tragicomedy

Waaaah morning why.

Going to be another weird Sudafed-enhanced day where my body wants to die but my brain doesn’t stop.  I can picture myself suddenly looking around at my office at 5:00 and finding that I have organized all the things; I hope it happens. 

I don’t have any deep thoughts today.  Valentine’s Day the other day took me through some memory montages of the past couple of years, leaving me on a mental loop of “a year ago….” but I don’t feel like spending a lot of time considering that.  I have constructed an immeasurably better life for myself, and I seem to have reached a phase where I feel less interest in dwelling in my past hurts.  It will cycle back around, of course, because processing requires revisitation, and that shit was painful; but for now it feels nice not to define myself by what has happened to me, but by what I’ve chosen for myself, even if the choices necessarily responded to circumstances I didn’t choose or want.

Of course I’m probably full of shit; traumas leave their marks and sometimes I feel sad, and that’s growth and healing too.  Wholeness is complexity. 

Oh fuck it, of course I’m full of shit.  Here’s my last Valentine’s Day:  My ex resentfully bought me grocery store flowers because I straight-up asked for flowers; they smelled like nothing and died after a day.  He took me out for dinner at one of our favorite sushi places because I asked him to take me somewhere (he so seldom displayed any kind of affection that I had hoped to cash in on the annual marketing tradition of special-occasion love to tide me over for awhile), but got mad at me when I drank too many martinis and wouldn’t speak to me on the way back to his place or for the rest of the night, except of course for the explosive sighs and slamming doors, which count as communication.  I ended the Commercial Day of Romance curled up in his bed silently crying myself to sleep. 

What a douche (him).  And also - what an idiot (me).

Silver lining: He was enough of a douche that it finally woke me up to the realization that I won’t accept non-love anymore, and showed me pretty clearly that I need to change a few things myself. 

Blech.  (Quick mental shake.)  Thank god I quit that when I did.  Thank god I have elected not to live that daily reality going forward.  And now it seems just as funny as it was painful.  What the fuck was his problem?  What reason does anyone ever have to behave that way?  That’s like a sitcom-farcical level of douchery.  And what the hell was my problem for tolerating it? 

It’s a little weird, looking back on a version of myself I can still connect with emotionally but don’t entirely recognize.  I can’t see this current self, or any future self, succumbing to those kinds of circumstances.  Part of me would love to upload my present perspective into my past brain and do the whole thing over just for the satisfaction of bringing my ex up short, and maybe to spare myself a lot of what was at the time intense misery.  But I think my present perspective was forged in that misery, so now I can treasure the satisfaction of looking back on his self-important dismissiveness and my kicked-puppy woundedness and laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was.  I mean, I still recognize how badly it hurt.  That was not a fun two years.  But at the same time...LOL.   Seriously wtf.  Under no circumstances would I have managed to fit happily into that life.  Like trying to ride a child’s bike.  It just took me awhile to realize that I could put it down and walk.  And while seriously attempting to ride that bike strained all my joints and bruised me horribly, there’s something kind of amusing about a fully grown woman weeping because the kiddie bike doesn’t work for her.  Oh, honey.  Get off the bike.

So here I am, wryly amused at my past determination regarding all the wrong things, and glad I woke up about at least some of it, and weirded out by the fact that my sad-sack life was in full swing only a year ago.  I’m a little perplexed as to where all the heartache went; most likely it’ll blindside me out of nowhere one of these days and I will empathize completely with my past self and cry about it like I did last weekend, and that’s okay too.  Self-love involves self-compassion, and I really didn’t know any better at the time, and that relationship really really hurt; and now I get to take that past experience and make it count for something going forward, in the resolve to live better, if nothing else.

Guess I managed a decent reflection after all, despite my swollen tonsils and drippy sinuses.  Thanks, Sudafed.