Conflict

Is the relationship asking to deepen, the pastor said from her pulpit at the Universalist Unitarian church.

I didn’t catch much more of the service because I was drowning in old religious trauma.

Dissociated.

Disoriented.

Collapsed.

Openly crying.

Eyes closed.

Tears streaming down my face.

I did not even realize that I had childhood religious trauma.

But there it was, on full display, in this church in Oakland that my ex had taken me to.

I had a lot of reservations about going and I can articulate many of them, but that if for another time.

The reason I am thinking of this particular sentence is that I have adopted it as an intervention tool with couples who are in conflict but afraid of talking about it.

Also, Esther Perel, who I have trained with, talks a great deal about how conflict avoidant we are as a society and the harm that it does to us.

I used the phrase tonight with a couple in deep conflict and extreme fear of walking into it.

And.

Lo.

There was a repair.

I am so grateful for getting to be a therapist.

I watched the couple move from being at either end of the couch at the beginning of the session to being tearfully in each others’ arms by the end of session.

There were a lot more interventions aside from that one, but that’s where it started, by walking into the conflict instead of avoiding it.

I am a very good therapist.

I am not always a very good partner.

But I am also human.

It is so very easy to see it from the other side of the room, or couch, if you may.

I couldn’t see it so clearly with my ex.

It hurts that I couldn’t always get out of my own painful past and shame with him in our dynamic.

My therapist was like, you got shamed, you shamed him, you both kept trying to talk to the other person and you only kept triggering each other.

I wish I had been able to pause.

God.

I wish I had.

But if wishes were horses beggars would ride.

And I would have a stable full of prancing ponies right about now.

It’s been such a wild ride.

Not comfortable.

Uncomfortable as fuck.

But I’m still on the ride.

Today’s ride is more about anger than it is about tears.

Yesterday I had my first, almost, so close, nearly, day without crying.

I made it to bed.

I knelt down, said grace, prayed for direction and guidance and had a picture of my ex float up behind my eyes that nearly floored me.

I was not expecting it and the tears came immediately.

Well, god damn it.

I thought I was going to make it through one day without crying.

But no.

I found myself today not so much sad but mad.

Mad at him for taking down his relationship status on Facebook before talking to me, days before talking to me, days of ugly anticipation.

Mad at him for being at his art studio in Potrero Hill, being in San Francisco when he lives across the Bay, the Saturday prior to this last, when he broke up with me in the evening, from Oakland.

Dude.

Why?

What the fucking hell?

Come over to my house.

Why am I seeing you post on Instagram about being at the studio and you won’t get in your car, drive over to my house, see me in person and do the deal face to face.

I suppose I will never know why.

Why is not a spiritual question.

But fuck, it rankled.

Rankled is not the right word.

It was like getting knifed in the heart.

It hurt so badly to see that.

I envisioned driving my car over and demanding, what the fuck?

Talk to me please.

Please, baby, please talk to me.

But I had never been over to his studio, I just know it’s in Potrero Hill, oh, I have a sneaking suspicion I could figure it out, there are only so many, but I’m not a fucking stalker.

I felt a moment of anger tonight too, saying those words to the couple in distress in front of me without having had the oppportuinity to deepen the relationship with him.

Fight for the relationship.

He gets the right to do whatever he wants, he decided to withdraw, he has his reasons.

“I don’t have time for you.”

But you have time to post to Instagram.

ARGHHHHHHH.

Anyway.

The anger is also a path forward, a light, a fire under my fucking ass.

I have been writing.

I have been reaching out.

And I have had people reach out to me over and over and over again.

Unexpectedly.

People I had no clue were concerned.

Messages on Instagram, Facebook, text messages, phone calls.

One friend even sent me a meme today via text that he made from my blog including a fake algorithm of me being offered “singles over 70” ads.

Motherfucker I am only 51.

And I dance like I’m 35.

Anyway.

I feel seen and loved.

Not necessarily loved by the man I want to love me.

Hmmm.

That’s not fair.

He did love me.

He just doesn’t have the time to commit to the relationship that it needs.

I think it’s the last that is unfair.

(If life was fair I would be dead)

He didn’t try.

(And maybe that’s unfair too, he just didn’t try with me in the way I wanted)

And that fucking hurts and makes me angry too.

I am worth the time.

Anyway.

I can’t convince him, or I would have already.

I have pretty much left him alone.

I will admit I have continued to leave him unblocked on Gmail, some small hopes that he will reach out and work towards repair, but the longer there is silence the more smashed that fantasy becomes.

One fantasy that has finally left is him being on my bed when I get home from the office.

He still has my keys.

I wonder if he is going to return them, I’ll come home one day with an anonymous envelope pushed through the mail slot, or if they’ve just been tossed in the recycling bin behind his house.

Enough repeated unlocking of the door to see my empty apartment, well, the cats are here, but empty of him, has quashed that fantasy.

I unblocked him on social too.

Maybe he’ll reach out there, he’s comfortable on it, uses it a lot.

Maybe….

Staying off that shit though, I can’t imagine seeing his handsome face, it would hurt too much.

I know this because I did look momentarily to still see some pictures of the two of us on his social.

It broke me all over again.

And.

Gave me what I now think is false hope, if he’s still got photos of us on his page maybe there’s a chance.

Anyway.

I expect that will change and I don’t know that I can stand to see that.

I may still go back and block him on social to avoid that pain.

But so far, the blog has given me the platform to process and process and process.

And the anger, like I said a moment ago has fueled the fire.

It has also fueled the fire for other writing projects.

I finally went through the steps to secure the right photographer for my tattoo book project and I am so fucking excited for it.

I have mapped out things I need to do before I connect with the photographer who is coming up from Los Angeles to work with me.

I am beyond excited to collaborate.

He is someone I know from my earliest sobriety.

I love and admire his work.

I cannot wait.

We will be doing the photo shoot the third weekend in March.

In the meantime I will be formatting the book and integrating the photos I do like from the previous photographer I worked will.

I will also be doing as much freaking self-care as I can.

I have been busy breathing and staying connected to people.

Breathing is work, especially when the pain was so bad I couldn’t draw breath without folding over and collapsing.

I have shared and cried and breathed and went grocery shopping and done food prep and written volumes in my journal, I have gone out dancing and will go out again in a couple of weeks.

I am listening to music that has no affiliation with our relationship and dancing in my kitchen in the meantime.

Anger is a part of grief.

And I know that at some point it will fade.

It will soften and I will accept and move gently forward into whatever unknown landscape there is in front of me.

I will forgive myself and him.

I will not shame myself for being messy, most of the time, and I will do my therapy work—with my clients and with myself.

I have to say my therapist being away has been really hard, but I have not come completely unhinged because of the sweet love and support I have had from my community.

And the anger is a little less now too.

Thank God for writing.

It is saving my fucking life.

So much so.

Thank God for the words, which are their own reflection love for me.

My heart needed so to process.

Here, now, in this way, I will show up for myself.

And.

Give myself the time he could not give to me.

“Checking In”

Said the email header.

The body:

“You doing ok?”

Signed, his name.

My response:

“No.

I’m heartbroken. It’s been excruciating.

you?”

And then there was nothing.

Let me preface this with I had just gotten off the phone with a girlfriend who has been saving my life, like for the past week and a half.

I do not know what I would do without her.

And a lot of very sweet friends who have checked in on me, texted me, made me steak dinners after meetings, made me stay over and watch videos, even though I was secretly crying when they weren’t looking, or gone out dancing with me.

FYI.

Social media is a big pile of poo.

I look like I had a fabulous time out dancing tonight.

And I won’t lie, there were moments of joy, getting lost in the music, forgetting how heartbroken I am.

But there was also me checking my email account waiting for a response.

See.

I did something today because I could feel him, I felt him I did.

I was sad.

I have been so, so, so sad.

Doing all the things, trying so hard to not isolate, calling all the people, doing the work, having the feelings, grieving.

I’ve been told that grief is a testament to the love you have for someone when you have lost them.

I very much love my ex-boyfriend.

It is still so hard to write that, think that, say that.

It makes me want to stop writing and put my head down on my table and weep.

I have done that a lot this past week.

The grief catches me and smashes me down.

I think I have a pretty good front when I am out in the world, but the sadness floods me at times.

More times than I want it to, let me tell you.

Sometimes it causes me to dry sob and the tears don’t come, it’s like my face crumples and the breath catches in my throat and I had a dry heave sob, but no tears.

Then it catches me, most often at the end of the night when I have no defense left, then I find myself bent over weeping and putting my head on the table where I sit and write or work from—my kitchen table is also my work desk.

My cats circle anxiously around me and frequently jump into my lap.

They are very concerned.

Circling back to the email.

And the night, last week, Saturday, at 10:38p.m.’ish, when he finally called and broke up with me.

Recap.

After calling my people crying so hard I am not sure they understood what I was saying once I choked out, “he broke up with me,” I was told to block his number, block his email, delete his social media and block him on all social platforms.

I’m a good girl.

I did what I was told.

Though later I regretted it.

What if he reached out to me?

What if he had changed his mind?

I know how pathetic that sounds.

So I did what I was told and I blocked and deleted his phone number.

Fast forward to today.

I do not know why, but I felt him out there in the ether.

I called my girlfriend and cried that I felt bad about blocking him and what if he had reached out to me and wanted to connect or make up or I don’t know, at least talk to me.

She said, “he knows how to get a hold of you, he can email you.”

I lost it.

“I blocked him on email.”

She said, “you can always unblock him.”

I couldn’t on my phone because I had deleted his number.

I tried to, but I couldn’t figure out which blocked number was his—I block spam calls, and I had deleted his number so I wouldn’t try and call him.

So.

After some writing.

I decided to unblock him on Gmail.

And holy shit.

He emailed me.

Twenty minutes after I had unblocked him!

Checking in, are you doing ok?

Cue my response.

And.

Sigh.

When I didn’t hear back.

I emailed him a longer email.

I basically told him how hard it’s been, all the ways I have been in pain, how hurt and sad and awful it’s been and I told him I had blocked his number and deleted it.

I asked him to send me his number if he wanted to talk.

That was six hours ago.

I guess he doesn’t want to talk.

My friend suggested just giving him more time.

She also suggested I email her instead of him.

Why is it so easy to tell another person what to do, but not do it yourself?

I would have said the same thing.

I wanted to email him again.

Beg.

Prostrate myself.

I still do.

I still want to be with him.

I am a fool.

I feel very stupid.

“You’re not stupid,” she said, “you love him.”

I do.

I still do.

Fuck.

Cue another fit of crying.

Not like you can tell from reading this.

I just had to stop and sob some more.

Fuck.

I have gone through a lot of Kleenex this past week.

So much.

I walked home from dancing tonight, I went to a day party today, and started dry heave sobbing in the rain.

Cue Mike Doughty’s “Sad girl walking in the rain” song.

Very sad girl walking in the rain.

I still have this fantasy he will be waiting for me in my house, sitting on my bed, when I get home from where ever I have been, he has my key still.

I can’t help either, I walk in, look at my bed, he’s not sitting there waiting for me and I just feel worse.

Maybe he threw the keys away.

I forgot to ask for my keys back when he broke up with me last week, I was in so much shock.

My best friend said, just go make another set.

But.

I don’t want to.

I want to see him sitting on my bed reading and waiting for me to come home.

I want to curl up in his arms.

I want to fall asleep on his chest again.

(more crying)

I keep remembering when I got back from Burning Man last year and we were making love, it felt spiritual and emotional and so passionate and full of love and reconnection that I can’t touch into the memory too long with out falling back apart, and he buried his face in my neck and said, “I miss you too much when you are gone.”

I resigned from Burning Man that moment.

I knew, I think I wrote about this already, but I knew when I left playa, right before the rains came, that it was my last one—thirteen burns—I wanted to be with him and travel together elsewhere.

There was also that really awful allergic reaction to the sun to account for, but it was really about wanting to be with him instead of the burn.

And though he broke up with me and for a moment I did contemplate it, I am not going back.

I’m going to Barcelona instead.

I got pretty busy this week trying super hard to move through the feelings.

I booked a trip with my sponsor to Paris in April and I booked another trip to Barcelona at the end of August, beginning of September.

I have always wanted to go and I had a lot of miles.

I had been saving my miles to book him with me on a trip.

He had taken me to Banff and Mexico City and Vegas and I wanted to repay the gift.

So many things I wanted to repay him.

Shame.

The shame of fucking up.

The shame of pushing him away when I was trying to communicate with him.

My therapist said, Thursday of this week when I finally got to meet with him, he’d been gone last week—I could have used it last week so bad—“shaming yourself is not helping.”

He also said, after hearing me tell the story, “it sounds like you were both trying to connect, I just hear two people trying really hard to connect.”

And that.

That.

That made it worse.

He was trying to connect with me and I with him and somehow we both kept missing the other person.

So much so that he decided that he didn’t have the time to do the work to be in the relationship with me.

I have to be aware of that.

He was very clear.

Although, when he said it, he sounded like he was in a tomb, there was no emotion, it sounded like he was dead or dissociating.

My therapist said I was in dissociation two weeks ago when I went snowboarding.

I have a small young part of me that was so desperate to stay connected with him that I agreed when I was tired and needed to rest, to go up again, on the lift. And I had another part of me that was like, no I do not want to get up on that lift and I dissociated right away and let the part of me that wanted desperately to stay attached to my boyfriend talk me up on the chair lift.

Which was my first time.

And I panicked and cried on the ski lift and fell off and hit my head on the chair and then I got up and tried to snowboard down, but I just kept falling and pretty much tumbled down the mountain and then I fell really bad and hit my head.

Hard.

So hard a woman who saw me fall as she was skiing past me, stopped, un did her skis and walked back up to me, “oh my god, are you ok? Do you need a medic?”

I said no.

“Do you want me to carry your board down for you?”

I said, no.

I’ve go it.

I mean.

I sort of had it.

I unstrapped and wobbled down the mountain.

I was pretty discombobulated.

I had bonked so hard.

Thank god for the helmet I was wearing.

I realized with hindsight and my therapist, that I was also in shock later.

I was so cold that night, it took forever for me to warm up.

There’s more about the snowboarding that I won’t get into, although suffice to say I almost titled this blog “The $1100 break up” because that’s how much I spent on gear to go.

Gear I traded in to Sports Basement yesterday.

I couldn’t return it, since it was used, once, ugh, and I will only get a fraction of the money back, and not cash, but store credit, but I had to get it out of the house, I felt so sad every time I thought of it.

I couldn’t get rid of my climbing gear though.

I tried.

I cried instead and put it back in my closet.

I can’t also go to the climbing gym, I’m afraid I’ll walk in, see the climbing walls and just lose it.

I loved climbing with him, he was beautiful when he climbed.

He’s handsome, but when he was climbing it eclipsed his handsomeness and it was pure grace and beauty, and it awed me to watch him.

I can’t go to the climbing gym right now.

I just can’t.

Sigh.

I don’t know where I am going with this writing except to say.

I am still heartbroken.

Writing helps.

My god have I written a lot in my notebooks this past two weeks.

So much.

This blog helps.

I hope.

I think I have just been writing it to stop myself from sending out another beseeching email to him.

I don’t have a pithy ending today.

So.

I’m just going to stop.

I have a table that I need to put my head down on and cry some more on.

Instead of emailing him again.

I will cry and watch old episodes of Six Feet Under.

I will wash my face, brush my teeth, get into bed and fall asleep crying.

Just like I have every day this past week.