The crux of the matter is this:
I cannot seem to get over this obsessive need to be loved by someone. A man/partner/friend-and-lover someone.
The longer I am alone and lonely, the more I desire this relationship and the sicker I get.
The more I want it and the sicker I get, the more off-putting I become and the less likely I am to find it.
Even when I am white-knuckling through the days, trying to control my thoughts and impersonate a normal person, there is stuff going on inside my heart that I cannot seem to control.
I "didn't meet" someone at a work function last month, but was intrigued. Became Facebook friends, discovered he was single and his dogs were his life, and sent him a raft of helpful (?) messages when they got out and were lost, briefly.
Wandered over to his building and introduced myself last week; had a 20 minute, very enjoyable conversation about four-leggeds, and he accepted an invitation to tour the new animal shelter Saturday.
For the rest of the week, I did everything in my power to reign in my wayward thoughts, to view them with amusement and let them go when appropriate, and to concentrate on the fact that if I was going to have someone come over, I was going to have to clean the living room and the kitchen and that was A Good Thing, no matter WHAT the circumstances. Confessed all to my therapist Thursday and got some helpful advice as well as encouragement that I was on the right track.
Got up Saturday morning at 7am. Started in on the cleaning I had begun the evening before. Showered and put on makeup and my contacts (trying to be a normal person but I'm not stupid). Made cookies (ok, I know ... but the house really smelled good). At 10:30a, he called and said he was running late, and instead of meeting me at my house, perhaps we should just meet at the new shelter. Oh, and he had to have a late lunch with a client that he'd have to split for, too, so that shot the idea I'd proposed that we take the dogs out after.
Hm. Why was I surprised? Why wouldn't the Universe LOVE the chance to watch me knocking myself out doing all the things I am supposed to do anyway (although I was doing them for the wrong reasons) and then, snickering, pull the rug out from under me?
Met at the shelter and that new building is absolutely magical, but that is another story. Chatted a bit afterwards and I asked if he wanted to take the dogs out after his meeting. He said yes; agreed he would call by 2:30 or whenever he was done.
Came home, put on MUSIC (!! I haven't listened to music for enjoyment in two years) and finished the house cleaning AND washed all three little dogs. I felt good. Not high or elated; just ... normal, like I imagine other people must feel much of the time. Had some energy to clean the house and dance to the music and get some stuff done.
2:30 came and went ... 3pm ..... 3:30 .... there was that old sick feeling in the pit of my stomach again, that feeling I am so exhaustively familiar with that comes when "he" said he was going to call/come over and there is NOTHING. Should have just done something else, but I was, as usual, utterly unable to do so. As I always do, I finally called and got the voice mail and tried to leave a normal message, breezily inquiring about "what's the plan" ... got a call back that he'd crashed with the dogs and hadn't meant to sleep all afternoon, but that he'd have to skip the walk now because he had some house-cleaning to do.
I confess; I said I was going to see a movie at 4:30 and asked if he wanted to go -- he said he couldn't because he had a friend coming over that evening that was going through a rough spot. The conversation was light and pleasant and it's possible I didn't make as much of an ass out of myself as 1) I usually do 2) I thought I did, but the bottom line is that throughout the day, I did the inviting (over and over again; what an pathetic mess he must think me) and at no time did he reciprocate.
I don't know what's going on in this man's head. I don't know how long he's been divorced or anything about him other than a brief conversation and what he wrote on his Facebook profile. I would welcome the chance to get to know him better because I am attracted to him (I fancy him, as the Brits say) and would like at least ... a chance.
But my sickness (or perhaps my tenuous grasp of reality) tells me it ain't gonna happen. Despite my conviction that it would be just as easy for the Universe to put someone in my path who could/would love me as it is for me to continue without romantic options, the Universe doesn't see it that way. This man is not interested. I am too old. Too unattractive. Too something. Or not enough something else. He's just not that into me, as the saying goes. And in a matter of days or weeks or months, he will start dating someone who, to the outside world, might not be that much prettier or younger or smarter than me, but is somehow better, not intrinsically flawed in the way I seem to be.
My therapist keeps trying to talk me out of that position because, as he points out, where do you go from there? And yet just because it's depressing doesn't mean it's not true. I spent the rest of the day Saturday crying. And today, more or less immobilized. Even with my thoughts firmly reigned in, my heart felt AWFUL and my stomach felt AWFUL and it hurt so badly I cried. What really got me going was knowing that, despite my best efforts, I cannot seem to be a normal person. It is not normal to meet someone you're attracted to, to have casual plans fall apart, and to be suicidal about it. It's not normal to feel this way, it's not normal to hurt this way, and it's not normal to live this way. But I cannot get healthy.
After eight years of trying, I've made no progress. If anything, it just gets worse. I cannot live this way: either in an agony of loneliness or making a complete idiotic spectacle of myself like a junior high school girl. I am too sick to function normally and too sick to want to prolong the agony any more.
Went to church this morning. Had the sense that perhaps it was the thing to do, although I was grateful for the lack of seating that landed me on a chair out in the lobby area. I was doing fine until Gail closed with this all-too-familiar passage from Ranier Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" and I fell apart and left. I first ran across this quote in the program two years ago -- oh, how I have wanted, needed these words to be true:
"So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall."
But Rilke was wrong. Life doesn't care. It let me fall eight years ago and walked away and perhaps it's about time I realized it's not coming back for me.
They say you shouldn't go grocery shopping when you're hungry.
I know better than to take up important conversations after 3pm.
And I should DEFINITELY not undertake a web post when the Vikings have just lost. No more Vikings until September. Nothing to look forward to now until May or June sometime when we can think of camping again. And here in northern Minnesota, where the weather outside mirrors my emotional landscape much of the time (dark, cold, bleak, featureless) ... five months is a long, long time.
I don't think I've been fond of New Year's since high school. College, I remember sitting in my room with a bottle of pills, wondering if I could commit suicide with aspirin.
New Year's Eve 1985, a newlywed of just over a month, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and entered my brand-new husband's home office, dressed in bits of skimpy lace and bearing two glasses of champagne. "I'm working," he informed me, barely glancing up. "I don't have time for that now."
The evening of New Year's Day, 1999, terrified that my second marriage, which had produced a just-turned-one year old baby, wasn't Y2K compatible, only to have my worst fears confirmed three days later.
New Year's, I'm realizing, brings out the very worst of my bad habits. So much of my work with my therapist for the past two years has been about my insistence on ruminating about the past and dreading the future. So an event dedicated to looking back AND looking forward is just tailor-made to plunge me into the blackest places I can find.
F'r instance: between 1985 and 1995, I had horses again and dogs for the first time, got married, got divorced, held six different jobs in six different towns, moved nine times, got engaged, got disengaged, and got married again.
Between 1989 and 1999, even, I realized a dream and bought a farm, although I didn't have it very long. I got my dream job, met the love of my life, visited the west coast for the first time, saw the ocean and the redwoods for the first time, played Josie in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" and had a baby.
But since 2000, the happy changes have slowed down considerably. Between January of 2000 and January of 2009, I've had to learn how to be a parent and a divorced parent at the same time. Believe me, it sucks. I lost the love of my life, ended up in the hospital once and outpatient care once for "nervous breakdowns," lost 140 pounds and spent 14 of the 108 months in alleged relationships (obviously this doesn't include alleged relationships that turned into one night stands). Since I've got the calculator application open, that means I've spent just over 87% of the last nine years alone. (Let me digress to send a big Bronx cheer to the people who say I need time by myself --I've obviously had plenty.) And since this dating has occurred AFTER I lost the weight (I would have figured it out eventually, but "luckily" for me, every man I have gone out with has treated me to a lengthy riff on the "fat chicks" out there and what a turn off they are), apparently pushing 260 wasn't the problem -- my personality is.
