feelings!

  This is something old I just published...like a year old

  It is interesting to note the things that bring me back here and the things that keep me away.  I come back at 4:15 on a Sunday morning with feelings of anxiety.  I haven't slept and I am laying in my new person's bed while they are out partying with their friends.  Snail broke up with me about a month ago, which is more or less how long I've been seeing the new person A who I met a week before the snail breakup.  It's hard to have any idea where to start when it's been so long since I've written here.  I guess as usual with a barrage of questions right.

What does being anxious mean for me?  Do I feel this way not in relationships?  How do I react to the snail breakup?  Fuck, there are a million more.  I am so fucking far behind right now in dealing with the shit floating in my head.  I think I've been so caught up in pretending that I am ok, that I forgot to be ok.  Also, part of it might be that I could only handle so many people and their opinions and feelings about me....so maybe I have lessened most of my relationships for a few years, because I am sick of the constant disappointment that I FEEL others feel about me.   I'm still constantly wondering if I'm a sociopath or an empath, or what the significant difference is.  Let's start with something positive.

   I have rekindled a friendship with Steph who I had the gnarliest relationship of my life with.  We have hung out three times and all of those times she was super sweet to me and acted like a great friend.  She gave me keen insights, asked good questions, and generally just listened to me explain my kind of crazy life as it is to her right now.  I am really impressed by her.  I miss her and I love her, but I'm able to resist any feelings of wanting to be with her, it just wouldn't make sense.  Anyways, this feels pretty important to me, the fact that we are able to so dramatically change the way we interact with each other.  We spent years being shitty to each other, not knowing what to do with our feelings for each other, and just generally causing tons of pain and trauma.  I'm pretty stoked that our story gets a new chapter, and I actually am stoked to be friends with Steph.

As far as the rest of my life goes...fuck I just don't know.  What I have been saying to all my friends is that I'm either actually ok with snail breaking up with me or that I am so far in denial about losing someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with that I can't begin to deal with it.  The truth is that it is probably a little bit of both of these things, but maybe not?  It is fairly horrendous to consider the possibility that I am actually that far in denial, but at this point, we must consider all possibilities.

Maybe I can try figuring out what I actually feel about snail, a bit by dealing with their narratives and my narratives, and the rest by discussing the material reality. 

I'm going to be an uncle

I'm going to be an uncle.  I just spent two days with my little brother and his wife and my uncle aunt and grandpa in a little beach town in central california.  When I first heard that my brother and his gf were pregnant I cried uncontrollably for along time on the phone with them.  They thought I was sweet, but they were selfish tears.  I was crying out of some joy for them but also out of sadness for myself.  I am 34 and the person who knows me best(steph) I had the worst relationship of my life with.  As time goes on I learn new things about myself and other people.  I learned Aly never trusted me and didn't really know me(hopefully) which is why we haven't spoken in 12 years.  Aly 2 had a decent idea of who I was but for some reason we always had a hostile relationship, which makes sense because of the context of me being in love with Aly 1 and there is no reason for us to talk.  Emily was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, we were never good for each other as friends or lovers, and she is the same person I left so many years ago.  Mary was a moment of madness, I wasn't ready for Francine, which is one of my bigger regrets.  I was so self obsessed when I met Francine that I couldn't see her at all.  Then there was Steph.  I was selfish in this relationship too, but in Steph I managed to stumble upon someone who could see me.  In the context and time of our meeting, we couldn't be there for each other, but I've never doubted the love or care we had for each other.  I miss her a lot more lately.  Part of that is that I feel she understands me more than anyone I've known in my life.  I thought B would be that person, my best friend for life, but him and I always had a hostile element to our relationship and I don't think he ever saw me and he had an element of pity/rage towards me that I never wanted and that continually hurt and led to the dissolution of our closeness. I do not believe we will be close again, and I think it would be too painful to try.  Then there was snail.  I am confused at how the people I am close to become so hostile towards me.  Snail told me they felt competitive with me and said many ugly things to me about my ideas.  They were a leftist queer radical when I met them, into trans politics and ending cyber bullying which is why they were in school to study computers.  I never once looked down on them and they changed a ton during our time together(i did too) but there was one huge fight where they just looked at me in bed and said "I don't think you have anything interesting to say to me."  I took a walk and smoked and came back and tore into them.  I told them how much they have changed since they are with me, and that to say something like that to me is totally fucked for a variety of reasons.  They met an entire friend group across the globe through me and their whole life is different for knowing me.  Fuck that, I made my point calmly to them and left and they apologized the next day.  The point is Snail was competitive with me in terms of ideas and friends and group hangs.  Snail didn't want me to be friends w their friends but made friends and tried to date several of mine.  It is my belief that they wanted to be me more than be with me.  They want my body(which I don't want) and my brain(which I don't want) and my personality(which is whatever its ok but comes w problems).  This competition for them that I never wanted led into so much hostility.  They thought I was charming, but didn't like it.  I acted how they wanted to, but they never acted like me so they never experienced all the downsides of being who I am.

   The point of this is that I don't want hostility in my close relationships.  I don't have it in most of them, in Hawaii there was only one person who it was like this with and she fucked my brother which I feel meant she was possibly mad we weren't dating.  I think Snail felt this at the end of our relationship when I was Physical and telling K I was in love with Snail and wanted a platonic relationship caused so much conflict.  I've been with A for a year.  I love her as much as I've loved anyone in my life and is one of the only people, maybe snail being the other, who I could see keeping in my life forever with a romantic side to our relationship.  However, it's been hard.  There was distrust from the first night and A never trusted me.  She lied to me for the first year we were together, the first few months being the most confusing because there was nothing that was happening that I would have been mad about.  This makes me realize that all of that had nothing to do with me, I was just a person being acted out upon based on her past.  I was loving and new and fun and exciting and she had zero reason to lie to me, except by assuming I was the same as the people she had grown up with or her ex bf, but I'm not.  I work fucking hard to be good to those I'm close to, I fail a lot, but I never give up on myself in this regard.  I feel hostility from her, that every feeling of mine is an attack on her.  I feel that she gets more mad at me for having feelings about things she did than I do about the things happening.  I feel I have no voice and it makes me feel weak and miserable and unloved/uncared for, but I am done with that.  I am going to change our dynamic or I will leave.  I need to return to therapy, return to closeness with friends, return to my center, which is caring and loving of those around me and acting that way towards myself.  I'm worried A won't want to speak to me and doesn't have any interest in my feelings about the things that happened or the trust issues it is created, and that means I can't stay because I need stability in my close relationships and I need to feel like I am seen.  I am returning to therapy to figure out why some of those I am close to feel hostile towards me.  An old therapist told me that if I walked into a room with 100000 people and there was one addict that I would go home w the addict every time.  Fucked up people not working through their shit can't care for me, because the cliche of caring for yourself first is true.  I am going to begin caring for myself better so I can be better to A, C, and everyone else that I want to be close to.  If A wants to be around and show up for that I'll be through the roof but I care about her too much to continue engaging in a negative way, to continue to stay when my basic needs aren't being met. 

I feel like I'm back at the bottom of a mountain that I have to climb back up.  Rulik, my therapist told me that it is a spiral and even if it feels familiar that I am not in the same place, which I am trying to remind myself.  I have friends, a million passions, enough money to get by, and so so so much that I want to do in this life.  I can't let my mental health detract from my life.  I'm excited and nervous to return to the bay area tomorrow and give starting over another try.  I want to be strong, to be powerful, to focus my desires on a single point and ignite all in their way and that is beginning.  I am cutting out the bullshit as much as possible and minimizing so that I can begin to grow from a simpler place.  I hope I can do this with A, but if not I will grieve and move forward with friends and remembering that I enjoy my own company quite a bit, I can interest myself with my thoughts and writing and reading and all the other things that I love to do.  I plan on writing here more consistently again no matter what happens.  I feel super anxious and nervous but hold out slight hope for myself and I will cling to that as I attempt to climb the mountain again.