I’m always ok on my own. I always have been and will always find a way to be if not. It’s not on my own I struggle with. Allowing someone in. Allowing the help. Allowing conversations. Understanding conversations. Understanding someone’s affection and compassion to me is because they see mine. But I don’t. Or can’t. I don’t care if someone doesn’t want to spend time with me. It is actually harder for me to. But I mind when they say they do and then don’t. Not can’t. Just don’t. The words are said and the actions don’t match.
If someone wants to spend time with you they will make the effort. I hear this a lot. If I think about myself. I want to spend time with him but can’t make the effort. Not won’t or don’t but I can’t. Logistics outweigh desire. Always. Not just geography but actual logistics. Not just time but actual things that are logical. There is sound reason. I have a very full busy life that requires so someone to be part of the entire thing not just part of me. Dinner with me is dinner with all of me. Time with me is time with all of me not just parts. I have to really open up and allow it. Then risk it, then think it, then do it. And I can’t. Do I like that there is something I can’t do? No. I want to spend time with lots of people but they have their own logical reasoning to also can’t. How does anyone ever spend time with anyone? Unless all the logical things are done and there is just room for me again? Was there ever just took for me?
I’ve spent the last few years on my own to allow room for growth to allow room for openness. Did I grow and fill that space on my own with my own? Now I have no room? I’m full of myself? Isn’t that a word? Egotistic. I don’t feel self important just important to myself. Are they the same? Am I so egotistical I can’t let anyone in? Probably a great question for my therapist.
She wants to pick apart a problem. I often feel I am not enough or that I am too much. One or the other? I don’t personally mind. Since I am full of importance I accept both thoughts yet they burden me? I get to a place I can’t say what I need and want. In fear it won’t be met or I am rejected. I bring a lot to the table she says. I usually feel I bring nothing but a super full table that is overflowing with chaos and it may even be broken and there isn’t room for anyone to sit because it is full of laptops for remote learning I can’t comprehend with my kids. Or my table is completely empty and lacks interest. She disagrees. It’s her job to disagree when I say things like this. If I said I offer a lot she would agree. It’s what she does for a job. To disagree when she thinks I am wrong. So we have to sort it out. She says. She points out I offer compassion and opportunity and love and various other words that don’t fit my vocabulary. How can she see them and I can’t? How can she see them and no one else can? Maybe I need to date a therapist? Someone who sees what she sees? No. I need to date no one.
What is dating anymore? Do we date? I never really did to begin with. I was friends with some one then we just became more. Then less. Then nothing. I don’t think we grew apart. We just didn’t grow together. My growth was one way and his was another. Not apart just not together. Looking back I can see it was never going to be a railroad track. I knew we would derail at some point. I kept waiting for it. Then got tired of how slow his side was growing the other way that I intentionally started going further away so it would fail. There was no hope so I needed to speed the process up? I intentionally angered him. I spent years knowing how not to. How to be quiet how to not feel how to not touch how to not be. For him. That I just started being me. And we finally derailed. In a firey hot mess that is still being extinguished. 6 years later we are still trying to put it out. Not a passion or love but the damage from the wreck of two people who couldn’t say what was what so we said nothing and let it end.
Now I am trying to find that railroad track again. The one I never had. I am still a single track train. It is getting exhausting. Or maybe I am both rails and not one. I don’t know if there are trains on one rail? Interdependence. Two single tracks running to make one single thing operate. Is it even possible. I met a couple yesterday who have been married for over 30 years. That doesn’t seem long given I was almost 20. They told me they have built two whole houses together. Not physically but been through the process of building million dollar homes and survived. I blinked. In a single train like thought I thought of all the things him and I went through. Lost babies, heart surgeries, g tubes, therapist for her, new houses that weren’t big enough for the growth we weren’t growing together on, lost friends in an accident, lost dogs, difficult kids, not million dollar homes. When I looked back and blinked again I am surprised we didn’t crash sooner. Everything we had been through should have brought us closer yet it is some of the most difficult things anyone can go through. I am not shocked we failed. Maybe we didn’t fail. We gave up? Maybe we didn’t give up. We both became what we needed to be to get through and neither one of us was really who we really were and are. We didn’t change. Nothing changed. We grew up from life then didn’t keep the train going. Life became a different kind of hard and we didn’t keep it going that way together.
I didn’t wake thinking I wanted to work through my failed marriage again. I have a therapist for that. Sometimes I don’t know what I need to work through. I slept again until I was woke by someone who wants to hang out with me but yet hasn’t really brought anything to my full or empty table yet. I know he can but he can’t right now. He has other thoughts that don’t seem to be like mine? He is consumed with his misery and I am trying to keep from becoming consumed with mine again. I did it once and don’t want to go back. I want to go forward and I want him to also go forward but I will crash again if I think I can keep his side going too. He may crash on his own. I don’t want to have a broken heart again. Then I stayed awake but sleepy and couldn’t breath. It was too hard. I couldn’t get a deep breath without a yawn. I steered my sleepy thoughts to wondering in a meadow with him and a blanket and thoughts of laying in a meadow and being held. I thought I would die. This lack of breathing can make me feel like I am about to die. That it is almost my last one because it is too hard to get one. That I can’t fill my lungs with enough air or maybe they have too much air and there isn’t room? I can stop it but then wake with a sore chest and jaw like I have been blowing up balloons all night.
I dreamt of being in a police investigation. Then when the police went into my house they saw my messy floor and table and then opened my fridge and saw I had chicken salad with a mr Meade on the container and then he said. So you were there? And then I started picking up Anna’s school papers I knocked off the table. I don’t even have a physical mess. But in my dreams last night it looked like my kitchen exploded with remote papers and computers. My mind is consumed with remote learning. Even though I give up on it: because that’s just one side of me giving up the other side has not and never will. The messy side gave up, my really controlling side says I still have control of something I can’t. I should get my two sides to be on the same train tracks?
My marriage didn’t fail and neither did I and I am not now. I am trying to work through what my therapist says I need to work through. Being enough for me. Not too much or too little but I am enough. I keep it written on a post it note in my car. Once it blew out and I stopped to go get it so I wasn’t accidentally littering the world with my therapeutic sticky notes. She is hoping I will see it enough and feel enough. Then when I meet others who don’t offer as much as me that I can’t see I am offering I feel not less or more but still enough. That I have to be careful not to offer more than I can. Because I can’t. I am enough. So I can’t give anything more or I will feel less. If you take from me or I offer I you have to in return enough that I don’t feel less. That’s how interdependence is supposed to work. We keep each other going not one or the other. It’s logistics. Train logistics. If the rails don’t go the same way exactly the same distance apart it will crash. It’s basic engineering and also basic mechanics and layout of train tracks. Are they perfect? What about a centimeter off? What about if a penny is on the track? Will that actually derail a train? Who inspects tracks? Does someone actually walk or drive that little truck that can change train tracks wheels? What else would that truck/train be doing? occasionally one may have to support another when there is weight given to another from an outside force. Like a bump on the road? Except we don’t want bumps on the tracks? No pennies? We want perfect laid out tracks. A train track may be a terrible example. It should be a great example but nothing is perfectly laid out. Except it feels like train tracks should be. My parents were that. The example. They somehow made the train move even with the bump and pennies on the tracks. Even with all train logistics failing them they didn’t derail. How? I should be what they are but I steered wrong years ago after something horrible happened and I shut down? Then I grew around that pain? Not through it. I allowed it to shape me into who I am. Some pain defines us. I was young and had to let it. No one told me not to and no one told me how to not. So I can’t now.
My therapist knows this. It’s what she wants to dig around and undo. Which means I will have to let her and allow me. Which I don’t. Or can’t?
Aspenleaf 