(aka: Could I Come Back Without Something Right Bloody Gripping? I Wouldn't Do That To You.)
(my apologies in advance for the length of this post, I meant it to be shorter but in the course of it a bunch of things that are all interconnected came up and I feel it's important for me to look at these points "out loud", so to speak. There may be a part 2 as well)
One of the reasons, since it seems like every day this week there were more and more reasons making the case for starting over, was that the other person I was talking to in those posts was an ex-boyfriend. He lives very near me for the first time in 13 or 14 years and has spent many years trying to get me to come back in his direction. Who in fact had a plane ticket booked to fly out to see me - four days after 9-11 - and so ended up staying home due to his work and thereby, possibly changing the course of both our lives. He was the one that said "I don't come to your site" while then proceeding to do exactly that every day from work. While, after not seeing each other face to face in 14 years, he kept 'forgetting' we'd made plans to get together. And then stopped any and all contact.
It has become a big issue for me in the last couple of weeks that he was lying to me and had stopped being in contact with me. I had thought he was afraid to see me because he was fat or some equally weird thing, but I think - in the end - it was because he was taking the parts of me from the blog while completely discounting that in real life (which he knows for a fact) I'm not running around screaming
all the time and that, in fact, although a little unique, I am fairly normal.
At least from a few metres / yards away.
He was one of the people who I'd speak to at the end of the day, who I knew had read some of the rants lately as I try to work things out so I can leave this all behind next year, and was one of the tentative ones... you know, the ones who are all 'careful' around you like you're about to snap and try to stab them to death with a rusted spoon or a toothpick or a cheez-it.
I've been realizing that some of my behaviors weren't just
bad habits that I've fallen into over the last fifteen years but actually symptoms and ways of dealing (or not) related to the depression. It's all very well and good that after so much torture to my doctor that I finally agreed to take the drugs and it would be marvellous if that's all I had to do to conquer this, but it just doesn't work that way.
There's things that I need to be doing as well. And I have been. And I've been making progress. But in some ways, I've gotten a lot worse.
I don't know why, really. Unless it's the trying to work it out that's triggering this stuff but I spent 15 years maintaining a level I seem to have completely lost now that I'm 'cured'. I'm still angry a lot of the time. I cry constantly.
There's a little component of OCD or something in there that makes me worry for HOURS about the ant that I just put outside - everyone knows they follow scents back to the nest and I've basically just doomed it to dying slowly and never making it's way home. I feel terrible. Those things bother me more and more. While at the same time I could care less if a nuclear bomb destroyed every human being on the planet. Obviously, my new doctor was right when he said we may have to make some adjustments and after a couple months where I've been feeling worse and worse - I am getting better at giving in so I'll be seeing him on Tuesday.
I've spent a large part of my life trying to explain myself to people. I don't know what this is about but whether it's some gene I've inherited or a rare virus there is no cure for it has been true all of my life. To be honest about who I am, what I feel and what I see as I try to figure this strange life out. I can't stop it, I've tried - oh, how I've tried - be enigmatic, you stupid cow, just SHUT UP. It's caused me a lot of heartache and, truthfully, it's cost me a lot of relationships. People don't really want to know. This world we live in is all about correctedness and 'normal' and the sad thing is - none of us really are normal. All I've ever wanted was for someone to understand me. I guess that the blog gives me that in a way but even that is just one small part of who I am.
Tony:Calgary said the other day that he just didn't 'get it' - all this stuff about me leaving RG behind. That the internet was public domain and I deserved everything I got. That he loved me regardless but he just wasn't one of those 'internet people'. I tried to find an analogy to describe it in a way that he would understand because Tony:Calgary is someone who usually is pretty good at knowing and accepting this bag of bones that is me. The best I could do, which wasn't very good at all, was this....
If the street is public domain (and I think we can all agree on that) it still doesn't make it okay if you come by every day, maybe even more than once, stand out on the sidewalk and stare at my house. Especially if you're a friend or someone I've been intimate with and I come out of my house to say hello and offer you tea and you just refuse to speak to me but continue to
show up every day and stare at my house.
Eventually, I'll try and do something about it. Wouldn't you?
Basic respect and etiquette (which is one of the rare things I will defend to the death as being basic human rights) aside, I think that people who do business over the internet wouldn't agree that ALL of it is public domain. I know that if my phone service operated over the 'net there's no way in hell I'd ever even consider the possibility of it being 'accepted' as public domain. If you consider it though, innovation and ability and mentality of 'public domain' is leading to a crisis in interpretation and I think that more and more we will run into problems around this very issue.
I also think I just got right-the-fuck off my topic. Again. Repeatedly.
Getting back to the issues of motivation that I was talking about in RG before I left - one of my fears was becoming this - my ex-boyfriend is military. I am contemplating signing on as a reservist (there's something I want them to teach me). If his motivation for all of this was not in my best interest (which, really, I used to think everyone was good and kind and this may be the first time I've ever assumed - before the fact - that peope maybe weren't) then by me mentioning what I was doing on my blog - could have given him the opportunity to hurt me quite a bit. If he wanted to. Which he was giving, lately, no indication otherwise.
It's one thing for those of us like Dooce and SassyLittlePunkin to lose their jobs because of a blog that they didn't realize would come back to hurt them but it's quite another for me to have witnessed what happened to them and then knowingly put myself in the firing line five feet in front of someone who's motivation is unknown and who's actions have proven only less than honest/ clear thus far.
Ex-lovers are a complex territory and I am the last person who will ever tell you that I can count on the actions of someone I've been involved with. Nor them with me.
Except for Scott - he can always count on me, in every circumstance, to choose love for him over everything else except my own life. I love Matt, more than anything and I always want to but, still, it's just as often as not that I hate him so much I truly believe I could beat him to death with a baseball bat. That may change but, for me, as an example, I never ever felt that way about Scott. That may be because I was a teenager, or because I loved him less or differently or any of a hundred other reasons but it only goes to further reinforce that matters of the heart are maybe the most unreasoning and unpredicatable force on the planet. Love and hate are seperated by a very fine line and that line is different from day to day, minute to minute, from person to person and even more so in people who aren't together anymore. Especially between people who didn't end in any bad way but for other reasons entirely. The true opposite of love is indifference and honestly, how many of us ever truly get to that point?
I've learned in the last few years that I'm not so good with aimlessness but where my true strength lies, apart from my ability to learn, is in my ability to reach a goal. I don't often have them and so most of my life has been aimless and random. But, when I decide to do something - I do it. I've never ever faltered or failed once I've decided.
This last year I've set myself some pretty high goals. I have no doubt whatsoever that I will achieve them.
You best get out of my way.