The last couple of days I have felt lost. I sometimes feel like I can’t get anything right. Like I’m out of step and I don’t even known the dance. I’m winging it. Making things up as I go. I have been a little withdrawn lately from my friends, family, the whole thing. There are some changes coming to my life and they don’t sit well with me, but they are unavoidable.
Today I talked with a friend and as much as I understand what people say sometimes about when you have lost someone in your life, you should cultivate your old friendships, you should work on making new ones, you need to grow past the pain. Today I have just been reminded about how much I’m really on my own.
You might see the words expressed about how “if someone treats you like an option, let them choose someone else.” I recently went through that. I’ve written about it some on this site, but I usually don’t talk about things like this for a few reasons. For one, my ex-wife stalks my blogs and I don’t need to give her that thrill of watching me struggle. I wish she would find another hobby other than masturbating to my misery.
You see, the friend I was talking to today and I have a major disagreement on how my last “situationship” ended. I call it that because nothing was official, though I did fall in love with this person. Then, they made me feel like I was an option. I suppose I could have handled things better. That’s what our mutual friend says anyway. They told me I burned bridges. The relationship is dead, and they no longer want to hear anything about it.
Because I didn’t do things “right.”
I guess sometimes when you try to dig deeper and cultivate enduring friendships, you find out just how rotten they are inside. My friend has told me I didn’t do things the right way. It’s funny how much people in your lives want to run things like a committee, when you are at your lowest and struggling, they have nothing helpful to say. I think I might cultivate that friendship much less. Maybe just let it go fallow. Nothing says healthy friendship like being shut out of talking about something important to your emotional health.
When I burned my bridge with the woman I had fallen in love with, I did so knowing two things. For one, I knew that when I care for someone, I will do everything I possibly can to make things right. I have built an entire life out of being the only person fighting for something, and maybe at my age, I have finally understood that isn’t a strength. I have wasted years of my life trying to fix things that I had no ability to fix. And when I have finally let go, I could finally breathe again.
When I burned that bridge, I had exhausted everything at my disposal. I didn’t make the decision lightly. I was the only person fighting for our friendship at the end. The romance was dead and done. And maybe I should have left some things unsaid. But I said them because when things have ended with people in the past, I have felt more lost and disenfranchised by not knowing the why of any of it. So, I left nothing to the imagination. I did burn bridges. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I lost a lot with that decision. I said a lot of things I can’t ever take back.
I’m sorry.
I knew was that unless I burned the bridge, I wouldn’t stop trying to fix it. There was really nothing left to burn. Just hope. Just the possibilities. The memories. The familiarity of having them with me on the Journey. And I really, really needed them to be there. Changes were coming, but as usual, I have to face them alone.
The last couple of years, I have felt like I can’t get anything right, and when people make me feel like I need to live by committee decisions…fuck, that just makes me feel even more alone. My whole life I’ve second-guessed myself, including a fifteen year horror show of a marriage where I was taught I couldn’t think for myself. Everything was criticized.
I burned the bridge because I suck at boundaries, especially with myself. I knew that if I didn’t, I would not stick with my values and boundaries and I would just be left feeling like an option. Like if I just said the right thing, it would fix everything. I knew that I would just waste my time and hers if I continued on that path and eventually, we would hate each other. Maybe she already hates me. I don’t know.
What I do know is I still care. I always will. But sometimes…when someone has been that close to you and they change direction on you, everything they do hurts. Especially when you are watching them hurt themselves. Maybe she was seeing the same thing in me.
Towards the end, she asked me (after reading one of my posts) if I actually felt alone? Even with a short text, the tone was accusatory. She unsent the text, but I read it before hand. Yes. I felt alone. I felt like I had lost my best friend and they were humoring me by still being in my life. I was tired of her vagueness and shutting me out and feeling crazy for having my intuition screaming at the back of my head that something was off and dismissing it. Being willfully ignorant over was was plain to see.
She had moved on. She told me she would never let me in again. And essentially the love I had for her…well, she didn’t ask for it. It was my fault for opening my heart.
The recent changes in my life I have to say that deciding to end that friendship (I wish I could say I walked away from it, but really I didn’t. I pushed away and said things I can’t take back. I threw those rocks at White Fang.) But I knew letting go was not so much right as necessary.
She gave me the courage to let go. And I felt at peace, for a bit. I shut myself away from others for a while. And disconnected myself from social media. I post blogs here that none of my Facebook friends read. Not linking posts has done almost nothing to affect my traffic here anyway. Facebook is a waste of time. It’s a lot of people at a party waiting for their turn to talk.
I’ve been letting go of many other things too. Big things. And though it hurts, letting go has been the right thing to do. Not many people understand the decisions I have had to make, but it’s all about boundaries with yourself. If you continue to do things that hurt you and others, it is best to walk away.
I want to make new memories in the futile attempt that I would be recording over old ones like a well-used mix tape from the 1990s. I want to drive far away and have new experiences. I’m tired of being treated like an option. Sometimes, I feel Unnecessary. Vestigial. I don’t fit in with this world or the way people have become. I’m not an Option, but when you take yourself out of the Game, you have only yourself. It’s either empowering or lonely. Sometimes both.
Nobody is coming. There is nobody out there guaranteed to complete us. We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. I don’t know anyone who has a relationship that I would want. Why then do we keep trying?
Today I looked at road trip routes I could take and felt frozen. I thought about deadlines I have with writing, the expense of going places, other obligations such as therapy or allergy shots or whatever is going on. Snowstorms. I welcome the solitude.
Maybe it’s like meditation. If you don’t have ten minutes to meditate, you need to meditate for twenty. What if this road trip is something I need to do for my soul? And all the rest are just distractions?
I have these little conversations with the few friends I have and by only one of them did I feel like I was truly seen or heard. And she is gone. And yes, I miss her. But I miss who she was nearly a year ago. Who she was blooming into. But she has to become who she needs to be for herself, not me. I hope she finds that person.
Wendigo Mountain 