Skeptical

Dana and I had a conversation that gutted me last night, and I don’t think we’ll be friends after this. I want to, but her words stung so bad, scored such a direct hit, that I know I do not need her energy in my life anymore. I thought that there was no limit to my understanding, my willingness to hear her, my willingness to submit to the fact that I’ve hurt her. I found my limit not because I was angry about what happened. Just dead. Flatlined. Could not show any more emotion in front of her, and perhaps not ever again. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future, but right now it’s time to disengage completely, because she wasn’t just saying something in a fit of anger. She was telling me how she truly felt.

I said something to the effect of it hurting so much that she was there for all the pain and not the promise. She said that she saw so much promise in me, but that I’d put energy into something and then get distracted when the next big great idea came along so that everything was theoretical and nothing was real. That she would be skeptical of promise in me forever.

It is something that I struggle with on my own. I know my personality. I am ADHD. I have more great ideas before breakfast than most people have in a lifetime. Where I fall flat, where I’ve always fallen flat, is in follow-through. I do not have the coping mechanisms, and never have. I feel differently now that I’ve gone through so much, because letting go of the tidal wave Diane created made room for so much more. I was so emotionally laden over my teenage heartbreak that I could not depart from it for more than a few minutes at a time, because I had to figure out a way she would stop calling me a liar. That she would believe the words that I spoke. There had to be a way.

There wasn’t. The answer was just to stop caring altogether. Dana also said something about that, that I’m like a dog with a bone and I just cannot drop things. It’s true. Emotional injury is my stock and trade, both figuring out my own and how to heal it, and how to heal others as I heal myself. I just want my world to be whole, and I will try every combination of words I can think of in the English language to try and figure it out….. when sometimes, I am trying to fit the wrong key into an ancient lock that’s already been covered in rust for quite some time.

I do not get letting go of people. To me, that is saying that they are unworthy of redemption, as am I. Relationships should be long and prosperous, no matter how much hell they go through, because the relationship is in working out the hard parts. Relationship is taking an emotional injury and finding ways to connect afterward, so that we can both look back down the road and see how far we’ve come, as opposed to how far we need to go. Relationships to me are never temporary affairs. I would much rather work through issues than give up, mostly because it makes things awkward if we run into each other at the grocery store (that was like a joke). I choose not to run away from emotional problems, and I am finding that I a tad unusual in that respect. I am tired of Dana’s insistence that my words are so much worse than hers, that my reactions of anger and enmity are more severe than the ones she’s handed down. I am tired of her insistence that the problems in our relationship were all mine to own.

I will not say much more than that except she’s ADHD, too. If we’re going to talk about squandered promise, I’m just going to leave that riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight there.

She has asked me the question, “since we wrecked each other, why do you even want more?” Because after the flood is the rainbow. Her answer is that what is broken should just stay that way. It is an approach to life that I do not want, especially if all she can see in me is the promise I’ve wasted and not the promise I live in right now. I am glad that I took my shot in getting away from her. I do not think that I could handle trying to emotionally separate from her, so I enforce physical boundaries instead. The dog with a bone attitude is gone, because I realized I didn’t want her energy in my life if all it was going to be is sadness at all the things I did not accomplish and skepticism that I ever would. I felt it long before we separated; one of the reasons Argo became so sacred to me so quickly is that she saw promise in my writing, something that I do gladly and faithfully every day. It is something to which I am completely dedicated, and the blessings it has endowed on my life are something that Dana does not see.

I have enough words to have a portfolio now, a recognized one at that. I may never be well-known, but of the people that do read me, I am respected. I have created something out of nothing. I have lived in my own promise. One day, it will pay off even bigger than it does now, because I have a wealth of sermon illustrations, book ideas, history so that I don’t repeat it…………………..

The hardest part about hearing Dana’s words was knowing that I’d said them to myself, and I told her it was just about the meanest thing she could have said to me. She didn’t see how I could possibly misconstrue her belief in my lack as mean. She was just telling me her emotions.

I. Am. Skeptical.