to me (but I have no patience to devote to really doing it intentionally and well on my own), I wanted an expert. The problem was, most financial folks seem smarmy at best but I found an angel of a human through a friend and after an hour of talking with him, it felt like a second therapist! At the end of two sessions, I had a concrete plan to buy a row house on Swann St eventually, donate excess stocks to charity each year, potentially leave my eternal wealth to a few organizations I’ve been supporting in little monthly bits for years, and then hopefully, one day, retire on The Med … and this was before I even dreamed of traveling at the end of the year, let alone to Sicily!
Getting a financial planner in itself isn’t terribly interesting, I realize, but it allowed me to start thinking about the future in a practical way. While sobering in many ways, it was also kind of exhilarating. I could own the fact that I’ve done really well for myself as a single woman, especially as one who has worked as a public servant for nearly 20 years now. Although still pretty painful if I am honest, I was also able to begin to recognize that the college savings plan I had for future child(ren) that I will very likely never have could and should be used now to change my life in a tangible way. So I liquidated some stocks and went to Europe on a whim. Then I came home and started to spend more than a casual few minutes here and there doing research into tackling my loneliness in a way that had nothing to do with human men.
I got a puppy.
I am not a pet person, and I never have been despite having grown up on a farm. I love animals but I never had one in the house and, in my family, that’s just considered gross. When I used to do online dating, if a man had a picture with a dog (especially on the bed or licking his face), that was a non-starter. Even after nearly four months with my wee puffy dog, I would still argue that I am not a pet person – at least not other people’s pets. But, to this day, the decision to get a dog has been the only thing in my personal life for which I have ever planned so far ahead. I overthink too much about everything so, outside of work, I am NOT a planner. I fly to Europe 18 hours after buying the ticket, I’ve gone to Club Med in Turks & Caicos four times by myself, always with only a few days’ notice, and I don’t even like making happy hour plans with people I love more than a day in advance (if I must). I just never know if I’ll still feel like it the next day. Or the next hour. But I read and consumed and researched and analyzed, for more than a month, every aspect of getting a dog and how it would/could blow up my life. I spent at least two therapy sessions almost solely focused on this choice I was making to change my life, one way or the other, for better or for worse.
I love control and yet, for the past several years, between my boss, the demoralizing quest to land a new job, and the catastrophic betrayal in my personal life, I had felt completely stuck while simultaneously out of control. This decision though? It felt like I was giving myself agency. To choose to get unstuck in some major way that I could control.
I liked the idea of adopting a senior dog but, I hate goodbyes more than anything, already have attachment issues and, again, I really like control. I worried that if I adopted a dog that already had behavioral issues, it would kind of be like inheriting my current idiot of a boss who has made my work life hell for more than three years. If I got a puppy though, a small, new, impressionable blank canvas, I would be responsible for teaching it all the things. And if I failed, it was my own fault and entirely within my control. I was making a choice to maybe blow up a content but decidedly stagnant life but also, regardless of good or bad, it was a choice that would definitely result in change. For the first time in a long time, I really liked the idea of change. So I researched breeds and all the other possible infinite combinations of considerations. Jed Bartlet, the Portuguese Water Dog puppy (@presidentportie), came home at the end of February.
And I hated it. Not him. He was very cute. I hated my decision to get him.
The night before I was set to drive out to the middle of Virginia to pick him up, my ever-unreliable friend bailed as expected and although I had a back up plan for that very real and frustrating eventuality, my back up plan had an unavoidable emergency. Plans C & D on the fly also wouldn’t work so I had to suck it up and accept that I would go myself. The morning of, I walked out to find the back window of my car had been smashed. Not having a shop vac, I had no choice but to leave the glass, get out the duct tape and trash bags — which blew open on I-66 less than 2 miles outside the city — and freeze in the snow and sleet all the way out and back from Virginia. Because of all the glass, I had to hold his tiny little self on my lap the whole drive home. Being alone, I didn’t have a video of first meeting him or anyone to drive while I snuggled with him as I had imagined in my head. I took pictures as I could though and we managed not to freeze. He cried and squealed and squirmed the whole way home. As soon as we got off the highway in DC, he puked all over me at the first red light, less than a mile from home! Then I had to figure out how to get him into the house, then leave him alone in there while I went out to clean up the vomit in the car and retape the busted window.
Day 1, post-puke
It was an inauspicious beginning, for sure. I cried for him. It wasn’t the homecoming I had been dreaming about for him and I felt so bad.
I was prepared for the lack of sleep and the potty training and the nipping and all the things the books and websites had told me. None of that bothered me. I was prepared and never minded waking up with him every hour or so, cleaning up accidents, or the scratches and scars. It was all the other stuff I had no idea to expect that nearly killed me (literally).
Week 1: refusing to go potty
I had taken two weeks off work to spend with him which, in hindsight, I still don’t know if that was smart or awful. I never felt so isolated, alone, hopeless, helpless, frustrated, scared, and sad. And of all those emotions, what I felt more often than all of them was embarrassment. I was so embarrassed that I hated my choice so much, that it had the exact opposite effect in my life that I had hoped it would. I spent three weeks of therapy just crying – so relieved to have another human to talk to that I just couldn’t. I simply cried about what a failure I was. I didn’t know the “puppy blues” were a thing but the r/Puppy101 sub-reddit got me through some very, very dark moments of panic and rage. Talk about feeling like I didn’t have control! After the first week, I spent much of that weekend texting everyone I could think of to ask if they would like a very expensive puppy, for free!
But you know what happened from that desperation? My village started regularly checking in, catching up, calling more frequently than I had talked to most of them in years – maybe ever? Old friends and acquaintances, cousins and distant family members, old coworkers, etc. If I had thought I could manage more than 2 minutes at a time while he was awake, I would have probably written about this time period. And then when his little, fluffy self was sleeping, I didn’t dare want to wake him. Plus, I learned very quickly to sleep when he slept, even if that was 20 minutes here and there!
Now, he’s almost six months old and we’ve been together nearly four. He’s not perfect but he’s about 95%! He’s ridiculously smart which is both endlessly entertaining and, at times, challenging. He picked up potty training in about 18 hours once I finally accepted that taking him outside before full vaccination was worth the risk! He will do anything for a blueberry or a green pepper and has never met another living thing that he doesn’t assume is his very best friend.
In the whole “Best in Show” of it all, like me, he started out as an extreme introvert (has since gone the opposite way after starting daycare), gets incredibly car sick, is as stubborn as the day is long, likes what he likes, vocalizes his emotions in a variety of comical octaves, likes kids far more than adults, and really just wants to be loved. He started sleeping through the night by four months, stopped using a crate at five, and now has complete free reign of my tiny home. But he also constantly eats pebbles, bark chips, and napkins, which is profoundly annoying. He poops only once a day but must do so in three different piles in a triangle of varying sizes, depending on his mood. Seemingly everyone loves him which is amazing, but it also takes us about 20 minutes longer to get anywhere because he must stop to be pet and snuggled or sniffed by virtually everyone, human and canine. It’s also forcing me to be more social – and in the small-talk-with-strangers way that I loathe. But we have a whole gaggle of neighborhood besties. Well, he does 🙂 Even the drug dealers on our block love him! In other news, I never noticed how many different dealers there were on my block until I started walking Jed many times a day.
In addition to forcing myself to reach out and lean on people for emotional support in those early weeks, there were some unexpected really bright spots. I talked to my parents and brother and sister-in-law almost daily for a while. Even now, my parents watch Jed on the daycare cameras and love to report little things they see to me throughout the day, whether I also saw it or not. And they both created an Instagram account just so they can follow his antics – unlike me, he is an obnoxiously regular poster 😉
In the first weeks of our regular trips to the front yard of my building, we met a lot of neighbors that I’d never even noticed before, let alone spoken to. And we met two individuals who had just moved to DC — and offered to watch him for me when I had to go back to work — I’m sorry, what?! You’re just willingly going to watch a stranger’s brand new, untrained puppy during the workday? YES!!! I vacillated back and forth a million times, talked it through in therapy, and because Jed hated being confined to his crate other than to sleep, and because I have been so sensitive to the noise made by various iterations of inconsiderate ceiling and wall-sharing neighbors over the years, I hated leaving him for even five minutes at a time to wail and cry and fuss.
I tried two versions of “pens” for him in my living room where he could have space beyond the crate to play. He broke out from behind the first one, a lovely white-picket-fence-style gate, just pushing really hard and wiggling himself out by pushing the records and books on my shelf back far enough to escape around the side! Then within 12 hours of erecting a fully enclosed playpen that was twice as high all around, he jumped out through a small gap and was left dangling a foot off the ground by a back foot (with a heart-wrenching yelp) until he thrashed himself free. Clearly he was willing to sacrifice literal life & limb to escape so I gave in and took down the pen 24 hours after it arrived on my doorstep. It now lives under the couch and serves as a very expensive but effective toy-blocker.
I want to break free!
So I installed a punch key deadbolt on my door and gave the code to these two brand new stranger-neighbors, went back to work, and the two of them took care of my puppy three days a week for a few weeks until he was fully vaccinated and could go to day care. I will never understand the supreme generosity and selflessness of these people. I consider myself a pretty kind and generous human but there is no way in hell I’d do that for a stranger in a new town when I wasn’t even unpacked yet! They have both become good friends and two of Jed’s favorite people and they couldn’t be more different physically; a fresh-faced, diminutive, white girl from Tex-ass and a very manly, massive, teddy bear of a black man from Vegas. I think it’s so comical though that Jed had such a blended nuclear family for his first weeks on this planet.
We have gone on roads trips together to PA and RI, have become regulars at Bark Social in Bethesda, and have slowly but surely increased our walks from the end of our block to a few blocks and even a few neighborhoods! We are still working our way up to walking the 2miles to the White House where Jed Bartlet can make an IG-worthy return to his West Wing. We could get there but I would have to carry him home and he’s become a pretty big sack of potatoes at this point. Still an adorably fluffy muppet though.
I cannot say that I’m perfectly content in work or in life but I finally have some career opportunities on the immediate horizon, still absolutely love my work, and have very little desire to entertain the idea of dating. Trust is still essentially nonexistent and I’m not sure when or if I might ever be ready again. I still experience grief (and anger) but the life I imagined was real was never mine to begin with. I am still working on accepting that difference of reality versus what I seem to have adopted in my life as “the ideal,” and something I maybe mistakenly think I deserve. I suspect the challenge of accepting that difference may last beyond my final breath.
I know that Jed isn’t what will fill up all the gaps and spaces but, for now, after the initial adjustment (which I wouldn’t do again to save my soul), he’s been a welcome addition to my life.
For whatever reason, Switchfoot’s “Dare You to Move” keeps playing in my head lately. I guess it started during one of the days recently when I was camped out in a cozy nest on my couch, trying deperately to make myself get up and go to the bathroom or the kitchen or get the mail or anything formerly trivial but, since I was essentially rendered paralized by Covid for a week, I couldn’t. It was pretty painful just to exist – even my skin hurt so much that a shirt sleeve rubbing against my arm felt like a million pin pricks. When I walked more than a few steps, the incredible pain in my lower back and legs was both bizarre and overwhelming. It felt like I was made of cement, heavy and immovable yet also illogically wobbly. And it winded me! One day I took out the trash and that 2 minute adventure made me so bloody tired, that I came inside, fell onto my bed with my shoes still on, and slept for 45 minutes. On one hand, it’s a blessing that I lasted nearly three years without getting it and I am eternally grateful that vaccines kept me from experiencing the lung and taste and smell issues of early Covid, and that took the lives of so many people, some of whom I loved and grieved deeply. On the other hand, I wish so badly that I had made time to get my second booster so I wouldn’t have had to experience it at all.
The whole Covid experience is too much to rehash. One of the only comforts was going on Reddit and finding dozens of other people who had the same concoction of bizarre symptoms and in the same nonsensical order, and the same insanely unpleasant side effects of Paxlovid and tips to get past them. It made me feel less crazy and less alone. We all know I love a normalizing moment.
Another comfort though was the number of people who regularly checked in on me. I am not someone who likes asking for help or admitting weakness or acknowledging loneliness to the people in my real world. But I was forced to while I had Covid. It is scary and humbling to live alone when you are so sick. The first two days were so tremendously awful and terrifying that I actually considered whether death might be more palatable. I could barely walk, I had full body goosebumps and tremors even while I was sweating through my clothes, I had too many bathroom adventures to count, my head was full of nothing but snot and pressure, and I nearly passed out in public twice on the day I walked a mile to get a PCR test. I have never felt so small and needy and helpless in my life. And yet, when I called, my friends picked up. They helped. They gave tips from when they had it (Vick’s shower tabs are essentially heaven, btw). They sent Postmates and Instacart. And more than one of them texted. Every. Single. Day. As awful and gross as it was, I also felt loved.
It felt really nice. And refreshing.
It took me a really long time and so much unnecessary frustration to find her but the time that I have spent talking with my therapist over the past several months has almost been worth the struggle to find mental help. Of the many, many things we’ve talked about and tried to unpack and work through, one of the things I am most grateful for is her helping me to be more proactive with my friendships. I am still on the fence on the chicken-and-egg of whether I have always been a loner or, if due to growing up shy coupled with recurring emotional trauma over the decades, my independence and solitude have become learned and protective behaviors.
As I’ve shared a few times before, although I obviously have memories of childhood and high school and everything pre-college, I underwent a significant change in who I am and how I show up in the world somewhere around the age of 21 or 22. It’s difficult for me now, at 43, to remember much about the person I was before that shift. I objectively know that I was shy and quiet and sweet and demure and naive and Christian, and also a doormat. It’s just that I look back on that time, that period where everything shifted, when I found my voice and my backbone and a modicum of self-confidence, and I feel a mixture of both pride and regret. I am proud of who I am and who I have grown to be. While there were obviously external influences along the way, and pockets of rich friendships and formative experiences, I did most of that changing by daring myself to … move. On my own. I did it through conscious choices more than circumstance and, eventually, after I dared myself to speak up, show up, participate, reach higher, engage … eventually, those thoughts became actions became habits became character.
The regret part comes into play, niggling at the back of my heart and feeling a bit too close to shame most times, when I am faced with situations where perhaps I have become too bold, too outspoken, too brash, too honest, too brave, too intense, too passionate, too vulnerable, too comfortable. Sure, some of that is insecurity rearing up from the depths of my past self, an innate self-consciousness that lives vividly within my inner child. She calls out sometimes to remind me of how much I have always craved belonging because I never quite felt like I fit anywhere for the first half of my life. Once I found my place, I am not sure that I fully lived there, at least not to the fullest that I could. But I operated in that space and I did it well.
The majority of the past nearly twenty years have been spent devoted wholly and passionately to my work. I LOVE MY WORK. As a high school counselor for twelve and now as the director of pre-college and scholarship programs for the last five, I have gotten to play the most rewarding and fulfilling roles I could imagine. That isn’t to say that it was easy. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence in the words on these pages that, in fact, there has been a lot of tribulation and disappointment, a lot of crushing heart ache, and so much literal blood, sweat, tears, and mental and emotional anguish. And YET, at least once a week, I still receive an email or a comment or a phone call that I add to the literal and figurative “smile file.” I have always felt seen, loved, and valued by my students, their families, and a lot of my colleagues, in ways that are unmatched in my personal life by a mile. And I know that this could sound a bit sad, that so much of my identity is bound up in my career, but similar to my penchant for solitude, I just don’t really know how much of it is innate and how much has been a learned, adaptive behavior, born from emotional necessity and self preservation.
That brings me back to cultivating friendships. My therapist and I have talked a lot about grief, loss, and rejection, specifically as it relates to what I experienced with John but also generally as I have exerienced, collected, and kept saddled to my being for as long as I can remember. As a child, several of my earliest memories are of loss. As a teenager, I felt rejection and exclusion so fully that they are like a velcro blanket over that time period, covering and clinging to the memories so tightly that I can’t separate them. As a college student and early 20-something, I felt both extreme lows and extreme highs in terms of belonging and self-identity. And as an independent adult over the past 17 years in DC, I have lost almost every close friend I’ve had to physical distance, marriages, mother/fatherhood, or job changes and, without exception, have been rejected or betrayed by every man I’ve dated. I have never been anyone’s number one, be it romantic, friendship, or family relationships. Every other person in my life has someone who is or becomes more important to them than me. I love that they have that love, but I am also jealous and envious and sad that I don’t. My family is the only true constant, but even some of those relationships have morphed and thinned in ways I did not anticipate, feel regret for not preventing, and wish were like they used to be.
Losses and emotional traumas are the fenceposts between which all the rest of my life has been strung. Some of those distances are spanned with solid, relatively unscathed streches of electrical wire, while a lot of others are bent, broken, tangled and in need of repairs of various magnitudes so that the pulse can flow through them. I think it’s probably possible to mend some of those stretches – at least in the ways that they still affect me. There are some stretches though that are always going to be rough and you’ll feel the jolt of the current if you get too close. I grew up on a farm; fence posts and broken fences and gates left open and electrical shocks were part of my normal childhood days. I know that even when you repair a stretch, it’s weaker in that spot unless you replace the whole damn thing.
Obviously, I can’t get a do-over on this life. I can’t go back in time and make different choices, walk through different doors, choose a different career or man, or see how things could have turned out if I’d been less bashful and more confident, if I hadn’t experienced some of the loss and violation I did as a tiny kid, if my trust and compassion hadn’t been broken and abused by people who should have been better humans. Although I have spent far too much time allowing myself to daydream or wallow in the sliding doors moments, depending on my mood or the season, I objectively know this isn’t possible.
My therapist asked me to write this week about unrequited love. This came from an observation I made after saying how nice it felt to feel cared for by friends while I was down and out with Covid. She asked why I thought it felt like people were more concerned and supportive when I was physically in crisis versus a year ago when I was experiencing emotional crisis. I told her that was an easy answer: I confided in more people. She asked why and I initially said because it’s easy to just simply text someone and say ‘I have Covid, it feels awful,’ when most of them have already experienced it, versus having to have a significant conversation full of emotional landmines and unknowns to explain what happened and formulate words for how it felt to people who haven’t experienced anything like it.
She pushed back because she’s good at her job. Of course my explanation is true but also, a year ago, I did not have some of the significant people in my life that I do now, I wasn’t as close to some of the ones I did have, and I made very little effort to cultivate or water those friendships, new or old.
She has been challenging me to try to take ownership of both my aloneness and my loneliness by making an intentional effort to be a friend and seek community. Specifically, to be less alone in my world. In some ways, I feel like the timid and polite 20 year old sitting in my Anatomy & Physiology class junior year with a bully of a professor and, exasperated and frustrated by the inequity, finally just daring myself to speak up and stand up and not be intimidated. Now though, I am daring myself to reach out to friends instead of wishing they would reach out to me. I feel like I used to be better at this or at least more natural but, now I actively send up smoke signals in the form of texts or even (gasp!!) occasional phone calls. I check in, I share more things, and I initiate physical time with people I like but also intentionally suggest things I like … concerts, dinner, HH, outdoor things, nerdy talks and live shows, etc. I am definitely one of those people for whom the snarky t-shirts “Sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to come.” exist. Except, I abhor being late and loathe flakiness so I usually either say no from the first suggestion -or- I make myself go but I really, really don’t want to and spend the preceeding days & nights wishing I had said no. If I suggest things I want to do, with people I like, that reluctance and dread leading up to things is much less crippling.
I know all of that is partially anxiety and introversion, but it’s also partly because I have grown so accustomed to being by myself, on my own, with no accountability for my time, that the idea of COMMITTING to something or someone that I’m not jazzed about is really difficult. So, I’m trying to be more proactive and it’s been helpful and, in most cases, enjoyable. When I suggest something and the other person isn’t free or doesn’t want to or flakes or whatver, there is definitely still an irrational level of disappointment and rejection and a reluctance to do it again. And I still feel slighted or excluded when I see on social media that suburban friends are in the city, less than a mile away, with their kids or something and don’t bother to tell me or invite me. I know that’s kind of silly and self-centered and they have every right to do things with whomever, whenever they want but I’m admitting that I still have to work through why it always hurts. I’m trying. It’s a work in progress. I’m daring myself to move. Again.
.
One year ago tonight, probably at exactly this time, I opened this laptop to write in this blog about a man I loved who was (allegedly) suddenly moving to another city and ending or at least changing what I thought was my best, most significant, most loving relationship of more than three years. What I found instead shattered me and blew up all the pieces of my life that I thought made sense. I didn’t know what to trust or believe, including my own mind.
I cannot say I am fully back to good. There are parts of this stretch of fence that will never be repaired without a significant weak point or two, and an electrical pulse that jumps and pops if you get too close, but I am moving. I no longer feel suffocating pain or crushing sadness. I still feel disbelief and anger and I still thirst for retribution and ache for resolution and long for any indication of remorse or contrition. I am less empathetic in some ways and more so in others. I have completed a grad program in management and gained a multitude of new connections, a community in which I not only belonged but thrived, and a couple of GREAT friends I can’t believe that I didn’t know this time last year.
I no longer feel empathy for the other woman; I feel pity that she doesn’t respect herself enough to walk away but that is also not my business. I accept now that I did the best I could to help my fellow woman and I cannot fix stupid.
I have dared myself to date, dared myself to trust, dared myself to give men a chance, dared myself to keep seeing men that I wanted to run from too early because I’m scared and gun-shy, and I have dared myself to walk away from (stoopidly attractive) men who were far less than I deserve. I am learning to recognize that what some men give is only crumbs and I do not have to accept it just because I’m hungry. I still don’t like being hungry but I’m trying to find ways to fill the void, even if it’s not through a romantic connection.
I have some renewed insecurities that I thought I repaired a few times before but, again, those repair points aren’t ever as strong as they once were, and there are days when I do not see the point in trying to find belonging and feel overwhelmed by self-pity and hopelessness. And yet … I am also tougher, more discerning, less blindly compassionate, more comfortable being vulnerable (beyond writing in an anonymous blog), and have made a serious commitment to and impactful strides toward being mentally healthy and protecting my peace. And yes, medication has been a game changer.
Heading into another winter, I am anxious and trying not to let the sads creep in just yet. It’s a daily battle this time of year. But I am still here; there were days and a lot of nights in the past year where I prayed that I wouldn’t be. I did not want to be. There are less of those nights less frequently now.
It isn’t perfect. I still feel many of the emotions I felt on this night a year ago, but most of them are relatively dull more often than not. There are days when I am proud of me and there are days when I feel like the climb is too high.
But I wake up every morning and I dare myself to move.
“I dare you to move I dare you to lift Yourself up off the floor
I dare you to move I dare you to move Like today never happened”
Have you heard this term? It drives me crazy and I’m not entirely sure why. I first noticed it a couple of years ago popping up in hashtags and captions of NFL players I follow on social media. There are commonalities among the players who use/d it most frequently, some of which are stereotypes that I won’t bother perpetuating here because they’re irrelevant in this context anyway. In football, it’s used in the context of defensive coverage. Safeties “lurk” to disrupt crossing routes mid field and (some of) those players are wildly obsessed with calling themselves part of the #lurkgang. Usually those players are flashy showboaters who far too rarely back up their talk with actual disruptions and clutch plays. But I’m a curmudgeon who gets annoyed with the young kids’ gridiron antics.
I was reminded of this term earlier this week though when I was talking to my therapist. We were talking about a topic that I wanted to noodle on a while before digging in and she suggested I blog about it this week. I laughed and said that I hadn’t written here in months and, when she asked why, I struggled to come up with a succinct answer on the spot. The best I could muster in that moment was that there have been times where I’m deep in thought or there’s something I want to bounce off of someone but don’t really have a friend for that particular topic or whatever, and I do think about writing, but I hesitate to sit down and do it now. In the past, writing was always my easiest, most comfortable outlet but that, like so many things, has become less natural as of late. I told her that at least half of the reason is just laziness and general malaise; easier to turn on the tv and doom scroll rather than intentionally sit down to write. But I also said that part of it is the lurk gang.
At some point in the past month, when I saw a current picture of him laughing and wearing a wedding ring, I finally deleted my Finsta. Yes, it was hurtful but not because I still feel the acute pain of it all. It was hurtful because it caused my hate and rage and thirst for retribution to ignite again. I HATE that he appears not to have suffered from his selfish behavior and incredibly cruel choices. He is still playing football, laughing, and living his fucking life as if he didn’t willfully destroy someone else’s. Exactly one year later, I am painfully aware that I cannot control that. But I can control whether I have to see it. So, it’s gone. Poof!
Since that fake Instagram account was always the largest and weirdly consistent generator of visitors here (even when I haven’t posted in months), I thought maybe that would help curb the lurking. Though I fully recognize and accept responsibility for being the reason all of those individuals found their way here in the first place, it is also okay for me to miss the anonymity of the origins of this blog. I miss interacting with regular readers that I also follow. I miss the feedback and the interaction and the input from strangers that always felt/feel like a real community and, although that still exists when I do write publicly, I also must acknowledge that I am reluctant to share things now because of all the people who have come here over the past year only to read about my heartbreak. A few are my actual friends in real life and I have no reluctance in being vulnerable with them at all. This has actually surprised me over the past year since this went public and I used it as a way to tell a story I didn’t want to actually talk about. Instead though, it is all of the friends and family of my ex and his now wife, and presumably one or both of them as well — even though I pulled back that protective cloak of my own volition and with the sole intention of knowledge being power, I am also allowed to no longer want those people to read about my moving on, my healing. That is the lurk gang that I’d prefer an option to filter out.
For instance, two weeks ago, Covid finally found me and absolutely wrecked me, inside and out! It was a wild time. I felt so alone, both physically and emotionally, but I had so much time to do nothing but sit and think. Every single part of me hurt, including my skin and my eyes so holding a book to read or watching tv were pretty much out. Instead, I listened to podcasts and MasterClasses and thought lots of existential thoughts that I wanted to get out. But I didn’t. Yes, partially because everything hurt and I don’t think I could have if I tried, but there was also a part of me that didn’t want “the lurk gang” to know I was suffering. It’s totally ego-maniacal, I know!! Why would anyone care? But Covid-brain is wild. You think wild things, particularly when you spend entire days not interacting with any other humans. I kept thinking, what if they think, “Good! The bitch with all the words and thoughts and feelings has been struck down.” After the fever-dreams and fugue state faded, I could recognize that thought pattern as paranoid lunacy. But two weeks later, the remnants still linger a bit. The what-if of it all.
My therapist asked if I regretted sharing my blog with him and her and their village last year. That’s an easy answer: NO. I truly do not regret it. I am still wildly proud of myself for daring to be courageous, standing up for myself, taking a modicum of my power back, protecting myself if for no other reason than ridding myself of the poison and putting it squarely around their necks as a yoke instead. The verbal equivalent of a scarlet A, I absolutely 100% still hope they feel shame about the truth. I still look forward to the day Karma rears her head. I still hope their friends and family know the truth and judge them for it. Clearly, there is a lack of accountability but, honestly, that’s not my business. It never was. My business was sharing the truth, my truth. I did that.
So, while I eventually would love to get back to writing about life and music and general musings, I’ve still got some baggage left to unpack. I’m just going to make the conscious choice to skirt the defense, undercut their coverage, and move my bags down the field regardless. They can lurk all they want. It wouldn’t be the first defensive end I’ve left in my dust 🙂
Tiger Lily Vegas 