As we all are so painfully aware, I am going through it. That’s the point of this whole project, right? Dissecting myself, my emotions, and my habits, analyzing past memories for crumbs of insight, crude meditations on the purpose of life and fulfillment, some inane musings on bugs, all of that. It was all for the singular purpose of trying to really identify with myself, to figure out exactly what is going wrong and right within my head. There are also the added bonuses of writing as hobby and the sway it has over what I do with my day, always looking for something to write about. I don’t consider myself good at this by any means, but I do still feel a dull pain when I haven’t written for a few days, especially when that’s due to not having done anything worth telling all of you. But again, the teleology of this whole cringe-laden universe localized entirely on a website from 2003 was to engage in therapy without having to pay someone $125 to tell me what I already know. I have issues, neuroses, anxieties about attachment and purpose, a wealth of identity problems, you name it. I’ve known I’ve had all of these for a while, but getting emotionally turned to swiss cheese does bring a little bit of priority to the whole project. So, I get them out by doing this. Understand them by doing this, hopefully overcome or at least make peace with them by doing this. It’s impossible to say if it has done anything more than make me feel better, but that’s a decent enough result to continue.
A lot of my thinking recently has been about results, specifically my focus on them above everything else. I find myself ruminating quite often on what I want to happen, the goals I want to achieve, the places I want to go, the things I want to write about. I’m very focused on this end point, the feeling of contentment or catharsis or achievement that follows the completion or satisfaction of any of my desires. For example, if I think about one of my goals, I think about running a 5k, but sort of ignore the whole process of getting there. When I think about quitting smoking, I think about how nice it will be to breathe regularly and save some money, not the arduous process of dealing with withdrawals. In a word, I’m idealistic, perhaps delusional, or riddled with fantasy, or whatever. Not to say I don’t run to prepare, but I don’t really value the running itself- the value is all in the payoff, the process is devoid of any token of reward. It’s just toil. And that’s the best case scenario, when the situation is really binary, do this to get that. When it’s more complex, say surrendering a cat, my wheels just spin. I can think of how nice it will be to downsize, to not have to clean up waste off the ground every day, to not have to wash piss-soaked sheets at 1:00 a.m., to have less mouths to feed. I mean, I also think of how emotionally devastating it will be, the shame I’ll feel, the realization made concrete that I betrayed an animal that doesn’t know why things happen to it. But again, that’s focusing on result, both good and bad. But when I get to trying to plot out the process, I just get discouraged, I procrastinate and push it off and tell myself I can do it tomorrow and then tomorrow comes and we repeat the cycle. Luckily, I haven’t had this issue with the physical goals I’ve set for myself with running and gym-going, but these more emotional and nebulous endeavors, I’m having a lot of trouble with.
The emotional ones are what’s really sticking in my head right now. Thoughts about moving on from the past, not moving on from the past, and what I want my future to look like- I can imagine the payoffs for these, I can picture in my head what a nice life will be like in a couple of years, but the process of getting there, I’m stumped. Emotionally, I’ve been a roller coaster in terms of how I think I should handle the fallout of a fifth of my life imploding. To talk, to not talk, to bury myself in hobbies, to sleep all day, to distract, to engage, to write. I’ve been focused on the emotional payoff of not feeling miserable all the time, but the ways to do that shift every day. I oscillate between “break everything that resembles a memory” to “reach out and be pathetic” at least three times a day and the whiplash keeps me inert. It’s caused me a lot of stress, honestly, trying to remedy the hurt. Maybe more stress than the hurt itself is causing. And that thought has been in my mind tonight, the idea that I’m making things worse by struggling against the emotions, trying to push them away and be happy and better with a big old grin and a new lease on life. I don’t think I work that way.
So, I’m going to try a new strategy, the “do nothing, expect nothing” strategy. What I mean by this is, don’t do anything to lessen the hurt and don’t expect anything you do outside of that to soothe it either. This doesn’t mean I’m going to cease all of my self-improvement projects nor does it mean I’m going to be laying in bed all day, calling out of work and refusing to eat because I’m just oh so very distraught over this whole mess. It just means that when I’m really feeling it, the loss, the loneliness, the gaps, I’m just going to feel it. I’m not going to hide it away or shuffle around it or try to cover it up with some new experience, I’ll just let it happen. As much as I hate to be perceived as such, there’s nothing wrong with being busted up. It’s everyone’s expectation regardless.
I suppose the swiss cheese comes into play with this line of thinking also. It’s easy for me to conceive of myself as a person who has lost something of great value and been made lesser because of it, like, y’know, a pair of cheese with holes in the middle. A friend was asking me if any of my activities were really filling the ex-shaped hole I felt and I said no. Originally, this was a fatalistic notion of mine that really nothing could fill that hollow space but time and that I had to wait around until I was renewed and cavity-less and whole again. I suppose now, my thinking has shifted a little bit. See, neither emotional capacity nor the definition of identity are really finite. There is no such thing as a finite me, there isn’t a limit on what I can feel and experience and all that. When I think of swiss cheese, I think of a regular square that is missing some space throughout. If I were to think of a “whole” piece of cheese, it’s still just the square, now minus the spaces. But I’m not like that. There’s no such thing as the Ryan cheese without holes, there’s no complete and healthier version of myself that results from time suturing up all the cuts within me. Loss, especially of a love, I don’t think is something that makes me lesser. It felt that way originally, like I did lose some of my volume, some of what defined me, some integral part of my being. But that just isn’t the case. I’m not a substance that can have things removed from it and made smaller because of that.
My new conception of hurt and loss is, hmm, well it’s like paint, I guess. If you were to imagine the complete, healthy, unburdened by emotional little-t trauma me, it would be a bucket of pure white paint, I suppose. But then you introduce the emotions, the all-encompassing tristesse, the black paint. It muddies up the bucket, turning everything into a dark grey. The initial instinct here is to take the black out, to return everything to how it was when it was unsullied. You can’t do that with paint nor can you do it with the past. And you can’t just add a ton more white, that’s in short supply. But you can add a little. Every time you have a good day, every time you hangout with a friend, every time you do a little something for your health, a little bit of white splashes back into the bucket. Eventually, the grey turns into something else- the bad stuff is still in there, but proportionally, it isn’t as heavy. You never took the black paint out, you can’t take it out, but you can water it down. In the meantime, however, it seems sort of pointless to rally against the paint and try to reason with it, to come up with little strategies to perceive the color as anything but what it is. You just have to accept that right now, you’re grey. In a bit, you’ll be lighter gray. After a while, you’ll be even lighter.
I don’t know, people always tell me I’m terrible at analogies and I’m pretty sure they’re right. I’m just okay with being grey right now. It’s futile to try to be anything but. And when I think about that, I don’t know, I feel lighter. It’s okay to be fucked up emotionally, it’s okay to have bad days, it’s okay to not do everything you can think of to try to ease the discomfort. In fact, thinking that by doing a bunch of things, you’ll magically be better is probably way worse for you in the long run. So, to symbolize this, I took the stone from the engagement ring and turned it into an earring. When I thought about throwing it away or selling it, it felt like I was trying to run away from reality, burying any evidence that I had ever tried to marry somebody. But that just felt really wrong to me, it felt disingenuous, childish, impulsive. So I opted to wear the symbol of my grief instead. There’s a comfort in accepting the things that have happened, there’s a triumph in displaying that on yourself, at least to me. I’m not over it and I shouldn’t pretend to be. When I think of what I should do, the process for feeling better, I think it’s just letting myself be how I am. Don’t avoid the feelings and don’t try to remove any evidence that things happened, just be. Accept the waves as they come, wear an absolutely gaudy stud earring, and just continue on. There’s no way to stop regretting the past and to stop loving your ex and I should quit pretending that there is. I’ll keep loving on my own time, I’ll keep missing on my own time, I’ll keep feeling sad on my own time, and I’ll keep adding more paint to my bucket on my own time. Eventually, it’ll all even out- no need to rush things.
jeez, louise 