What are you most proud of in your life?
Today is not the greatest day to have this prompt, because I’m dealing with a lot. Part of it is just now having any freedom at all to tell any stories about the whole ordeal with Supergrover, because now I just want it to be over and the story won’t quit. I need to put it down with force, and my dreams are eating my lunch. There’s a reason for this. You don’t meet extraordinary people without loving them through extraordinary problems. She didn’t do anything wrong, ever. My reactions are my own and have nothing to do with her. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings after a decade, and it’s the entire reason why I need it all to end. I went into this relationship not knowing she didn’t think of me and what I do at all. I will never stop saying this, because even though she didn’t think it through, I’m not blaming her.
Where I feel blame comes in is pretending we’re okay when we are clearly, clearly not. I am not proud of any of this, yet that doesn’t mean it’s not still my story. It doesn’t mean that other people won’t connect to deep trauma and the bonds we create to deal with them. My problem here is that we managed to turn on each other and when we did, she discarded and I kept lovebombing because that’s what I do. She discarded me, later came back and forgave me, and then my mother died.
I was a completely different person who needed her in a completely different way. I stood up, and she didn’t rise to meet me. I do not know whether that is because she couldn’t, or whether she wouldn’t, and that’s not my call. My call is what to do with all her feelings because I cannot get a read on her and I’ve been walking on eggshells ever since. I would say she was a narcissist except she’s clearly not. It’s not like she discarded me for no reason. I earned it free and clear. I came onto my best friend while under duress, not because of anything she did, but because I was in a situation where I couldn’t deal and thought getting her to run away from me was easier than just telling her flat out, “you cannot be my friend. I do not have a clear path to you yet, because I cannot decide how I feel and it’s not a good thing.” If I had, we might have been able to save the relationship, essentially just putting it off until I was really myself again.
We didn’t have that kind of time. I needed to get there faster, and I didn’t. It is such a time of trial and pain that I am stil recovering a decade later. It doesn’t all have to do with her, she was just the lucky recipient of all the shit happening in my life that rolled downhill. I remember sitting on the floor of my apartment before Dana and I moved from Portland, telling her all my most intimate secrets while she told me hers.
It was never her looks that bound us. It never is when you fall in love from the inside out. Remember, our relationship is 99% text. Her words stuck with me because they were in my head, tone of voice fabricated when a phone call would have solved so much. Everything she said echoed in my chest, which made her voice louder in my echo chamber as well. When we were lovebombing each other, it was a high I’ll never experience again, because this was too unique a situation.
Dating Zac is my refuge in all of this, because I need time to rest and relax in a way I’ve never needed before. I cannot be fully present in a relationship right now, and he’s not waiting on me to decide anything because he doesn’t need me to do it. I can handle going out on dates, even platonic ones (going to Charlotte Cardin with Lindsay tomorrow night). I cannot handle the relationship escalator, because I cannot care for someone else in the way that I want while all this is going on. Believe me, it’s not that I can’t or stubbornly won’t move on. It’s all the things I can’t say, summed up by other factors at play. The triggers she left are still there and it’s going to take a while to get them out.
The triggers are large, but I agreed to take them on without knowing ahead of time what it really meant. That she’d always be the baby I’d respond to in the middle of the night with something to drink, Tylenol, and if she ever got old enough, I’ll throw in diaper changes for free. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. If that’s ont love, it’s saying I’d be tested when she said she had wonky organs. If that’s not love, I wouldn’t reach out for her in the middle of the night, without knowing what dream it will be that will make me do it, and being embarrassed that it even happens because like I said, I didn’t know. If my girlfriend heard me calling for her, I couldn’t tell her why and it would be a bad situation fast to wake up in the middle of the night with the wrong name on my lips, even for the purest of purposes and not anything to do with cheating. It’s because she’s done things like that for me in real life that make me want her protection, and then it flips, and the things I’d like to do for her as a repayment flip and it’s a different scenario altogether.
But when I express this to Supergrover, she says that she already has a very full life and can’t do anything for me. This is truly problematic because when we told each other all that stuff, we were drunk as fuck on each other’s brain chemicals and it looked a whole lot different once the effects started wearing off, because she’s not trusting enough to open up again and I have so far been inconsistent enough that when her eyebrows go over her forehead in exasperation because she didn’t ask for this shit, I pick up all my toys and go home because I didn’t sign up for that.
When I forgive someone, I mean it. I don’t let them do me dirty and then set boundaries where they can never work it out with me; I’m just too unwilling to trust an apology with changed behavior. I’ve never become jaded, and I’m proud of that. Jaded comes in when I don’t see changed behavior and I’m trying my absolute best. Where we were before determines how willing I am to set those boundaries, where no amount of feeling wronged erases love or care or connection for me. To love someone so unconditionally that I’d push the big red button on this web site if it came to that, because having the freedom to say what I want with no restrictions on it became a bad thing over time when she wouldn’t commit.
Because then I started having real problems with no peers except her, and she was shit at dealing with mental health. She didn’t know me well enough to know what would happen when we exchanged secrets with me, and neither one of us were prepared for the fallout because we knew each other’s deepest secrets without the context for it…….. except being in the honeymoon phase of a relationship where you can’t see anything going wrong. This person is never going to do anything wrong. There is nothing this person could do that would make me feel differently about them, etc.
I got that deep, but she did and she didn’t. This is because she pushed me away and brought me closer so that I never knew which end was really up. When we get too far apart, we start attracting each other like magnets, but to different degrees. Since I treated her with the same intense lovebombing after we made up, I don’t think I made sense to her. That’s not how it works in her world. If you fuck up, she’ll never open up again and I blew it. I didn’t protect the one baby I made promises to and it broke my heart in half. I jumped up and down trying to get her to see that my behavior was driven by something outside me that I couldn’t control, and it wasn’t my feelings for her. It was that ADHD kicked my ass in the moment and caused waves. Then, when I did the work and became healthy, she couldn’t trust that it was true.
I do not blame her for this. I blame both of us for keeping a toxic pattern and Supergrover being unwilling to work on solutions so that both of us felt well and healthy again. I feel like since she was coming from a very suspect place, she thought I was coming at her from that direction, too. That I was holding something over her head that I didn’t. I was facing the reality of the situation and asking to move on, and the reality is not pleasant. If she felt guilt, it was of her own doing because I didn’t bring up the past in order for that to happen. I will take responsibility for my tone sounding judgmental, but it’s not because I was trying to be judgmental. I’m ADHD and Autistic, raised by a pastor and later a doctor.
I don’t see judgment. I run numbers, emotionally speaking. Where’s the percentage in our behaviors in this situation and what needs to happen in light of it….. not “you’re bad and I hate you.” And of course, because that’s what she thought I was saying to her, that’s how she treated me. That I was always wrong, terrible, and judgmental because I was so mean to her all the time.
No, cielo. That is not true nor has it ever been. I do not see you as wrong and bad, but a mirror reflection of me. When I move my right hand, you move your left. When I learned to love me, the love for you grew deeper because you’ve always lived inside me, my Impossible Girl as I became yours over 10 years. The two Timeless Children that fall into each other the most often. The ones who love so intensely that it flames out, because avoidant/anxious patterns fill a need. We have, as my friend Donna Schuurman said, “compatible wounds.” I am not calling you out, that’s a psychological term she uses that has stuck with me for over 20 years. That’s why I bellieve managed correctly, our relationship makes us perfect for each other. Left untouched, we’ll emotionally destroy each other……… and that’s exactly what has happened. We have left so much “done and left undone” that those sins are grevious unto me.
This relationship will sustain us or it will kill us, and in order for it to stop hurting us that way, we will have to have it out. There’s no way around it, and she doesn’t have time, which ramps up my feeling that she doesn’t think I’m worth it. That she won’t submit to any boundaries I set forth because I don’t deserve them with her. And then, just when I think all hope is lost, there she is. My dragon. The one I love more than all the others. It’s just that safety and security for me is so lacking and so secure without knowing what day it is. I cannot cope and shouldn’t have to, and not because I am feeling entitled and want to intrude upon her life. It’s that she forgave me and I jumped through hoops to prove myself because of it. What I didn’t know is that it wouldn’t work and nothing would ever be the same. That I’d carry a constant feeling of “I can’t do anything right” and constantly have it validated. I am not that person. I am not wrong and bad all the time, and I refuse to be treated that way when I’m just expressing needs.
I tend to get angrier than I should because the longer she goes without addressing anything the less I want to walk on eggshells around her, but I run up into the limits of her forgiveness that way and it just hurts. There was no choice for me except to walk away until Supergrover can love herself the way I love both of us. That her reactions need to come from a place of joy again, because I know they do for other people. I’m just standing outside a big circle, sort of forgiven and yet not. She is folded into my family and content to be so without really recognizing that I need her, too. That if our relationship continues, I can be tight or not at all. I cannot walk in insecure attachments trying to heal them alone.
It’s running over the problem with Supergrover again in my mind because my autism naturally makes me ruminate over it constantly…. and yet, there’s a reason for that. I hit 45 and all of the sudden boundaries meant something to me when I’d never been able to do it before. I established boundaries with everyone in my life and she was so proud of the process until the last one was her. She was the last one for many reasons, the biggest being that I was depressed and isolating because I couldn’t focus on both of us, and it was time to let go if we weren’t moving forward, anyway, because I could not maintain the cognitive dissonance of loving someone so much and having a ceiling on how much it meant to her, and to have the level go up and down every day was frightening. I hung in as long as I could, but I’m not waiting on the world to change. I just hope it does, because I’ve done more work on myself for the past 10 years that would not have been possible if I hadn’t started from a place of pain and reclaimed my life in such a way that I was more stable and capable of dealing with emotions.
If nothing else, I hope she’s proud I’ve gotten there, and I know she is. She’s told me so. What she will not do is get there herself, because it’s too hard and it hurts too much. She’s told me there’s just so much she’ll never let go of. I also know I’m one of them. Even if we never speak again, we’ve changed each other to such a degree that we don’t fit in the old containers we made for each other. They used to stack, and now they’re warped.
I am most proud of getting rid of the floppy plastic boundaries and starting to build with steel……. and it’s okay if that’s with someone else. But we could be The Proud Family if we gave it both our pennies.
Stories That Are All True 