Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I got demand avoidance over writing. I take a lot of heat for my opinions, but I am of the same mind as Ben Franklin…. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So, first of all, my blog is why I stand up- to have a voice at all. Sometimes it shakes, and I speak my truth, anyway. That doesn’t mean that my truth means someone else is lying. They are not having the same experience as me. So, if we have mutual friends and they have a different story than me, please believe both. It’s not a matter of truth vs. lying, but what both people picked up in the room- and by necessity, those won’t match because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. There is room for more than one truth, and mine isn’t the only one. That’s because there’s truth, the subjective, and Truth, the objective. I do not traffic in Truth so much as truth. I cannot be omnipotent, I can only be a diarist. The problem comes in when my readers want me to be omnipotent, representing their mindsets.
I am not here to take away validity from anyone else’s story. I am here to name it and claim it, whatever it is. It really hurt me when Supergrover said that I’d painted some things as fact that I didn’t have the right. I had no idea what the hell that meant, because it’s not like she talked to me about what I was writing, or offered suggestions as to how I could make it better and more accurate. I was floundering because I had no information and my responses were feeding themselves without any input at all. So, if you leave me to my own devices and never address anything, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because you don’t have a problem with it. If you tell me there’s a problem, I can regroup.
I cannot be held to the standard of apologizing for everything I don’t know. Everything I don’t know is fucking enormous, in this situation and in others. What I can do is apologize for what I do know. I’m shattered that I hurt my beautiful girl at all, ever, but I am so incredibly human and fallible. I made mistakes. Full stop.
I just got tired of paying for them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over……… You get my drift. As I told her, “I don’t get to decide how long you hurt, but I do get to decide where the line is between justifiably angry and holding a grudge.” I didn’t get tired of her being hurt and angry. I got tired of her not wanting to resolve any of it so we didn’t have to live in hurt and anger.
As I have said before, I would have cut off any one of my limbs to read her blog entries about me (she’s not a blogger, I’m just sayin’). I would have liked to have been angered and moved by her words, too…. And I was, but only when she was mad enough to say “I’ll answer this one, but after that, fuck right off.”
I know she doesn’t want drama. I know I don’t, either. But we’re both cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It’s an unbreakable connection on both sides, because after a few months goes by, the urge to tell each other things returns in full force. Then, we get close and after a few months, we’ll blow a gasket and tell each other to fuck off again. It’s seriously like an addiction I can’t kick, because neither one of us are very good at no contact. This is because it makes me cry every single time she says “I’ve been good. I’ve followed the rules. You said you wouldn’t reach out again, and yet, you did.” The fact that she thinks she’s being good by not talking to me wrecks me every single time. We are not cut out for this.
We are both tenderheart bears, yet not without our claws.
It’s just time to put them away, and for her, that answer is distance. For me, that answer is connection and resolution. I will never be happy with a relationship in which someone intentionally keeps things from me, because it makes me afraid and untrusting. I don’t need that anxiety, and I’ve confronted her about it many times before writing about it here. It’s frustrating, because she’s mad I let the world into ours, I’m mad that she doesn’t listen to me and you do.
In the end, I basically had to choose between being a writer and being her friend, and I chose me. It was time if she was going to keep stonewalling me, and I have no doubt that she would have done it until she died or I did.
But that’s my baby girl…. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way at all. I mean literally, in my mind, she’s a child. One I was supposed to love, protect, honor, all that. I did and I didn’t. Very mixed results. I do not blame her for any of that. I was a straight up mental mess. However, once I got it together, there were no more conversations in which we could make headway because we were still so cautious and resentful in the first place.
It is seriously one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever been a part of, and yet also something I never want to live without. I can’t, because even when she’s not here, she’s here. When I write, I can feel her presence, and she’s usually teasing me.
Something to the effect of “come on, Lanagan. I know you have more in you than that.” I basically just replace the person I know now with the person I knew 10 years ago because those memories are happier. I do not like all of the unpleasantness, and I am finished with it. I am receiving the closure I need the longer I go on having sent her very healthy messages in return, because it says to me that she was only in it for a dog to kick.
Being called a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years will do that to you.
Meanwhile, I have so many terms of endearment for her that I couldn’t even write you a list at this point. She can also act like a huge jackass, but I don’t think of that as her personality.
When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed. Still. After 10 years.
It’s not a game, and I resent that statement more than anything else. I promised her I’d be there for her for her whole life. I didn’t know what it would entail, I just said yes. At that point, we didn’t even really know each other, and yet I knew I was forging an unbreakable connection.
It started to feel like only her pain mattered, only her thoughts mattered, only her everything mattered. That’s because I made time for it. She did not make time for my feelings in terms of responding to them unless they were about other people. I have never managed to convince her that we need to work on our own communication. No one’s relationship with anyone is off the table except for apparently the one between us.
I haven’t been saying that this is all her fault, or using my blog to be shitty to her. That’s because I was not having the same experience as her, so I doubt she’s been tracking with me this whole time. I am positive that has led her to believe things about me that are not true, because she doesn’t respond. She takes things in and “reads between many lines.” But no actual communication regarding any of it except for “I’m furious beyond belief at some of your entries, and moved by others.” Well, what the fuck are you mad about and what moved you?
I feel like both of those things are important for me to know.
Because if I knew what moved her, I’d always write like that. I always want everything to be happy and sunny in my world, but the world doesn’t work that way. It’s complicated and sometimes it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s really dark.
But, for every storm, there’s a rainbow.
Stories That Are All True 