Saturday, December 16, 2006

Cliche

It's such a cliche
to be blogging about breakups, but this is what's been on my mind lately. The thing that is so tragic about most breakups is how two people who came together in love and admiration of each other can end things with such rancor and anger. Is it because we found out the other person isn't who we wanted them to be? But if we wanted them to be someone they weren't, is that really love?

At the end of a long (for me), exhausting, conflict-ridden off-and-on relationship, I'm torn between joy at being free of it all, and grief over what is now passing away. Or rather both of these things exist for me right now; I'm trying to sit with both of them. And I am really trying to not inject more anger and insult into the mix as my ex- and I bring closure to this thing. But in the midst of all the accusations and hurt feelings, I find myself wondering if I'm as mature and sane as I think I am, or if he's right, if I really am cruel and weak. Or is he the cruel and weak one? Or are we both: cruel and kind; weak and strong, depending on who we are at any given moment?

I guess it doesn't matter. The only thing to do in this situation is to try and stay out of the argument. I've apologized, I've wished him well, there's nothing else for me to do, except heal. But it's so frustrating and demoralizing to know that someone who used to hold me in such esteem now things I'm some kind of crazy, demented bitch. Because I'm not. Or I don't think I am. I've screwed up royally in my life, and I've also done the right thing, too many times to count. But in the end it always seems to be the bad things that are remembered. I suppose that's why we're breaking up.

I
just have to remind myself that I am not responsible for how someone else chooses to see the world, and I don't have to be liked by everyone. For the first time, the depression I find myself in right now is devoid (almost) of the self-criticism that usually accompanies these down times for me. I'm not thinking about how I will never find love, or how I've failed or how I've chosen badly, I'm only feeling the normal grief that accompanies a loss. This is huge for me. And I need to remember how huge it is, and how valuable.

Last week I got my hair cut, and I colored it this weekend. For me, changing my hair has always been a sign of a major life change. It's almost a cliche. The hippie honey-girl is gone (or at least dormant for awhile.) What's next is anybody's guess. I hope for lots of laughter, love, and light in 2007, and less angst, confusion, and bitterness, for me, for my ex-, and for everybody out there in cyber-world.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Manifesting

Last week I decided I was going to try to "manifest a healthy, strong, loving relationship." I'm surrounded by psychology information and resources at my job, and was looking at some energy tapping information, where you tap certain acupressure points to manipulate your energy flow...or something. I'm not totally sure how it works, but lots of people say it can be effective, so I decided to give it a try. What the heck...it's painless, easy to do, and I don't have anything to lose, right?

This particular exercise I decided to do entails tapping some points on your right ear while repeating a phrase that represents something you want to happen in your life, but stating it as if it's already true. So rather than "I want to be in a strong, healthy, loving relationship", I say " I am in a strong, healthy, loving relationship."You do this several times a day.

I started last Wednesday, and seem to remember to do it 3-4 times a day, so far so good. On Saturday, I went to a friend's holiday party. I had invited my ex- who several weeks ago told me he "just wanted to be friends." That's what friends do, right, invite each other to parties? We've been "just friends" so often in our on-again-off-again-on-again-off-again relationship that I figured we were all square. There didn't seem to be any hurt feelings or resentment or anything brewing, I mean I had seen him a day or two before for another social event and things seemed fine.

At the party, as you can probably guess from all this set-up, everyting was not OK. Near the end of the party, after sitting around brooding in the dark living room for awhile, my ex- decided to sit me down and basically interrogate me about something that happened two years before, where we went out for a social gathering of publishing people but couldn't find the group. He accused me of lying to him about it, implying that there really was no group meeting, that I was covering my ass in a lie or something...I'm not even sure what he was implying, it was so crazy. I got upset at the accusation and we got in a fight. He also threw in some other jealous crap for good measure. What a way to end a party.

After 6 years of fighting and making up, I'm really not in the mood to make up anymore. I don't know if he's getting more unstable, or I'm just getting better boundaries, but I'm feeling like the friendship/relationship whatever it is is finally over. It hurts like hell, but I'm so used to the pain by now, it's like I know exactly what path it will take. It reminds me of that scene in 'Trainspotting' when the heroin addict decides to quit cold turkey, and you see him stocking his room with all the supplies he'll need to survive, since he's done it all before.

I don't think I'll be seeing any dead babies crawling across the ceiling, but it is funny how no matter how many times this happens, it still hurts almost as much as the first time. But, that's old news.

The day after the fight, I was lying around depressed, and a thought occurred to me: What if this is the first stage of my manifestation? What if the universe, or my chakras, or whatever is at play in these types of things, has heard me, and that getting my ex- out of my life is the way to open up to a new relationship? I realize that the fact that we pretty much constantly fought during our relationship, and that we also fought several days after I started my new manifestation regime, doesn't exactly prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the ear-tapping works, but I do wonder.

I've known in my heart for awhile now that having my ex- be such a big part of my life doesn't bode well for me finding a new, healthy relationship. He took up so much of my psychic energy, even when we were just friends, that I often wondered if our closeness was one reason why I was still single. Now that this has happened, I wonder if I'm seeing something shift in my life. Maybe I'm getting stronger; maybe he's losing his grip on me (or I'm getting better at shaking it off). Maybe this means I'll finally have the strength to let him go and let someone new in. Until I know more, I'll be tapping my ear like a fiend. Only in private, of course, I don't want to scare off any possible love interests!

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Finding Enlightenment on the Bus

So last Thursday night I was on the bus coming home from work. Normally I take the BART for this leg of the trip, but there was some delay on BART, so I took the 72 bus instead. It's a LOOONNNGGG bus ride. For some reason, I was just sitting there without a lot of jibber-jabber in my head. That's not normally the case for me, but this night, I was just sitting, my mind relatively quiet, observing, open to the people around me.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. This was one noisy crosstown bus. I think if I had been more my normal self - more in my head and more judgmental - I would have been really pained by the noise. There was a group of high-school-age kids in the back talking back to each other as kids will, a woman talking rather loudly into her cell phone, and two other women having a loud conversation. As it was, I let the noise just wash over me, and it did feel like some sort of sonic wave.

The next thing I noticed was peoples' energy, bouncing around inside that steel box. The lady on the phone was getting mad because another passenger was looking at her as she talked. Two young girls were eating sweets (one had a huge, rainbow-colored lollipop, the kind I didn't think they made anymore) and talking quietly. The two conversating women were swapping stories of their painful childhoods - and they did sound painful. One said the last time she had seen her father was when he had come running to her house, t-shirt covered in blood, looking for shelter. The punk-looking guy next to me was staring out the window but his fingers never stopped moving.

Eventually, as I watched the restlessness on that bus, I realized what I was seeing. It was like I opened up to what was really going on. And what was really going on were that everyone's egos were desperately seeking comfort, bouncing around inside that bus like ball bearings in a pinball machine.

The lady on the phone was seeking acknowledgment from her friend on the phone and also making a big show of getting up and moving so the guy watching her couldn't see her. The comfort of self-righteousness is one of the nicest feelings there is. The girls eating sweets were enthralled with the comfort of the food. The two women sharing horror stories were wanting their pain to be seen - really seen - by the other, and also wanting it to be OK that they didn't feel responsibility to treat other people respectfully because, as one of them said "Nobody ever said sorry to me." The loud kids in the back of the bus were seeking comfort in numbers, seeking physical and psychic safety by taking up space. The guy next to me was, like me, en route to something else that would give him some kind of comfort. A lover, maybe, or a concert or a drug deal. I was going home to be safe in my cave, where I was in control and nobody could touch me unless I wanted them to. We were all just bare-naked egos in that bus that night, crying like little babies wanting to be fed and held.

I know that this is true of most people most of the time. I joke sometimes that you can take the person out of the schoolyard, but you can't take the schoolyard out of the person. All of us at some time or another, and most of us most of the time, are in the schoolyard, at least in our psyches. We hit and kick when we think the bully is coming after us, or we ingratiate ourselves in exchange for being left alone; we seek solace in something outside ourselves - food, love, sex, booze, TV, self-righteousness, religion - because we aren't getting our needs met elsewhere and don't know how to ask; we seek cameraderie with others so that we can feel safe and not alone, the way zebras do on the plain, and we'll do whatever we can to be accepted by our crowd, to not get kicked out and left for the playyground bullies.

And there's nothing wrong with all that - it's the way humans are. But that day on the bus I saw it clearly than I usually do. I'm usually as blind and ego-driven as everyone else, and I was on that night, too, but for some reason, I saw something differently, some break in the curtain between what we tell ourselves is real, and what is actually real. It was like when the light falls in a certain way, illuminating a familiar object differently than normal, and you see that object in a new way, for just a second. I felt a strong compassion for everyone on that bus, for the little kids inside us all, who just want to be loved, acknowledged, appreciated, and touched.