Life is a Banquet

Hitchhiker's Guide to My Heart

Two years ago today, I met my Freak.  Oddly enough, I'm not giddy with anniversary-joy and feeling-oh-so-lucky today.  Which I feel bad even admitting, but it's where I am today.   I'm not who I was two years ago, and I think any joy in the moment is buffered by grief and amazement at how much has changed.

Meeting Freak felt like joining up with something that was already there, waiting for me.   It was less an answer to a wish than an answer to questions I did not even know to ask.  In a way, our relationship often feels a lot like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  Two years ago, the universe sent me an answer.  I'm still figuring out what the question was.

What Feels Like Home

Sometimes, you have no idea how much something means until you have been without it so long.  Nearly two years ago, I went from having an apartment filled with nice furniture to having nothing, as the result of an ugly divorce (things are more civil these days, but very ugly then).  I decided that my furniture was simply not worth the mental energy required to fight for it.  But, in the ensuing two years, as I have gradually moved from owning an inflatable mattress and a dish upon my first night in Salem, to acquiring computer desks, washer & dryer, refrigerator, chairs, a breakfast nook, a real bed, bookcases, storage, cooking supplies, and all manner of other odds and ends (including of course A HOUSE and FOUR beasts), I have thought often of what I was forced to leave behind.

Big Shot

I’ve been watching a lot of Sex in the City DVD’s lately (thanks Blockbuster for your latest rip-off: unlimited rentals!). I’ve also spent much of the past week flogging myself with a noodle so wet it should have been glue long ago. Watching Carrie with Big, her own personal pasta pot of doom, I am forced to ask: Do we all have a Big in our lives? Someone whose mere presence turns our lives upside down? For whom we feel things we ought not? Who brings out the very worst in us?

Why is it that it’s never the good ones who keep us up at night? Who make us want to drop everything, and screw up everything that we’ve worked so hard for? Why do we continually set ourselves up for failure? I see this over and over, people doing things they know they shouldn’t, and yet somehow reveling in the drama of their self-torture. I wonder what other people are using the drama of the toxic friendship/relationship/family member to mask?

I know that like Carrie, I trot my Big issues out whenever I want to distract myself from something, career, health issues, money, envy, even happiness. For the past week, I’ve let my inner six year old dance around the house, throwing tantrums, making idle threats, and generally being hell to live with. Once again, I wonder why Freak puts up with me, and I why I dump all this crap onto him.

My life as an Ostrich

This is my entry for this month's blogging for books contest. The theme is adaption to change. While my whole blog is really about change, adaption, and re-invention of the self, this is my submission:

There is the change that we must adapt to because it comes upon us suddenly, without warning, altering the landscape of our lives, and then there is the change that we dream about, plan for, and willingly take part in, even if it reaps unintended consequences. But there is also the change whose very necessity we fight against, where adaptation is both the acceptance of the change, and adjustment to its fallout. The story of the end of my first marriage is the story of such a change.

A Dream of the Future

I'm not planning on making a practice of recording or writing about my dreams, but after the catherisis of yesterday, I had what I feel was a very significant and symbolic dream.

Closing the Door

Sometimes the universe gives us situations out of the blue to offer unexpected clarity in another situation. About two months ago, I discovered my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s blog, and I felt a strong connection to her. I wanted to talk with her, share ideas, and possibly even be her friend. After all, it seemed that we had both been through very similar things—married young, divorced because we were too young and grew apart, like art, were liberal, and so on. So I took a risk, and I sent her a rather lengthy email introducing myself, explaining how much we had in common.

Loving More, Searching Less

Lately it seems like references to polyamory are cropping up more and more. Perhaps its our hyper-sexualized culture, or perhaps the whole-gay marriage debacle has people throwing in the monogamy towel as a vestige of WASP-dom they’d rather not be associated with. Myself, I never really considered anything other than a one person, one lifetime commitment for a very long time. I mean polyamory, or multiple relationships, is not exactly the dominant meme one receives growing up in the heartland.

I remember this bizarre movie set in the 1970s that came out in the early or mid 1990s that featured parents who were “swingers” and they went to a party where people grabbed car keys and went home with whoever’s car keys they grabbed and someone else went home with their spouse. This shocked and disturbed me more than my first glimpse of full frontal nudity.

Moving On

Much of my melancholy state of the past few weeks has centered around the imbalance of my relationship to the past, my inablity to be truly here in the now, and my yearning for closure. I still lack the answers, but I finally see a path to the balance which I seek.

Sometimes that which keeps us mired in the past is quite simply guilt. We feel burdened by the weight of others saddness and their inablity to move on makes us feel guilty. And so we stagnate.

Last night the wireboy set me free in a conversation I thought I did not want, and then realized that it was ALL I have wanted for over a year. I wrote a poem about it here.

 

Romancing Myself

Sometimes I only recognize in retrospect how badly I treated myself.  At the time, I usually justify my beliefs in some logical and seemingly rational fashion, then when that façade no longer holds up, I progress to the always helpful medium of blaming others for the sorry state affairs in my life.

Forever Begins Right Now

Tonight, I re-read Judy Blume’s classic novel Forever. 17 year old Girl meets Boy, falls in love “Forever” and then falls out of love. It’s right up there with Love Story as far as sappiness goes. I last read this book when I was 14, and at the time I was more interested in the explicit “dirty” parts than in any plot or deeper meaning. But, when I was selling books back today and getting a few new ones, I saw it on the shelf and it seemed to beg me to take it home.

I read somewhere recently that if we remembered how much love hurts, we’d never do it again. How incredibly true this is. In fact, I think many people stay together long past the relationship expiration date to avoid the pain and heartache. When you are “in love,” the love feels invincible, and you’re certain it’s a once in a lifetime occurrence. And so like the heroine in the book, we rail against ourselves, fight the end, and even when we’re the one who leaves, we still grieve.

Everyone loves to fall in love. It’s the staying that’s hard. Love is such a fragile thing. What appears to be a hardy plant can die quickly, while what appears to be a puny little plant incapable of bearing fruit can surprise you and thrive. And in order to fall in love, we must succumb to temporary amnesia about the pain. Spur of the moment declarations of ever lasting love decorate the bridges, restrooms, building sides, and tabletops of America, testaments to the hope inherent in young love.

In the book, in the end when they break up, she must decide what to do with a necklace that has their names and “forever” inscribed on it. She drops it in her purse in a scene that perfectly captures the awkwardness of such partings. The deeper message here I think is that its very easy to become cynical when we loose forever. The stages of grief are akin to that over the death of a loved one.

Books like Forever don’t come along very often. We are conditioned to expect to see true love, first love triumph, to see our hero whisk the heroine off into the sunset. It’s easy to crave first kisses, and electric glances when you are surrounded by the pressures of daily life, the laundry, the work, the bills. My brother is in love for the first time right now—and I see the power of love to transform a person, to bring us however temporarily out of deep depression with its powerful rush of endorphins. But what do we do when the depression returns? When simply being together is no longer enough to make a crisis go away?

I’m far from a cynic. In fact, it’s the fact that I’m such a romantic that gets me into trouble. I want to believe in forever, I want the white picket fence, the kids, the happy home. I want to be a part of a little old couple on a bench. Even as I mock suburbia and soccer moms, I believe in the power of love. I believe in the power of the union of two.

The fear that Forever leaves unaddressed is the fear of your own fallibility, your own fickleness. It’s not like a diet where all you need is willpower to sustain the relationship. Fear of yourself is powerful barrier to fully being there in a new relationship. It’s that same all or nothing thinking that paralyzes from accepting our half-full world. We feel that we will never again trust completely. It's not fear of committment--it's fear of letting ourselves down. But the human spirit is such an amazing thing. At the end of Forever, when she runs into her former beloved, there is sadness at what is lost, but hope at what may come. That forever is not impossible, it’s just a matter of timing. And luck.

Forever is like any other journey—it begins with the first step. And I think I often forget this. You don’t get the happy ending if you don’t leap, if you don’t believe, if you don’t trust, if you don’t risk the pain. And it begins with forgiving yourself for having dreamed and believed before. I’m not sure I’m there yet, but I’m working on it. Forever can be right now.

And the funny thing about perfectionism is that we don’t want to start a task if we can’t do it “right” or finish it. Flylady with her 15-minutes at a time mantra has helped to stop such negative thinking. It’s enough to do what I can, even if I’d like it to be more. One of her testimonials this week asked what we are hiding from when we give into this defeatism. I think another good question is what are we afraid of?

There is so much good in my life right now that focusing on the negative is holding me back from truly enjoying. Sometimes half full has to be good enough for right now. And if half full makes us truly happy, we have to brave enough to admit that instead of apologizing for not doing “more.” In order to unconditionally love myself, I think letting go of such thinking will be a major step forward. Drink up!