At first I thought, well that's nice of her, to send these things. Then it slowly started to dawn on me that it was an act of violence. Because if you do not have any space in which to communicate with a man with whom you were in a partnership for 6 years, and you have completely cut that man off, but then you pull these weird, wordless creepy stunts like returning some of that man's stuff by mail without any communication, you are on the attack. You are creating a weird, creepy, abusive, unclear, symbolic arena of stalker-esque unpredictability. You are hostile and expressing your hostility in a way where there is no opportunity for it to be returned or even called out.
Irresponsible, immature, weird, unaccountable, wounding, creepy, hostile, sick and toxic.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Why I was actually trying to be in a communicative and meaningful partnership with such a toxic, narcissistic, emotional pinhead asshole is the central question. Why do I do these things to myself?
The Occam's Razor answer is I hate myself, so why not form partnerships with people who also either secretly or openly hate me? Or who are not available? That way in appearing to get something good, I can suffer as I deserve to suffer. Good plan.
Maybe this tendency on my part is starting to lift, as it seems like the loml sees me and actually loves and accepts me for who I am. I hold her in the highest regard also. Of course, the reality is that we can't be together, so that unavailability is still operating. And the realities of the loml's life makes her an unavailable limerent object a lot of the time. So I wonder.
Anyway, I am also quite sure, knowing A, that she timed this particular stunt to coincide with the anniversary or her trip to Seattle to see her paramour. Quite sure.
The only thing I'm angry about at the moment is that these creepy bullshit gestures still seem to have the power to throw me. That I thought to myself "Oh, how nice, I should message her and thank her." Oh hell fucking no. The doormat days are over.
I am glad to have the CDs back and had assumed that I discarded them after I digitized them all. I didn't need them since I have converted them all to mp3's. Thbe funny thing is, I am going to double check against my files and, if I have digitized them all, into the trash they go. I'm also sure there is some weird significance to the fork, but I'll be damned if I can remember what. Since it has the stench of idiot emotional shit attached to it now, into the trash it goes as well.
Fuck all of this.
One thing that I keep picking up on is that you are angry at yourself because someone else was an asshole and you didn't see it. I get that you are trying to un-pick why you have not had successful partnerships, but I really don't like how angry you are with yourself. I think there is as much a danger of addiction when it comes to self-hatred as there is with alcohol or drugs, and while it feels satisfying to flagellate oneself and to retroactively discover patterns of stupidity and credulousness, I think it is essentially unhelpful.
ReplyDeleteLooking at the past with the eyes of the present is a tool, but since our eyes move through time along with the rest of our selves, they don't present a truly accurate picture: they cannot see who we were at the time we were fools. They just give us the after-action report, which - like every other autopsy - is written ex post facto. It is not and can never be a complete description of who we were and where we were in our lives.
I can remember going back through every one of the twenty years of my marriage and finding sign after sign after sign that I completely missed, mis-read, or consciously ignored. I berated myself for my blindness for at least a year or two, probably longer. How could I not have seen/known/imagined/suspected?
When I came to my senses, I started to remember that most of those twenty years had been very satisfying and very happy -- which was why those seemingly small incompatibilities could be iced over and ignored until other forces became too strong.
Human partnership is about more than conscious choices. It is an untidy melange of physical attraction, social compatibility, intellectual connection and emotional satisfaction -- all of which are affected by everything from the weather to career success to health problems to child-rearing practices. When you consider all of the constantly shifting variables of which our relationships are constructed, it is a miracle that any partnership lasts through the innumerable re-calculations and adjustments that are required.
Don't be so angry with yourself for picking an asshole for a partner, because there are always two sides (at least) to an equation, and at least for a time, the formula you and your partner came up with functioned rather well. Was your partner an asshole the whole time? Probably not. Were you an asshole the whole time? Probably not. What variables shifted to make you such strangers to one another? There's no way to isolate them all and it's pointless to be enraged at your inability to count the stars. Be more kind to yourself.
I think you are right of course, but I don't really blog in order to be given advice. It's interesting to me that people think a blog post is an accurate reflection of things. I wonder if perhaps these are people who have never kept a journal?
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