Being Kind to Myself

I wish I could say that I’d been on my first date in the last (almost) five years and it went spectacularly well, and that’s why I haven’t written anything.

But no.

She ghosted and I’ve never heard from her again. Maybe it was something I said, maybe it wasn’t. I’m not going to wrack my brain about it, because there weren’t enough interactions to be offensive in either direction. Perhaps she didn’t like being written about, and if that’s the case, then I’m glad we never actually met in person. It’s really hard to date a blogger if you don’t like being written about and/or don’t like their work. I am not interested in dating a fan, just someone who isn’t opposed to it.

In fact, one person did ask me out for coffee once because she was a fan, and it literally drove me up the wall. This is because (I think) she wanted to meet the person who wrote all that stuff, and apparently, there should be no difference between that person and me at all. She kept measuring the person she saw in front of her against stuff she’d read from years ago, as if I was telling the truth then and lying now, and seemingly competitive over who knew me better (wtf).

She did not accept that over time, people change their views on things. She also wanted the me that existed before my mother died, and that Leslie is gone. I know I’ll never be the same, and that’s all right… but being around people who expect me to be her is not.

Right now, the most important thing is that I’m being kind to myself. I told my two closest friends here and my sister about said ghosting, all of them later checking in to make sure I was okay. Of course I was. I wasn’t putting pressure on this to later do or be anything, so it didn’t exactly feel like a loss. More like a little bit of hurt ego and nothing more, because I was happy before she agreed to go out with me, and I am happy now because of my friends’ and sister’s reactions of kindness.

My expectations were so low that it would have been impossible to feel disappointed. I liked her, but I wasn’t pining- we didn’t e-mail/talk on the phone long enough for her to get under my skin before I saw her. The momentousness of the occasion wasn’t about her. It was that I felt ready to meet someone else, that I felt free enough to do so… and that in a sense, I’d let go of the past and it, in turn, had let go of me.