The air conditioner and the box fan in my office are both humming as I listen to the keys on my mechanical keyboard clack. Music, for me, is not external. I write in the silence, but music often runs through my head as I record the difficult passages of my life.
This is a difficult passage, but as Winston Churchill famously said, “if you’re going through hell, keep going.” The reason this is a difficult day is that I started out by looking at Facebook memories, and it was one year ago that I wrote the letter to Michael, Aada’s husband, explaining that it was a rough break for both of us that we didn’t get to meet each other and make room for all of our feral feelings for each other. I wrote a list of all the ways I wanted him to love her in my stead. It made me smile, and then my cheeks felt wet. I still feel every bit of love for Aada that I always did, but I got myself into an impossible situation and now it’s time to get out.
Everything right now is a distraction from the way I feel when I’m writing about her, because it makes me feel invincible to have such an incredible muse. I’m not angry today, as I was in the last entry. Just sad that none of my predictions for the future will come true unless a miracle occurs. I take responsibility for all the ways my blog has affected her life, and look forward to writing more about new experiences. The sadness is not being able to talk to her first before I publish, something I should have thought more about before I “exposed her.”
I deserved this friend breakup because I got too angry, too fast. She was my primary relationship for a number of years because we weren’t romantically involved, but emotionally entwined in a way that most friends aren’t. I still cannot deal with the hole left in my heart, and the guilt that it came at my own hand. I was in a very bad place, and I own that I would have made different decisions had I felt better about myself and the state of my world. It’s not an excuse, but my bipolar disorder got the best of me. Having bipolar disorder does not make me less accountable for my actions, but it is context for me down the road when I’ve forgotten why this relationship no longer exists and “whatever happened to….”
I used the word “feral,” and that’s exactly what it was… a reaction with no reasoning behind it. She lied to me in a way that she cost me more than she will ever accept, and while she has apologized for that lie “a million times over,” it does not erase my reaction when I found out.
I was less than gracious.
There’s no going back, so as I sit in the “silence” I’m thinking about how we both treated each other over the years. There’s no percentage in trying to fix anything, there is only taking the good parts away and learning from the bad. We both told each other to fuck off every time we got close. In that way, it will take months for this to feel real. That’s because we’ve tried to end it hundreds of times and it hasn’t worked for either one of us. Either I will feel her pull or she’ll read something here that she has to address, and we go a few days catching up until something gets said that the other doesn’t like and then it’s chopping each other off at the knees. That cycle has to end for both of us, because we have tried to get healthy over and over and over and over and over and over…………….
I do not think that we’d be in the same place had we met in person, because there’s something about the Internet that makes you quicker to anger than in person. It’s easier to go down the wrong road a lot faster without clearing things up. I wonder every day how things would have changed if I’d ever seen her eyes sparkle when she was making a joke, or given her a hug after a fight. I wonder if she wonders those things about me.
She mentioned being sorry that she wasn’t more present when my mother so shockingly died, and I told her it was okay… she was present now. And at that time, it was true. But she was only present in my inbox, too ethereal to be real. I have to admit how tired I was of her bullshit, that if she really wanted to show up for me, she would have already. That her reluctance to meet was feeding the trauma bond, not creating a solid and secure connection. That she was going to be avoidant and I was going to be anxious and that’s just how the cookie crumbled.
I will be the villain in my own story, and I wish it meant I never had to talk to me again. I don’t feel great about this set of decisions and I will have problems forgiving myself for a long time. I should have just stopped replying. I should have left it at “I’m happier without you,” because at that time, I was. I’d managed to go a whole month without Aada ripping me a new asshole about something I’d written and it felt great. The thing is, though, I could go a month, but not longer.
I wasn’t happier without her in the long run, and I’m not happy now. But me being unhappy is not her problem to solve, because I think it’s better that we don’t talk. I need space to find new friends and make the solid, secure connections I crave without being a slave to my inbox. I gave up monster amounts of social interaction just to sit in my office and write to her. I do not regret it, I just know that much isolation is not good for anyone. But it’s amazing how happy I thought I was.
It’s time to consider a vacation from all of this, and mentally I just don’t know how to prepare.
I did make a wonderful friend this week, Josh, who lives in Maryland relatively close to me. He’s a therapist as a second career after being a war reporter in Iraq and a television news producer at CNN. We walked around the National Aquarium in Baltimore chattering away about anything and everything. I felt free for the first time in months, able to let go and just enjoy the moment.
Living in the moment is something all writers have trouble doing, so at least I don’t feel alone. We are all lost in our thoughts most of the day, because we’re constantly pushing our own “record” buttons.
Mine just doesn’t have background music in the traditional sense- it is the symphony happening behind me as I type. The air conditioner and the box fan in my office are both humming………..
When I am writing, I have two modes. The first is complete silence, sometimes with a blocker like white noise or several fans in the room. The second is listening to either the soundtrack to Argo or The Bourne Supremacy. It has to be spy music, and it has to be Middle Eastern in nature. I don’t write about spies in my daily life, but the music translates into everything else because it’s mathematically quick when my brain isn’t. It jogs things I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. It is basically making my thoughts compete to the rhythm and tempo of the music.
When I’m doing chores, I like to listen to rap or hip hop. Sometimes angry country where women kill their husbands. It’s not hilarious if you haven’t lived in the South and grown up on these jokes…. like how in Texas, we don’t get divorced, we just have big backyards……… thus the joke about Bryn having a yard large enough to *garden.* I may not ever put a ring on her finger, but good luck proving she’s not mine. With us both being bisexual, I can’t prove one way or the other what’s going to happen, and there are too many complications to figure it out so why try? The story will unfold either way, and both of us are happy right now having other partners and just leaning on each other the way a best friend would. To think that is more important than having a romantic partner is crazy because I will never find a better friend. We undervalue friends in our society, and to me it’s your other marriage because you can’t go to anyone else the same way you can with them because no one else catalogues the books in your library.
Right now, there is an entire reddit thread of people who are crying over bff divorces, people who feel exactly the way I do about Bryn. No one is her, no one will ever be her, she broke my heart in third grade and I’m still not over it, et cetera. Third grade and you’re 55? Yes, let’s make sure that never happens. If I want her, I need to act like it.
We are learning how to love each other and be strong women at the same time, which is actually a bigger deal than everyone else might think, because being lost in trauma bonds constantly makes us doubt that the other one is sincere. I, like her and Michael, am stuck fighting her on letting me love her….. and she’s sharpening her weapons to take care of me because we are The Timeless Child. I will not tell you her story, because she is starting to believe that she needs to tell it herself and I have the platform to allow her to do it.
I realized I had told her how much I loved her because she could see how big a decision it was to add an author on my platform, responding by making my platform even better. She has a completely different writing voice and reminds me to be happier. I could return the favor.
We both run the gamut between reading a room and making those observations float into our echo chambers. We pick up the negative emotions in a room first, because we are programmed to respond to everyone else’s unhappiness because we are trying to keep our secrets. We are in protective mode of our spirits and bodies. This is not a problem. We have taught ourselves that we are worth protecting. The echo chamber just makes the negative emotions feel bigger and scarier than they really are because the boss music is playing, but they (jointly and/or severally) can’t touch us because we also have good boundaries.
Bryn will have my undying emotion forever, just an eternal soldier’s flame because our emotions run so deep they stack like a sandwich. That’s because she studies animal behavior just as closely as human behavior and she takes in all the things about homo sapiens that we cannot see. Her book title is literally “All the Dark We Cannot See.” Bryn “grew up with me” starting when I was 19 years old. So if our mutual friends want to start sweating bullets, this is where they should start.
Fuck them and their little cult of adoration. They just make me even more glad I got away from them and have spent the last 10 years worshipping the goddess who made me see what a nightmare you’d all become, because the people that do nothing are culpable.
This goes back to when I was 12.
My confusion and horror started then (but horror came later when I really understood its aftermath, but that’s what causes the panic attacks…. buy now, pay later). I was 12, and you very much weren’t. This is the call of The Timeless Child. It never changes, and it never gets better, because our abusers have taught us to beat the system and we do it whether we want to or not because we’re trapped. You have to identify, and you’re bad at it……………… because you don’t study animal behavior and Bryn does. I swear to fucking Christ, if you want to find an abuser, don’t hire a detective. Hire a dog trainer and I fucking mean it.
That’s because the child is acting just like a dog. Frightened behavior leading from the abuser making them alpha dog, and everyone else are puppies they have to take care of or their lives get worse. We will protect ourselves forever to avoid emotions and it goes two ways. They generally marry each other. The first is the one that cuts off all their emotions. The other is the one that bleeds out. One only takes care of themselves. The other can’t get out of bed in the morning, they’re so emotionally laden.
For the former, the sins of the world do not affect them. For the other, they’re the caretakers. They want everyone to feel safe and work toward it happening. It all stems from animal behavior. One becomes Black Panther, the other becomes Erik Kilmonger.
It will never vary unless you break the cycle. Bryn and I found each other. Instead of trying to handle someone’s emotions because they don’t have any by choice, we’re handling someone’s emotions that will handle ours. It’s a radical concept, being healthy and responding in a way she can hear it because I’ve found out that we’re the same person. Trying to love someone who can’t hear it is exhausting.
Although, I will tell my beautiful girl to reassure her that one of her three word e-mails cut me in half because that was the moment that all her love flooded into me at once and I realized that her feelings were large and I shouldn’t have blown it (for the 345454354354435345435th time). It’s one of the times I can quote her because it’s so innocuous:
“Also. Thank you.”
There was a big goddamn thank you because when she is humble she is fucking quiet. You can hear a pin drop.
Those words reverberated and she didn’t take in that part of it. She only took in the part where the consequences for me were vast and I also expressed unhappiness about it because it was a more complicated issue than I thought it would be. No support, no commiseration, no anything.
Just another confusing moment that could have been cleared up and just won’t. I don’t have to be sad about it, because I’ve let it go. But I just won’t go into a relationship expecting that someone understands they need to respond when their actions have caused pain and lift me up so that I can deal. I’m tired of dealing with people who are content to let me struggle. It is more work than I should be allowed to take on without positive reinforcement. That there are certain things I will do for you as long as you are doing certain things for me. That a relationship is a balance between anger and love and what we feed is what we get. I have absolutely been the villain in one case and the victim in another. I get that I’m not going to be the hero in every story and I’m tired of catering to people who think they’re the whole story. I was just willing to bend more on this one because first of all, when I was wrong I was really wrong. Secondly, when she was wrong she was really, really wrong as well. Neither of us could hear love very well, and we both focused on “everything was bad.” I thought she didn’t express herself enough to be clear over time, because saying everything was fine and withholding love was devastating because she’d gone from sunshine to cold, but not really. It was a spectrum as well, so I was feeling her out a lot of the time because only her annoyance would come through and she’d withdraw, then come back and make me wonder why she was reaching out if she was always so angry.
I found someone who is not always so angry.
We have music in common and listen to a lot of the same things. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her because I know she’ll only make me a better writer because I’m responding to her.
I know it to be solid because I have been smart about responding to my beautiful girl as well. I have learned how to be me by learning what I both do and do not want. Both lessons were just as important. I need to find the people that will forgive you over and over without shutting down, because I will always be human and so will they. I will give them the responsibility of helping me manage my emotions because I am offering that as well. The way I think of you rubs off. You’ll find yourself feeling better about who you are because I’ve told you that you do matter in a way that you can hear it. It’s the basis of something healthy and sustainable. It was where I thought Supergrover and I were going, because I’d been that for her before. But because I had hurt her, it wasn’t that she was malicious, it was that she was one type, and I was the other. But our behavior lined up. We could zipper our DNA, because it was permanently sealed when we were kids. She cuts off her emotions, I become the frightened dog. It’s how we’re programmed and she couldn’t see it.
That’s why the ostinato is “help her anyway.” I’m hoping that in time, she’ll realize we were just wrong for each other from the beginning because we couldn’t take care of each other once there was a schism. There was a power dynamic in all areas because there was a solid one in place from something that was pure.
She approached me like a dog as well. Loyal to a fault. Sniffed my hand and decided I could pet her head. Let me hold her leash. Would heel to an enormous degree and bark at everyone else. I did something to offend her, and the bark turned toward me for every conflict for all time because she had something concrete she could use and so did I. We just became two different types of dogs and couldn’t break the cycle.
It didn’t stop me from loving her and wishing for something healthy. We’d just gone too far into the woods and gotten lost from each other. It was a conflict like a dog being too heavy to carry who’d gotten injured. I was working on pure adrenaline, and my energy had run out six trees ago. But I never stopped loving her. Not once for one moment. I could get angry enough to tell her to fuck off for all eternity and never in six billion years mean it. I’d just get tired of dealing with her anger and confusion bullshit that I needed a fucking break. Any break in that pattern would cause unrest because she started to feel a push/pull that I didn’t. I knew she could be alpha dog if she wanted, and she was unsure. It was terrifying because when I had a conflict with her, she reacted as if I was trying to hurt her and not trying to get her to pay attention to the fact that it hurts me when she pulls back and it shouldn’t feel like an obligation because it shouldn’t hurt when I pull back, either. That’s because we both know where we stand at all times because we’re both emoting good and bad things.
Alternatively, I have the choice to believe whether she means good or ill and react appropriately. Everything doesn’t need to be put through the ringer of bad or good behavior and I overexplain because it’s a trauma response. But she never learned that I needed to tell her everything because that’s who I am.
Her self esteem went up and down as we talked because she decided that I would always be a threat. My trauma response irked hers and we were connected at the brain despite the fact that we brought out the worst in each other. I will be sorry about it for the rest of my life, but I will not think we should have continued hurting each other, either.
That’s why I want her man to be the best he can be. It’s not that I can’t be the shorter, more female version of him, just someone who cares about her without reason or rhyme because it’s so crazy solid and immense. It’s that she won’t let me be him anymore, because she’ll never see me like that again. It was a painful goodbye because it had to be. I would never walk away unless I felt it was necessary. Her words didn’t ring true consistently and she would say the same thing. It’s just that I was looking for desperately needed love and she was looking for desperately needed anger and guilt. We focused on all the wrong things, and I sat with the bees and cried while she felt justified in treating me this way because I’d always be an asshole.
What she confided in me was never the problem, because she never focused on what I was actually saying.
I will always love her a crazy amount, just beyond all measure because she proved to me every day she was worth it and wouldn’t acknowledge why I saw that. She thought she had too much sludge in her soul to be mine, and I thought I was sitting next to Christ in a hallucination. That’s funny because she’s an atheist.
I will never forget finding my person. The one I was meant to love like this. She wasn’t meant to be my Jamie. She was meant to be my Jenny, and she let me go………… but we’ll always be the same person on the opposite ends of the spectrum because we acted like dogs.
Stories That Are All True 