What quality do you value most in a friend?

Having a sous with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God’s great gifts. -Anthony Bourdain

Everything I know about love, I’ve learned through cooking. That’s because my relationship with Dana was very much chef and sous, without the hierarchy. We cooked at home the same way we cooked at work. “You put ’em down, I’ll pick ’em up.” I relied on her technical expertise and soaked it up like a sponge. She learned that when I said I could fix something, she could take that check to the bank and cash it. Instead of just serving me things, she asked for my input. It meant the world to me, because who even am I in the kitchen? I’ve never been to culinary school. My absolute and total belief that she was the chef made communication in the kitchen so easy, because Dana didn’t have an ego and yet there was a line, like Leo being Jed’s best friend and his Chief of Staff. He wasn’t the president, and he knew it.

Our home life fed our work life and vice versa. I couldn’t wait to be in the kitchen with her every day, and that communication made us closer in that if we could communicate under that much pressure, we could talk through anything. It gave us emotional bravery because we were pushing ourselves so hard physically…. especially me, and I’m not in it for the pity vote. It’s just that *everything* in a restaurant is heavy and she could do most things faster and easier than I could. She had more muscle mass. I lifted a lot of things that were too heavy for me, and I will be in awe forever of the memory in which Dana carries a 50 pound bag of flour down a rickety set of steps. The hardest part was not hurting myself in the kitchen. It was watching her in pain. Therefore, my heart stopped for a second at the danger of what she was doing. Then I realized how strong she was.

And if she fell, she’d have a much better survival rate than I ever would have, because I’d have tripped over nothing in the first place. It’s a miracle I didn’t die, especially during a shift, I just couldn’t lift 50 pounds while I was afraid of the stairs that rode the line between step and ladder. Because I have no peripheral vision, the only thing that happened to me that made me afraid was backing down the stairs into a stock pot of cold oil- I couldn’t see it, so I stepped into it up to my shin.

I couldn’t believe what a patient teacher she was, and I’d like to believe I was a good student. I may have gotten a job on Dana’s word, but I kept it. I just couldn’t always be on my A game because my physical limitations show there more than everywhere else. Why wouldn’t they? Cooking combines balance, timing, depth perception (particularly in plating). I had to keep track of all that and sometimes my body rebelled.

I’m proud of what we accomplished together, because combined we had a well-rounded chef. One with both a great palate and technique.

Now that I’m not married to a chef anymore, I’m not saying I want to be with another one. I don’t know what my future partner will do for money. But what I know is that they’ll have the heart of a chef. They’ll either be great cooks or willing to learn how from me. That’s because closeness comes through activity, and life happens when you’re doing something else.

I need someone not afraid to try new things, who doesn’t have hangups about a particular ingredient before they try it. I need someone who is bold and brave in their choices as to how they do life. By this, I mean that they need to have enough confidence to admit when things are wrong and how they contributed to a problem. To be vulnerable with someone is the hardest thing on earth.

When you find that person, it makes you explode on the inside. Everything looks new, even if you’ve been in love a thousand times. When your brain comes down, you think about consequences and how much you’re willing to open up based on what’s happened before the relationship started. You use heuristics to say that what one person is going to do, they all are. That comes out both in very positive and negative ways.

As an INFJ, my inner landscape is huge. I let people in, and walk away from people that are frightened by it. My mind is a very busy place, and to be let in is a privilege. I don’t trust easily, and because I’ve been hurt before, I’m not as approachable as I’d like to be. I walk as if I’m in pain and don’t want to be bothered, and I can’t find a lie.

In terms of learning about love in other ways, my beautiful girl invested so much in me that I couldn’t help it. My brain flooded at all the dopamine, because I heard a message that I hadn’t heard in a long time. That what I bring to the world is valuable, and keep going. Looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.

When my mind stopped turning a deep, platonic love into something the relationship would never sustain, I realized that even though I had been in love with her and it sucked ass carrying around all that emotion, there was no part of me that wanted to reject her. I often did when I was angry, but I was never alone in doing so. That’s because we’re a little too much alike. First children can be assholes to each other because they’re used to being the authority on everything.

She has the heart of a chef, but her passion is for different things that line up with the thousands I share. We do such different things that even if we lived a mile from each other, our lives would never cross over unless it was on purpose. We’re both introverted. Good luck. I think she’s less shy than I am, but we both have social batteries that drain vs. shyness in meeting anyone. We both think a group of people is called a “no, thanks.”

So, sufficed to say, I thought I’d found a lifemate, but not in terms of romance. My personality profile says that I only have one or two really close friends at a time because I’d rather be deeply intimate with them rather than having surface level friendships with a lot of people. It has been true my whole life. God forbid I be at a party, just having fun and not talking about anything of importance and enjoying the moment.

No, I am knee deep into all sorts of things, very few that were outside my beautiful girl’s wheelhouse. I wanted to soak up her knowledge for all time, because she cares about the same issues I do.

And yet, we fought like cats and dogs because she was everything my personality profile said I’d get, that I’d find someone willing to walk in my inner landscape with me. Why that side of me, the one that felt hurt and rejected won, I’ll never know. Why didn’t I just let it lie and stop responding? She gave me things to think about that will turn over forever in my brain. Why give that up?

It was easy when I realized that we’d never get back what we had, and I was too crushed by it. She didn’t deserve to know how I felt about her anymore, because clearly it didn’t mean as much to her as it meant to me. The reason it took eight years is that she did things that touched me deeply…. that even though there was no going back, we could move forward.

As long as we didn’t have to talk about what did happen, and it was making her reactions all the more muddled…. loving and also reinforcing the idea that I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. Those words aren’t easily forgotten, and she said them. I just don’t know if she meant them. Was her response actually protective when it came across as angry? Why did I feel so defensive and afraid? Because I’d wronged her. She didn’t hang it over my head, but she didn’t solidify anything, either. That choice didn’t bother her, but it made me ruminate on what she actually wanted from me for far longer and with more intensity than I should have ever given it. I should have walked away sooner to protect both of us, but I didn’t because I wanted the question of how to move forward out of the way. How to navigate spiraling out because as much as we reject each other, it’s not really possible to disconnect now. We are both in each other’s minds and hearts but in different ways and for different reasons.

So, whether she shows up or not, I have to be there for myself. I have to offer myself the relief I was seeking, because relief is the only thing I wanted from her that I didn’t get. That’s why it was too painful to continue the relationship on a surface level. Not talking about the real thing led to superficial snarks, real and perceived.

So, there’s a lot in me that’s fighting right now with what is real and what isn’t. How much I should believe based on what I saw and not what I heard, because maybe I missed what she was trying to say in favor of thinking I was right. I also have defensive mechanisms and a stunning need to be correct. Thinking about it now makes me laugh, because none of our younger siblings would believe the lengths we’d go to in order to prove each other wrong because it’s good to be the king.

I feel deeply about every win and loss, because no matter the outcome, I screamed with empathy. It hurt more to watch her in pain than it did to be in pain myself, and 90% of the time I caused pain because I’d stepped on a land mine thought to be dormant. The other 10% was in reaction to feeling completely dressed down and unable to express my point in a way that had merit. I’m not the person that always has to be right in most cases. It depends on what I know about the subject, and I will defer to the smartest person in the room, always. But what do you do if your subject matter expert doesn’t think the same thing about you, or expresses that? What I mean by that is the people in your life not yielding to you at least part of the time. No one is ever wrong to the point there is no redeeming quality about them a hundred percent of the time. There is no relationship where one person knows everything and the other person is absolutely brainless and never has better sources and methods than you.

I will never in my lifetime have a conflict with someone in which I don’t have to own consequences, so I expect other people to feel the same way. I write to people privately the same way I write here- which is to say that I look at every possible combination of factors that could be going into someone’s behavior. I clearly express my 3D opinion, which is that I love you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.

When the response is rejection, trauma kicks in. It’s my job to stop. I can’t throw around words the way I have. I don’t judge people, I judge whether situations are fair. Just how long I’ve been feeling defensive because I spoke in a quiet voice and was ignored. How that builds up and my voice gets louder. I need to know why I’m doing it in order to change, and I can point fingers, but only for comprehension to understand the pain’s source. I cannot blame other people for my reactions, and I will not allow people to think that theirs are more important than mine. Different and equally valid.

Most of the time, I don’t understand the charge I’m leading because I don’t think the way a neurotypical person thinks. My filters are different, and the symptoms are akin to Asperger’s. I don’t process emotion like most people, so I don’t always know what to say in a way that doesn’t make them upset because I simply wasn’t thinking about it. My brain doesn’t say “you can’t say that.” Where my empath kicks in is seeing when I’ve caused a negative reaction, mostly because my calculations are foreign. I’m not running on the same operating system. There are no “things we don’t talk about.” That’s because every instinct in my body says that being vulnerable is the key to being strong. That it takes more courage to tell people how you feel when you are terrified of rejection. It takes courage to have an opinion, a right I’ve denied myself for far too long. That’s because when I began to have opinions, I rocked the boat to the point I thought I wouldn’t survive all the upheaval. That I had to fight this mental battle with my health so that I’d have enough energy to also self-soothe.

I didn’t want to continue a relationship where I thought I’d found Richard from Texas and she’d found Groceries. That’s because I made it where it didn’t feel that way and couldn’t get enough confidence in myself to give me any slack at all. I knew that my brain chemicals were beyond FUBAR and didn’t retreat the way I should have.

And exactly none of that turned down all the warmth I felt when I thought of her, not a fire in the belly but a day at the beach. I will feel that every time I think of her, which is how I know there’s no set of circumstances in which I’d refuse anything she wanted. It wasn’t a little deal to me that nothing felt solid, and the inconsistency drew me into myself. I was trapped in this cycle of believing that everything was fine and she hated me and yet still somehow tolerated my presence. Say that sentence all in one breath and you’ll get close to how I felt when you’re winded.

At the same time, I wasn’t always good about letting her know that I was thinking of her feelings because I talked about them, but she never talked about mine. Over time, I realized that my emotions didn’t cause much in her when I felt like Elvis had left the building, awakened out of a stupor caused by awe. When you love someone, aren’t both of those things true? That you can grieve what is lost and enjoy what you had simultaneously, because love and conflict live in the same house?

But if the only thing I can be counted on is saying we’re done and not done, I won’t waffle. That’s because I showed up for every holiday for nine years and wrote to her every day. For nine years. Pretty sure I can be counted on for more than a political point. When I said that it was over, we both had steam in our ears by then. I had no guidance in how much I should feel, so my attention never wavered from the first time we had a conversation. It should have been different. I should have known she was sharing my words with other people because she should have told me she was going to do it rather than telling me after it had been done. I don’t care about her sharing my blog entries, but my letters are another matter. Who knows what went on between her and the people who read them? I ruminated on that for years, because she’d said to keep things tight from everyone, and never said she wouldn’t.

I can’t do that. I can’t face a firing squad over what I’ve written, and neither can she. Neither one of us would want to walk into a room knowing that everyone there knew what we’d said, which meant that integrating our lives would have been difficult. I just would have had to sit through a lot more uncomfortable conversations because I haven’t said shit to anyone. She has a clean slate all day, every day. I do not.

He’s never known it, but I think about her husband all the time. Why wouldn’t I both love and fear him? How would I know how he felt in all of this? When can I stop shaming myself for it?

I am not pushing my memories with her away. I am letting them come and visit me in my dreams, her words pouring thoughts into my head that made me feel stronger and smaller than I ever had. But her words didn’t do it all. My reactions were often poor because my self image was so destroyed.

I do think that I’ve gotten a peace of mind that hasn’t been with me in a long time. I didn’t want to be selfish, and I waited until I was so defeated that I just slunk off into the night. That’s because she laid out everything on her plate and I couldn’t take it. I’d already spent years thinking of everything on her plate and knew there was no universe in which any one of my problems could compare. I didn’t get impatient until we’d been tearing at each other for almost a decade. I don’t know what created that push/pull…. that we could say it was over like that and sign up for more.

I think it can be chalked up to our different approaches to everything, but I never knew when she was going to see a change as positive or suspicious. When she felt attacked, she attacked me. Sometimes, I was stable enough to say “no, that’s not what I meant,” and sometimes her reaction was so fiery that it engaged my escalation mode. In fact, the last exchange we had started with “I don’t want to fight about this.” It ended with her feeling like she had to delay reading my e-mails because they brought on guilt and shame when none was meant. I am not responsible for that guilt and shame. I am only responsible for communicating my needs and hoping that they create a desired reaction because my happiness is just as important as theirs. When her response was to go find other friends, I did. I would like to believe that she popped off as much as I did, because she knows I know everything in that letter intimately. That no obligation of hers went unnoticed to me. I couldn’t believe she thought she needed to spell all that out as if I hadn’t noticed. I’d been drowning in it. I knew I was last priority, I knew why, and I couldn’t make anything better.

If I’d been the sort of person that compartmentalizes emotion, we would be in any of the situations we are now, because I could have just laid back and enjoyed having a friend that was smarter than me.

But I didn’t. I walked around hurt too much of the time, not because of how she felt about me; it was all about my emotions. The guilt and shame that was above me dripping down. I can’t speak for my beautiful girl, but it seemed like something was brewing on her end that read similar. My emotions were too big, and I knew it. I didn’t know how to tamp them down properly, and I never will. Someday a neurotypical can tell me what that’s like.

Right now, I’m just trying to turn my attention, living around this loss instead of kicking it out. Dealing with it while it’s happening so it doesn’t come up later. It’s important to me to have a verbal tapestry of our history, because even if I never get what I want again I still want to remember when I had it.

I want to cry out all the pain, and relive all those laughs. The fact that I look at this whole experience together makes me invincible, that I am not swayed into “it was always bad” or “it was always good.”

I didn’t handle it with power, grace, or style. But I felt it all, all the time. What kept me going was the heart of a chef, that the same give and take I had with food was there with all relationships…. that all of them were a balance of clutch and gas.