The River

What brings you peace?

As I went down in the river to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way.....

I started this morning by singing.

I am not sure that it brings my housemates peace, but that’s not my issue.

Yesterday, I got some clarity about the relationship with Supergrover that I hadn’t had before. Her reactions looked like they have for the last eight years. She dismissed everything I was saying except the worst of the worst, when it’s not important. The things I say that are positive are every bit as powerful if only she’d take them in. But she’s not looking for that from me. From me, she wants something she can rail against, or at least, that’s how it comes across to me.

Not once has she asked me why I wrote something I did.

Not once in all of this current round of fights has she picked out anything nice to say about me. Yes, I will absolutely lose my shit at times. I will also freely hand over a large amount of love. But you can’t take it if you don’t see it. I hope that I’m getting through to her, but what I have realized is that it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be happy with a relationship that consists of me writing something and her telling me how horrible it is that I’ve said something instead of trying to comprehend it.

You can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I’m done letting her bang her purse on my head. I’ve tried too hard, and it made no difference. She is allowed to think the worst of me, because I have now done enough within myself to know that her words are complete bullshit because she’s taking everything at face value and writing off the negative as something I’m doing to spite her.

I’m not describing my emotions and my life in 3D, I have been hurt in some way and must feel like I need to destroy her.

You don’t get sentences as full of love from me as mine were if I think you’re a villain in the story. She’s not the villain, but she is definitely the antagonist. Instead of talking about it, both presenting our issues and reaching a consensus, she has walled off at every turn. It’s demoralizing to an enormous degree, because to me it’s like she became a totally different person. She couldn’t see my love and attention as a good thing.

I’m tired of having my peace disturbed, and yet there’s always going to be one more thing before she goes. Always. I could be more consistently loving if I felt it back, because there would be so much less anger involved. I could stop saying that I’m done and not done, because there’s something about the relationship that’s truly worth saving. I wonder all the time how we got to this place. How many twists and turns the path has taken, all of them good in retrospect and hell on earth then.

The thing that will stick with me is that over the last eight years, I have had fewer and fewer instances of days where she was genuinely happy and willing to reciprocate the good stuff. She has no problem expressing anger, and I hate it when I’m the target based on something I wrote with absolutely no context for what I was going through when I wrote it.

Exhaustion has set in. I think of her as the past now, because she doesn’t want a future and has told me that too many times, while also reaching out. But I’m not innocent here. I’ve also called it quits and reneged. What is interesting to me is that we kept up that fight for years without truly walking away.

I had to need peace bad enough to say the relationship wasn’t worth it. That I couldn’t live with shitty communication no matter whether we were at fault or whether it was a reflex of being virtual, not having the smarts to change mediums when it was possible.

It leaves me with a sense of panic as I move forward, but that’s because everything is unfamiliar and new, not that I’m incapable.

I have said all of this before in a hundred different ways, but it’s not for her. It’s to remind me to stay strong, that my complaints were valid…. that just because it’s not important to her, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Her life is so big that I can see why I’ve always been in last chair, but I didn’t think I had a leg to stand on until I did.

Breaking the pattern of trying to please her so that we both got what we needed was the wrong answer for the relationship, but the right answer for me. That’s because she’s not listening to me, but I am.

I cannot tell her that I love her even when she’s angry, because she wouldn’t believe it. She stole my peace. I was writing some of the best pieces to ever come out of me whether they were angry or lovesick. She’s bound and determined to treat me as if she has low self-esteem, because if she didn’t, she would believe the positive things I say.

She would believe that I think she’s absolutely gorgeous.

She would believe that I love her anger, because when she stands up for herself, I teach myself my own value.

One of the most painful aspects of our relationship is that I’ve written this set of entries more than once, and either something I say will bring her back around, and perhaps part of seeing all the negative for her is having the will to walk away when she didn’t before.

It makes it easier to walk away when you’re angry, but it doesn’t bring you peace. I think that’s a large part of why we’ve tried so hard. Neither one of us really wanted to leave things unresolved.

I let out all my anger, she keeps hers in. I don’t think it’s personal to the two of us, necessarily. I just think she keeps a lot under wraps and this is just part of it.

This is because there is an instance in our past where she didn’t tell me something because she wasn’t sure of my reaction….. but that once became all the time.

I cannot fault her for this because I made it happen, but I can say she does bear responsibility in shutting down two-way communication. She doesn’t open up, ever, just blames me that I want those things from her. Everything is not good enough for me, when I just thought it was time to fish or cut bait because I was tired of my thoughts and feelings being invalid. That I could either walk on eggshells or not have a relationship with her at all. This is not a one-sided problem. My anger management is just now coming to fruition, because I literally needed years of distance to get over what happened between us.

I changed, desperately seeking self-compassion because I knew I could not get compassion from her while she was angry. While I was changing, she wasn’t. She’s still in the same emotional place I left her, because I realized that my anger needed to tamp down on its own, and part of the anger was everything she wasn’t saying.

She didn’t take in that our agreement was stepping into a river and going with the flow. My positive emotions were getting dammed at every turn. She stood in the negative emotions, bathed in them, took them as fact.

The entry she referenced said something about her not being able to steal happiness anymore, but she didn’t ask me why I said it. I needed to stop the neurodivergent urge to explain things more and better, and if the person isn’t listening, to try and keep explaining until you’re understood. I didn’t do anything by explaining it one time, so surely six will do it.

I learned that I needed less of all of it, because I could find the things that made me unhappy. I could not find the things that gave her joy.

As I went down to the river to pray, I learned when I studied the good old way, it just wasn’t that great.

When we should have baptized each other and walked away clean.