Quitter

My parents used to call me a quitter.

• After a year or so of Campfire Girls, I didn't go back. It wasn't any fun and I have some very bad memories of it.
• I was in Honor Choir in 5th grade and I quit it to play softball. Because our lives revolved around my brother's sports, I thought I'd get some of the attention if I played a sport. (There is a whole, ugly story around this, but now isn't the time.) I wish I hadn't done this. I'd have been happier in Choir. But I was only 10 or 11.
• In 6th grade, I joined Girl Scouts. After about five months, all we had done were a handful of crafts. We didn't go anywhere or do anything. I had joined with two other girls, and they were also bored and unhappy. They made me the spokesman to tell the leader we were quitting. She cried. I was 11. My folk began calling me a quitter to my face.
• I was forced to join Job's Daughters when I was in 7th grade. Didn't want to, but the family had promised my dying grandfather (and given several things, I certainly felt no compulsion to follow that promise). I stayed for a year and a half before being able to leave it. My parents again accused me of quitting, of never being able to stick with a thing.

Motionless

Our bodies are made for movement. To whatever extent a body can move, it needs to move. Recent articles tell how all kinds of non-good and even bad things happen to and within your body when you don't move it.

I have barely moved in 10 months. My muscles are shortened and tight. My body hurts, yet walking causes pain as well. While I fear what I am doing to my body, my inner paralyzation controls me more than that fear. As my therapist says, what you do depends on which fear is strongest.

My life has been motionless as well. I haven't looked for work (and even if I'd had an interview, I don't think I'd have managed it well, given how messed up I've been). I haven't pursued help for financial problems. I've been a little mouse in a little hole who fears a cat is waiting right outside the hole.

This is not how I want to be! I used to climb trees and ride my bike. I also used to lie on my bed and read for hours. When we had a swimming pool, I could swim laps for hours, enjoying the feel of the water and the movement of my body. (And one time, when no one was around, I swam naked, which is the most blissful feeling in the world.) I used to dance in my house in the evening with my stereo turned up and the only light the flickering of candles.

Of course, I felt safer then. When I was a child, I didn't have to worry because my parents took care of us. After Dad died, I felt the beginnings of the instability of life. Later, I usually had enough money to get by. Even when I had no health insurance, I was healthy and young and didn't need it. I had work, I had enough friends, I had comfortable homes, even if I did move rather a lot at first. For all the problems I had and the traumas and griefs I endured, I still felt a measure of safety that allowed me to move.

Then, in my mid-30s, I had my first immobilizing depression and anxiety. I eventually overcame them, or they went away, and I recovered. I had a few other times that weren't quite as bad, but still I moved less than before. But none of those times of immobility were as long as this one, or as completely paralyzing as this time. Even at the worst of those times, I would get up and move — dance just a little, go into the garden and pick something to eat, walk around the block or on the beach.

I'm old enough that everything I do physically is more significant for my future than anything I've done until now. If I want to be physically fit and in good condition so I'm self-mobile and can take care of myself for a long, long time, I need to move now. I need to exercise now — not the run-a-marathon type or the body-builder type or the gym-rat type. However, I need to be able to walk long distances, briskly, while holding a conversation. I need to be flexible and strong (yoga, pilates perhaps). I need upper body strength as well as lower-body and, most of all, I need to enjoy moving my body, and to move my body because I enjoy it.

Maybe part of my immobility comes down to enjoyment: I don't do what I enjoy. My mind is a strange and sometimes unfathomable place, even to me — it wouldn't be impossible that I am punishing myself for some perceived fault. Fear or punishment, does it matter? I hold myself motionless, strapped down with invisible bonds — and not in the good way. I've emptied my life of so much I enjoy, other than the hurtful binges of fat and sugar that only mimic pleasure, that I'm empty of almost everything but fear and pain and grief and longing ... and the memory of everything good.

Years ago, when I owned my first home, I bought an orchard ladder: a very, very tall three-legged ladder made for people picking fruit from tall trees. I've had a fear of heights since I was a child, but it was my house, and my fruit. As I told my friends and myself, "I will not live my life controlled by my fears." For some time, I lived by that credo. Even a few years ago, when I made a major, unbelievable change in my life, I chose to do so in spite of my fears.

The incalculable grief and loss of the last year, all the changes in my life that I had absolutely no control of, the feeling of falling from a high cliff toward rocks many miles below — through them I forgot how brave I am. I forgot my credo from many years ago. I forgot me.

I'm still walking a tightrope with no net below me and each day is scarier than the last, with my continued unemployment and my dwindling resources and my beloved safety net gone forever.  But I can do it. I can do this. I have endured and overcome so many, many things in my life and I have come up from the Abyss again and again to smile, love, and enjoy my life. I need to remember: it never wins.

Remembering this, I must get up again and smile and love and live. Because pain sucks and just existing sucks and if I run out of money and have to go live in someone's basement it will suck, too.

Smiling and loving and living won't hurt me any worse than I hurt now. At least they will make room in the fear and pain I've surrounded myself with so I can move. And the next time that I get knocked down, get my feet wet in the Abyss — because it will happen again and again in my life — the voice inside me will remind me that it never wins and I'll get up and walk and dance my way out of that damned Abyss, out of the paralysis of fear and I will win, because I have done so before. If I can do it as many times as I have, there is every reason I can do it again.

So move.

The Scarlet Letter

I want a man, but he isn't mine. Since he decided to not live a double life — a predominantly time-spent and verbal and online play life — he doesn't play verbally or online. I rarely see him. He still calls me most — but no longer all — days.

Do I consider us friends? Yes, great friends. We know things about each other that few if any others know. We respect and support each other, even if it is now in very limited ways. 

Do I consider us more than friends? Yes. He calls me most days. He tells me about his days and, if there is anything to tell, listens to what I tell him about mine. I leave stuff out now because he's a fixer and he cannot fix what he has no time for. I'm a listener and supporter and comforter, so he tells me virtually everything, including letting loose a few things about his wife or marriage that are hurting him. 

Do I expect the situation to ever change again? I don't know. I hope so; I think the pain in his marriage would cause another person to leave. Sometimes one can be too committed. It's possible that I am being biased, but honestly I am probably too self-aware and too committed to truth and to other people's happiness or at least having what they want, even if it means I don't get what I need or want. I am fair with him, overly so if you ask my friends who know. Few do.

Do I still love him? Yes and I imagine I will for the rest of my days.

One of my friends thinks that being in love with a married man is my way of avoiding commitment. When I ask this friend what he considers all my previous relationships where I desperately wanted commitments, his opinion is that my disastrously poor choices and catastrophically bad relationships stem from the same fear to commit. It's an issue of contention between us, of course.

I have told a very few people about this relationship because I know most will judge me for it. It's about lying and cheating and it's wrong, right? Maybe ... not. I think that life is complicated and flexible. I have cheated. I have been cheated upon. I think that we all try to get what we need and I think that sometimes our partner can't, or even won't, give us what we need. And I think that sometimes a partner won't let us give them what they need and want. Thus the one who cheated most egregiously on me, was, to take his word, "not physical." Sometimes a partner wants out but doesn't want to be "the bad guy." This is why I've had to be the bad guy in numerous relationships because apparently I've got more balls than quite a few of the guys I've been involved with.

This is the man for me: he is virtually everything I want in a partner. He even matches virtually every one of the qualities I wrote in a list some time ago. All the important ones, at any rate.

Once a cheater, always a cheater? Not necessarily. Once you have what you want and need, most of us never look elsewhere again. There are as many reasons to look outside a relationship as there are people. I doubt that most people will do so, simply because they obey all the rules and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I admire that. 

I'm lonely and have never had a longer-term relationship than three years. I don't know if there is something wrong with me, or with my taste, or with the Universe, but I have never gotten all of it: want, need, someone who wants to be with me forever.

I'm not looking, partly because i love this man and it would hardly be fair to date someone else when my heart is elsewhere. I'm used to being alone, as much as I hate it. I am built, from the very atoms of my being, for a relational life, for having a man to share my life with, for having children to love and mentor and support. The Universe laughs. My therapist understands why I feel the Universe hates me.

Life and love are complicated and messy. Yes, I would hurt if my partner involved himself with someone else, but I would also strive to have the open, honest, giving relationship that I hope would lead him closer to me rather than farther away.

I love a man, but he's not mine. I hate it, but I'm okay with it. I just wish my mom could have met him.