Because I’m a writer, I feel like my entire life is two sets of events running concurrently….. the ones where situations create writing, and the ones where writing creates situations. I don’t hide how I feel about things, and that is threatening to many people. I cannot argue with their feelings, I can only sit with them. I can only change my writing to reflect how they felt. I won’t change what I say about them, their behavior will do that. I am describing everything as I see fit, therefore, I cannot change the past.
I can do something about the present.
I will acknowledge their feelings and think about it hard core. That will also create writing. If they are really hearing me when they read, we will move mountains. If they’re dismissing me as someone who likes to talk shit about the internet, the relationship is not worth saving.
I acknowledge gray areas and emotional blind spots by diving deep into my own, because once you understand how you fit into the puzzle, you figure out why someone did what they did when they reacted to you. I know my deepest, darkest spots because I’ve looked at the times where it’s happened more than once and why. It’s not being able to figure out others’ behaviors, it’s to have empathy for someone. You will go so much further in a relationship when you can be empathetic. When you can see that people are fallible and they make mistakes, but they’re still beautiful and glorious? It makes life worth living. What doesn’t is feeling all of that love for someone and not getting it back.
So, your job is not to forgive the unforgivable. Knowing how much you’ll give without reciprocity is your job. That way, you’re not looking for anything externally. It all comes from you. Once you learn you cannot blame anyone for anything, it all revolves around you is the moment when you stand up in the universe. It allows you to take up as much room as you want. Either people will accept you or they won’t, and you won’t constantly focus on rejection.
The flip side is doing the homework. You cannot go to the other extreme and exhibit Godlike behavior. You are not the main character in every story.
Writing like this causes effects in my real life because my relationships aren’t connected. Supergrover doesn’t know Bryn, Zac doesn’t know either of them, etc. Therefore, when I say things generically, sometimes they’ve taken something personally when it wasn’t about them. Except Zac. He’s never been the subject of a hit piece because he has a cabinet full of candy and snacks. Take a note, people.
No, the truth of the matter is that Zac and I haven’t been together long enough to have anything that creates real conflict. If he’s with someone else, so am I. Just not on the ground. Bryn and I chatter constantly whether it’s video calling or on the phone. However, what I know is that if we have a conflict, neither one would care if I wrote about it because they also know that they has banked entries that tell you how wonderful he is and that they’ll come back.
Sometimes I create my life by my writing, and it scares me. That’s why I went from loving feedback to hating it. I am trying to create writing by living my life. That hindsight is 20/20. It’s a balance I have to live with as well. I grapple with the consequences of saying something, and the knowledge that they’re not my audience, either. As in, I am not directing ire at them. I’m using them as an example of what hurts me because they did it. My story is someone else’s survival manual.
I wasn’t seeing what I needed to read, so I created it. Anne Lamott gave me both of those ideas, as well as the idea that my story was valuable and I owned it.
It’s the balance of how to live my life forwards while actively wanting to live it backwards. I cannot understand the future if I do not understand the past. It has the added bonus of making me well respected at the craft of blogging, because I am willing to write about those moments of behavior that seems extreme and how I’ve breathed through it.
Often others gain more understanding of me when they read my blog, but don’t realize that they’re now part of my story even when I tell them that up front. It’s not up in their face. Once it starts, it’s a new ballgame. That’s why I’m so dead serious in the beginning and my boundaries are ironclad.
I have a laser beam on our interactions because writing about your interactions with others cannot happen. I wasn’t there. I cannot have empathy for your story if you do not tell it to me, and our book only has two characters. If I write about a third party, it’s just gossip.
That’s why it’s taken me 10 years to have the courage to tell Michael my thoughts about him. That he was a silent character, but he’d been there the whole time. That I’d thought of him more than he ever thought I had. I was grateful he could take care of her in a way that I never could have, for a whole host of reasons. I figured I could say goodbye to him as well, because I lost a collaborator, albeit only in my head.
I thought about a lot of things because trauma bonds aren’t inherently negative. They’re just intense at either extreme. You go through shit together, you’re bonded at a deeper level than those you haven’t told those things. Now, in order to live my life backwards as a writer is problematic because I could make things so much clearer if I could complete the whole puzzle. That’s what I meant about Supergrover deciding to cripple me as a writer because if she walked away, I was afraid of tripping over a landmine. That’s what made the trauma bond scream. I had to spend time with it whether I wanted to or not. When I finally realized that I needed to move on so that I had room for more characters, it broke me when I tried to lay out what a lifetime connection meant she still wouldn’t say what she wanted and honestly. That’s because none of her communication was long enough to be able to respond to how she felt. She saved it all up and exploded, as did I.
The real story is so much more than the sum of its parts. However, that would cause my life living forward to take a dramatic turn. I don’t write about the things that I can remember to spite her. I write about them so I remember them. I remember every turn it took to be able to hug her, but only if she wanted that relationship with me. I was tired of waiting to know if she wanted that relationship because I couldn’t write about anything more because she couldn’t lay boundaries down about what I was writing that was okay and what was too close to the hard out.
Not being able to see real world consequences is killing me, and that’s why I had to stop hoping. That’s why I had to get tired. I had to know if she wanted me to go through the process of breaking a trauma bond. So far, the answer is no. But it doesn’t matter because I already feel completely at home and have since the first day I moved to Maryland.
Sometimes it felt like we had no problems at all. Sometimes it felt like we had every problem known to God and man, and please don’t underestimate those words. It’s way less hyperbole than you think.
She wouldn’t give me a library of images that didn’t have to do with conflict or the hard out so that I could describe her without describing her. She didn’t give me a mask, and wouldn’t tell me if I was good at the one I’d created…. or she would, but it would be negative. Positive things would have meant a lot when I was talking about conflict, because she loved the things that I said when everything was wonderful and thought I was out to get her when I wasn’t. That the hard out meant success for me in some way by having her over a barrel.
I just want the little things that come from the smallest place in her, the one that really listens to what I’m trying to say and lets me know how she feels about it. Both of our destruction mechanisms are very clear. How to move forward together is devastating because I don’t think she wants to give me the little things.
I am not creating our lives moving forward by living backwards in the way she thinks I am. I am telling the things that no one should remember and yet they’ll be the most important in the end.
That’s because in a sense, by the end of this entry, you’ve learned that I have three lives.
I need her, but I won’t beg. She has a choice. She can join my weird little life or she can’t, but she doesn’t have to show up on the ground. She just needs to be more forthcoming with things that really show me she’s listening to me. That I am not out to get her. I only want to be a character she loves on her favorite story the way she’s a character here.
And oh my God. Is she ever a character. You think you know. But you have no idea. She’s the only one that when I say LOL, I actually mean it. I love third life jokes the most. The ones you’ll never hear.
I don’t think she realized that she’d created a different reality for me, and that I was doing what I needed to do to accommodate it, not trying to judge her and piss her off. I needed to get out of Texas, and remembered that I loved DC. It’s my Paris. My dad got it. Lindsay got it. She didn’t get it. That’s because she didn’t pick up the clue phone on how she’d affected my life to an enormous degree. I gave her a clue about it, but she didn’t hear me. Her loss, because I never thought she made me move here or guilted her after it happened.
I made a sacrifice, but it had nothing to do with physical proximity. I was just willing to be close if she needed that. She might, she might not. Not my issue.
Because when I brought up our third life, she saw nothing good in it. I was the one that constantly praised her for changing it. I love her like I know I should keep breathing. The fact that she can do that through writing makes me know that we’d be successful no matter how much she let me in. That I could be responsible and only write about how we interact as friends so that I have a library of small things to pull from when trying to explain the big things.
The best way I can explain it is that she said a logical thing in a logical manner not knowing what emotional thing it would create because she wasn’t thinking that way. The thing she said was important in every emotional interaction I had at that time in my life. Critically so.
It felt like being dropped into the middle of a different country with no language skills. And then i was expected not to care so much because she could do it. She’s already her.
Stories That Are All True 