I’m starting to get that feeling of not having a home that I always get when I’ve spent a long time with family. Because Texas and Maryland both feel like home, neither really do. You can add Oregon to the list. It’s almost as if I belong to everyone and no one simultaneously…. everywhere and nowhere at once.
It’s kind of freeing, but sometimes the pendulum swings too far in terms of feeling anchorless. I think that in a lot of respects, my relationship with Aada over the internet was more grounding than an IRL relationship because it grounded me regardless of physical location.
“Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.”
I may or may not have said that to Aada once or twice over the last 12 years.
I will miss those unprintable replies.
It was interesting feeing like I belonged to the Internet instead of to a physical place, but I’m starting to realize that you cannot have your anchors set in the cloud. It looks stable, but the air up there is quite thin.
So why do I spend so much time both wishing that the relationship was still intact? I don’t know anything else yet. Not enough time has passed for me to be completely stable and grounded with other people. It will take time, but I’m slowly coming out of the shell I created to keep people away. I’m not shy, I just had a lot to hide.
Not having anything to hide is the theme of my life now, because I haven’t had that in a very long time. Aada didn’t want me to talk to anyone about her, wanted to be a secretive little bubble with me where we were isolated in our own echo chamber. We learned to fight a little too well, egging each other on instead of de-escalating either the fight or the relationship until we could handle it with care.
I think a lot about what I should have done when I found out Aada lied to me, and that the lie was woven into the fabric of our relationship. That trust was broken beyond all measure because the bubble was built on truth and honesty.
Her reaction was that her lie wasn’t that bad, wasn’t pathological, and I was just a manipulator. That can be her story and she can stick to it all she wants, but that doesn’t make it true. I did not manipulate her so much as we both have “stuff” left over from childhood that made us both manipulate each other to get what we wanted. I did that by being overly anxious. Aada did that by being overly avoidant. We’d just figured out how to get past all that when she told me that she lied.
But the end is all my fault? I’m not so sure about that.
I don’t think she ever had it in her to meet me on the ground because she was scared of meeting me in person. I was also scared of meeting her on the ground, but one of us had to put on our big boy pants. So part of me ended the relationship because I thought, “we fight all the time and she’s lied to me in a way that caused a monster amount of pain. I’m done.” It was a split second decision that I have been over in my mind roughly a million and one times.
I could have handled her lie better, because there was no need to get as angry as I did. It was out of bounds, and that part is definitely my fault. I take ownership and responsibility. But I also think that my anger was the last thing that happened, not the source of the problem.
The source of the problem is that I’ve told her I love her more than air, and I meant it. She does not feel that way about me, so my feelings make her uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to seem homophobic, and I don’t want to seem aggressive. So we danced around the subject for years, to mixed results.
I can’t speak for Aada, but it seems like she rejected me not only because she was straight, but also because she doesn’t love herself that much and probably thought I was a little bit crazy.
I am, just not about this.
But I don’t think she thought I knew how crazy this all sounds- that she’s such a good writer that those butterfly feelings in my stomach presented before I really knew what was happening, and I’ve never been able to get rid of them because when we’re together my dopamine goes sky high.
But I’m not pushing Aada into anything she doesn’t want. She actually agreed to be open and to have very few boundaries with me (which I appreciated and it made me cry). We agreed to love each other, each part of the other’s “wild and crazy brain.” But that didn’t mean that boundaries would get crossed that didn’t need to be. I know that she’s straight and in a committed relationship and I would never want to do anything to get in the middle of that. I was just glad that she agreed to let me love her at all.
And then I blew it, for reasons that will stay with me for a long time as I waffle between what I think and what I think.
That’s really what this blog is for. It allows me to work in longhand instead of curating the perfect life through sound bites. I couldn’t have been in this close of a relationship with Aada without being able to explain it in longhand, because a sound bite would cheapen us all the way around.
It was a struggle to accept that while Aada was my friend and that was solid, I couldn’t go to her for more than that. The less I say about that, the better. I will just say that I listened to a lot of sad music and took her joking about marrying Brené Brown so hard that I could not even.
It was harmless, a joke that just got under my skin.
So when I met Brené last Monday I have to admit that I felt a spark of jealousy.
You stole my woman, Brown. En garde. 😉
Kidding, of course. What I actually said was, “you’ve said that you’re a Liverpool fan, but how’s Richmond looking this year?” Without missing a fucking beat, she said that Richmond had a midfield problem and played it straight just like I knew she would. I also said that when I was at University of Houston, I taught her how to use Microsoft Word, so realistically I taught her everything she knows. She said, “you sure did.”
There it is, from the horse’s mouth.
I had no illusion that Brené would remember me from UH. But it’s true that I was her computer lab supervisor when she was a grad student/TA. So, she’s a few years older than me, but I can’t help but refer to her as “one of my kids.” Because back then, she wasn’t BRENÉ BROWN, TRADEMARK.
I just saw her on YouTube one day and said, “I think that’s one of my kids,” and I e-mailed her team to make sure our dates lined up. When they did, I realized that I had met a famous person, they just became famous years and years after I met them.
This happens to me a lot because I went to High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Robert Glasper sat behind me in History when I was in 10th grade, so Brené is not the only Houstonian on “List of People I’d Pay Money to See.” Robert played The Reach at The Kennedy Center a few years ago, but I had to come back home to see the illustrious Dr. Brown, who is currently skating on thin ice with me.
Really? No, not really. 😉
Stories That Are All True 