The other day I ran into ex #2 at a car dealership as I was getting my car serviced. It was awkward. It was like talking to a stranger. I couldn’t imagine that this was someone I once had a bond with. It brought up a lot of feelings, but mostly I felt guilty. It took me a while to work through why.
I went for a long walk when I got home (after a stop for French fries) and thought about it. He is a nice man, but very conventional. When we met, I was trying to be normal too. I didn’t mean to trick him. I really wanted to BE the normal person I was pretending to be. Was it dishonest? Yes. Not intentionally, or rather not maliciously. I was lying to myself, too. I thought being a fundamentally different person was going to be good for me. I thought there was something radically wrong about who I really was, so by extension I thought being different would be an improvement.
I was so, so wrong about that. He was the one who paid for it, maybe even more than I did. I paid for it with about 80 pounds. I paid for it in unhappiness. Never getting a look of comprehension if I said what I was really thinking, or tried to talk about the book I was reading. Listening to the music I love when he wasn’t home because he didn’t like that “weird, angry music.” Never watching a film more intellectually complex than “Ghostbusters” because he liked things he didn’t have to think about too much.
He was a kind, funny man…but not intellectually oriented. Not stupid, but he didn’t think thinking too much is good for a person. He was practical and hard working. He didn’t ever believe me when I said I didn’t want to have children because married people have children. That is just a given.
If motivation and intention count, then I didn’t do anything wrong…but they do. Don’t they?
Eventually, it felt like I was dying. The inside me, not my physical body. I originally wrote “only the inside me” but that is even more important than the outside, isn’t it? I was trying to kill that person anyway, so why did it make me so unhappy?
Because there wasn’t anything there. If I shut down my real self, I didn’t really have a new and improved normal self to replace me with. There was nothing. It turns out that being nothing feels pretty awful.
And the emergency pit stop at Mickey D’s for emotion killing fries shows that I still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with things. Oh, I did eventually–but couldn’t I have skipped the binge eating and gone straight for the healthy activity instead? My head knows that is the better response when I have an emotional overload.
Too bad my emotions don’t let my head talk much sometimes…
Keep working on it, right?
Right.