I went for a walk on the beach this afternoon. Seems like the usual thing to do when you
end a relationship, it’s Father’s Day and your dad died 7 weeks ago, it is the
Summer Solstice, and, in the absence of any clarity, you just keep moving.
This is not a bash-my-ex kind of blog, not really. Anyone that knows me will tell you that I
write to release emotions, tell my story so that I can find my own journey and
responsibility, learn, in some written flash of brilliant insight, and stop the
spinning in my head that keeps me from taking it to the next level. This should be like that (keeping fingers
crossed) because really I am not clear, possibly about anything, and this is
how I cope.
So I was walking on the beach at Surf and Tide. A wonderful beach for families and bbqs and
all the kinds of things that you would expect from a summer weekend when the
weather is nice. Low tide meant lots of
things to look at, and since I was there to avoid families (feeling a little
like I don’t have one now, both by design (the break up) and uncontrollable
circumstances (my kids with their dad for the weekend, duh, and my first
father’s day without my own dad) I wasn’t really in the mood to people
watch. I was in the mood to find
seaglass. Like a ton of it. Nothing says
emotional stability like broken glass, right?
I needed to have something to use to slit my wrists or at least cut my
foot. Pain, I was looking for pain. Feel anything, Elise, anything at all. I hadn’t cried about any of it yet, and with
my biggest fear always being that I will feel nothing, and no one will come get
me because I will be invisible, this was a rather pathetic goal. Wallowing and
shallow, and completely twisted in its fucked up kind of misery, but a goal.
So I rolled up my pant legs, took off my shoes, and started
walking. No glass. I kept walking,
closer to the shoreline. No glass. I
went into the surf, took off my sunglasses so I could see the reflection of the
light. Still no glass. Surf and Tide to Wharf #2, almost 2 miles
and NO FUCKING GLASS.
What I did get was out of my head. I couldn’t think my way through this. I was smack raw in the middle of emotions I had been holding
under for a really long time, and now, all I was getting was anger. No glass,
and I had been looking. Trying. Knowing
it was out there, I just needed to be smarter about it, more careful about it,
more sure about it. And nothing. Not one thing. Empty beach, empty heart, emptiness that truly had been there for
months.
On Friday, in an attempt to just be out of my office and
away from my boss (a sleazy oily little man with zero integrity) I had attended
a workshop billed as an opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship. Starting business, finding capital, blah
blah blah. If you look up Steve Blank, or
Phil Randazzo, you will understand that there were going to be some heavy
hitters, and I could learn a lot, if I cared.
I didn’t. I just wanted an
excuse to have my place of duty be somewhere else, and this was perfect.
I knew I was in a place of transition with my job, my
writing, my now-over relationship, but hadn’t any clue how to start the
conversations necessary to make the leap to the next level. How quickly or slowly I made that leap was
entirely in my hands. I was stuck in
old patterns of thought, though I didn’t know it yet. Though by noon on Friday,
in the middle of a small-business workshop, I had just listened to a speaker
who had nothing to do with any business dealing, talking to us about clarity,
and moving forward, and finding authenticity, and making decisions about
relationships, and not settling.
I had a light bulb moment, with not many skills to act on
it. I had made a decision about my
relationship needing to move into something else (I had already defined it as
friendship in my head by the end of the talk) and while this was not really
going to be a fun conversation, I knew both Jim and I would be happier about it
if we could stay talking as openly and honestly as we had for the last nine
months, and could become an amazing life long friendship. I was excited. Petrified, and confused, but excited.
Oh yeah, I guess I need to say something about my
relationship at this point. I have been
in a relationship with what I can only describe as a complex man for the last
nine months. We met online, he asked me
out, and we met three days later. Just
breakfast. No real touching, but the conversation and energy (in my heart) had
me knowing I was already heading into something deeper than casual dating. I also knew he was an alcoholic. He admitted much later, after he had been
sober for a few months, that our first few dates he had been pretty much
drinking heavily. I knew that. It kept me at a distance, and I even wrote a
blog about it in a couple months in (if you want to go back and find it, it is
in Nov 2014) But he was changing, our conversations were becoming deeper,
meaningful. We stopped being guarded,
if we ever actually were. I was totally
present, always authentic. I never, not
even once hid who I am from him. Our
dates became days. Our days became
weekends. We didn’t do much more than
cook or hang out, sometimes going here or there, but always there was
conversation. Intimacy that rivaled anything I had ever done, and he said it
was new and scary for him too. The physical
was a chore, neither one of us being what had been usual for past
relationships, but it was good when it happened, and (again, in my heart) based
in love and true affection, the way I had always thought long term
relationships ended up with each persons desires ebbing and flowing, and
negotiable. I was liking it a lot,
letting the love portion fill me up as the emotional intimacy grew.
That probably would have been fine, but for the
addiction. Turns out that old
relationships can be addictive, too.
Bad ones. Ones that feel normal
because it is all you had ever known.
Ones that you seek when emotional intimacy scares you, and the physical
with the other person was the best thing about your world. That happened in a full blown, and
completely caught in lie two months ago.
I should have walked away then, when already I was compromising some my
more intellectual desires for travel and adventure, and for shared reading, and
for activism. I had already convinced
myself that I could do without those things because the man was kind and open
and as we grew we would find out own paths both separately and together and
start sharing support and love in whole new ways. I was sure of it until that moment, the lie, and instead of being
a fucking bitch, I listened and kept and open mind and found the time to admit
my own struggles and found a level of forgiveness I didn’t even know I
had.
I know this now to be my codependency showing up in this
relationship too, and I was determined not to go down that path. Delusional somewhat, (okay, calling my own
BS, completely delusional) but it was okay because I would talk with him, we
would work it out because that was what love looked like in our world, and in
the world I always thought I wanted to create inside of relationships,
different from what I have ever done before.
The real me. The trusting
me. The authentic me. And sadly, in the process, I taught him how
to treat me. It became acceptable to
lie, and then the lie became inevitable.
No matter what we talked about from that second on, the possibility to
lie would always be there. And, because of fear, addiction, not moving forward
on his own clarity, I became invisible.
Invisible?
Yeah. I knew everything about
this other woman in his life, and she knew nothing about me. Well, maybe about my presence, kinda sorta,
but nothing what-so-ever about the relationship we had created. Nothing about the conversations. Nothing about
the promises and commitments. Nothing
about plans, though vague, and had each of us committed to staying, to asking
to stay, to not leaving out any conversation, about never being afraid, and
showing up and making the emotional intimacy the strongest most important thing
in our lives. Creating bonds, that even
if not clear, would be strong enough and we would build a friendship that would
be able to weather anything just because it could. I already knew that kind of emotionally intimate bond could
happen, because I gratefully have one with someone else (who, when he reads
this, and he will, will know how grateful I am). So I was sure that all my effort, all my staying in truth and
love was totally worth it, even if/when our relationship changed.
That seems to not be that case on his end. Seems, when it came to conversation he was
having with this other woman, I meant nothing.
In the version she got, I was barely a friend. We had never kissed. We had never touched. We had never made love. Our conversations
were shallow. His attraction to me was nonexistent. His words of commitment and
love to me (and my children) had never happened. I was completely invisible in his life. Unloved, unimportant, and
unclaimed.
Whether or not any of that is actually true, I have no way
of knowing. But what I do know is that on Friday I knew something had to
change. Something life changing. Something about me, and I invited him along
to join me in this leap forward. A
chance for us to get MORE emotionally entwined, but in a more healthy way,
something new for both of us. Something
that gave me my visibility and dignity back, and allowed him to step up his
vulnerability and truth, both. Change.
The next level. Clarity. Serenity.
Saturday morning, more of the misnamed entrepreneur seminar
continued. I had invited Jim, signed
him up, almost begged him to come. I
knew something amazing was about to happen, and I wanted him to be part of
it. I love(d) him that much that even
as I was becoming more clear that our relationship would be changing, I saw it
as a positive, where we could both grow and understand and find clarity in our
path. I heard more words of inspiration
about keeping yourself in light and honesty. I was sought out by a
teacher/coach who listened to me for more than a half hour explain my fears and
short comings and taking myself for granted an allowing that from other
people. I was taught words and
techniques and feelings about how to improve my life right that minute with a
tiny shift of the compass needle (and a little help from Jesus and some black
magic) I would move my relationship, my thoughts, my life into a 100% better
place, even if the change meant doing things differently. I was clear for the frist time in
months. I knew. I could not go back. I was excited to share this with Jim. To
help him grow, too. To understand there
is enough joy and light and happiness in the world for everyone, and we could
both have it and still love each other.
As is true in my world for every time I am in transition,
that did not happen. In the course of
one evening, one morning, and one short afternoon, both of our lives had
changed. I was moving out of
codependency and towards more authenticity, and he had allowed the presence of
the other woman to change his path away from his spoken choices. While I was
seeking friendship, he was seeking dissolution. Every conversation about growth together, every commitment we
ever made to staying honest with each other, ever scared and unclear step that
we had made together, was gone in one very pointed telephone conversation. I was not given the chance to share
everything I had just discovered, because he walked away. His fear and insecurity and inability to
change his past had just evaporated the us we had created. I had a place of strength. He had gone back to his past. He did not
give me the courtesy I had asked that we talk and share in person. He emotionally vomited all over me, and did
so without any courage, over the phone within earshot of the woman who was now
in control of his world. The selfish
alcoholic he had been 6 months ago was back, even if he hadn’t picked up. I was just one more lie.
So all this came to me as I sat there at the end of the
beach, angry, without seaglass or any other implements to commit suicide (ok, I
am not suicidal. This is a blog, and I
am a writer who has some emotional license, get real folks). And as I started to cry, realizing I hadn’t
yet, I looked up and saw a single shiny piece of copper amber glass, not two
inches from my foot. I picked it
up. I laughed. There was my sign, right in the fucking
middle of my path, that I was on the right journey. I got up. Stopped my head
spin right then, and used the gifts I had been given over the previous day to
steady me. Strengthen me. Lift me. Reframe my way of thinking.
And I did. My
reframing got me to where my father was not suffering any more and could be, if
I was of a heaven and hell kinda nature, be holding my son in some really comfy
chair in the pasture of forever. My
reframing got me to where I could see Jim as flawed and worthy, but not someone
who could meet my needs, maybe not ever, as long as he keeps himself in
darkness, and I don’t have the ability to stay there. I like the light, it is
not an illusion. I know better. And I could also see how his absence in my
path, though heartbreakingly sad in this moment (and it is, I am kinda a mess
missing him, if I am honest), just created a space for the next level person to
occupy. I had no ability to invite that
into my world with my honesty if I was too busy keeping closed with me moving
pieces, that didn’t quite work, around hoping to find the fit. I will be worth it, and not invisible.
On the walk back to the beginning of the beach, along the
same exact path I had come, I found dozens of pieces of glass. Shiny. Easy to see. Right there in my path. I did not even have to look for them. It was easy. Showing me that I need to
remember that even things right in front of you can’t be seen without the right
mindset. And that once I change my
game, change what is acceptable, the path becomes inevitable. A whole collection of seaglass to prove it.
