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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If motivation and intention count, then I didn’t do anything wrong…but they do. Don’t they?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Too bad my emotions don’t let my head talk much sometimes…<\/p>\n
Keep working on it, right?<\/p>\n
Right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"