Turn Off, Tune Out

Even with the new ideas I'm having here, the great work, and the epiphanies, I still ignore my life. I am still not living, I'm only taking up space and air.

Most people in my position would be finding some work, any work to help pay bills. Most people would have made the calls to find financial help.

I just watch streaming video and read blogs.

I have lived vibrantly in the past, even in my adulthood. I've even lived vibrantly in the last few years. But I've done so less and less and that disturbs me. I don't want to spend how many years I have left just taking up space, simply existing. I want to enjoy living.

Sure, right now the zest is still pretty much gone, with Mom gone and my having a distinct lack of social life. I love my online friends, but I need face time. I need to be able to hug someone, or even just touch their arm or their hand. Not being able to touch is kind of like being in prison.

I've had some times with The Man that were beautiful, truly beautiful. I've spent some time with one of my girlfriends here, just talking and talking, that was very fine. When I still lived at the beach, and was walking regularly on the beach, and was not wallowing in self-pity because I didn't have any friends at the beach or a lover, life was beautiful and joyous. (And my body was in good shape, too!)

I want ... I need ... what I don't have, and that stunts me. I feel that living is unpleasant and a chore. I'm sure as hell not having fun and haven't had much in a long time. I know — just do it and all that other stuff. It's ungodly difficult when I don't see any payoff for me in terms of what I want, what I need. I'm not such a great person that I can live to serve others. In many ways, I've been there and done that, from family to manager to lover. I keep thinking the pendulum is going to swing back my way, but family is gone, I'm desperate for an income so I don't have a lot of choice about a managerial relationship, and I don't see The Man choosing me (yet, in some ways, I honestly see us together) nor do I see me choosing another.

So far I've gotten little zings here and there, from mental breakthroughs and good therapy, but it's all popcorn stuff — it doesn't satisfy except for a few moments.

Voices talk to me in my mind — not those kind of voices! — telling me all that stuff about just do it, be satisfied with what you've got, ya gotta give before you can get,  you'll only get love/friends/whatever once you stop wanting it (and what kind of psycho came up with that one?), etc. 

In the Buddhism book I like to read, the author refers to a couple of her friends who died young of cancer. One of them wrote a letter to all his friends about how he would have wanted more, but he had never wanted other.  You know the sayings about living without regrets? My life is filled with regrets and ways I wish my life had been "other." This is nothing like the life I wanted to live, and I never imagined I would be on the far side of middle age and completely alone as regards family and geographically close friends. This is nothing like the life I always imagined, not just in little ways but in huge, powerful, reasons for living ways.

So it's not really hard to figure out why I don't look forward to tomorrow and why my depression recurs and why this time it is so damned hard to shake. I can't even call my mom to talk to her about my sadness and get her sympathy and pep-talk the way I have a thousand million times before. 

I have no one I with whom I can exchange "I love you." "I love you, too." I miss it.

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.