The most recent thing my ex-fiancee, B, posted on her blog (back in November) was something along the lines of trying to remember who she was before she fell in love, or maybe that’s who she has always been. I’m reminded of it this morning as I’ve been contemplating my own journey back to myself. As I sat on the sofa petting my cat Nick – who seems to be loving and needing the attention today – I kept repeating the phrase “the circuitous route to who I’ve always been.” Life’s major shakeups have a way of making one pull back and reflect (assuming one has the time, resources, and luxury to do so). And all of the stupid pedantic cliches about change prove true…. the more things change, the more they stay the same, etc. etc.
We are capable of great change, we are always changing, and we seldom change – one big ball of contradictions constantly adding on, deleting, revising, revisiting, adding back, deleting again – you get the picture. I think big change is hard. I think we attempt it, fail and swing back to our belief that people don’t really change. It also seems like we naturally hold others to a higher standard than ourselves in not believing they can change, but we can. These contradictory thoughts are why I’ve tried to embrace Whitman’s statements that I (we) contain multitudes. It’s why I’ve been trying to see the world as only a little black and white with a whole lot of gray in between. I am me, forever changing and forever who I’ve always been.
When I got married, my wedding gift to my wife was a one-year anniversary trip to Maine. I booked a B&B up in Bar Harbor along with a stop in Rhode Island to see the Newport Mansions. She used to talk about her childhood trips to Maine and also talked about visiting the Vanderbilt mansions (or maybe it was some other huge estate). I had never been up there, and it seemed like the prefect way to celebrate our one-year anniversary. I had to convince the B&B owners to accept my booking as far in advance as I was making it – they typically didn’t book more than a year out. The trip, while it had a few moments of tension, was pretty great. We met a wonderful couple from Germany – they were older and just nice to be around. We had the most delicious popovers in the middle of Acadia. We spent time sitting in Adirondack chairs looking out over the water. It was, for me, filled with “this is what life should be about” moments. Explorations of place, nature, food, and people.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped having those moments. I worked a busy job in New York with a long commute. We were raising a child. She was working full-time and getting her PhD. The business of life took over. When we agreed to get divorced, she was about to head out on a work trip and we agreed to think it through and talk about it some more. I can remember one specific night – it was one of the sadder nights of my life. I sat at the dining room table, in the dark, probably drinking, listening to sad music – I can even tell you the song (“Someday We’ll Linger in the Sun” by Gaellynn Lea). I thought about how we were never going to get back to Bar Harbor. I thought about losing the life I had once envisioned. I thought about how somewhere along the way, that vision had disappeared. The revelation I had at the end of the night was that the vision was still there and it was the characters that would change. By that time in our marriage, I’m not sure we knew each other all that well. We hadn’t talked in a forward thinking, dreaming, type of way in a very long time.
I carried that night with me as I went out in to the dating world. I became determined not to let the busy-ness of life take over. I had a better sense of what I wanted – or so I thought. I met a lot of people. Very few of them ever got to the point of us talking about or imagining the “future” – three to be exact (and one of them only talked about it ever so briefly in a text after I broke things off – as if to say “here’s what you’ll be missing”).
Also after the divorce, I felt like a failure. I wanted to run and hide. I didn’t tell my neighbors about it for about five months. I wanted to go somewhere where nobody knew who I was. I wanted to re-establish myself. I applied to jobs in different parts of the country. I came pretty close to moving to West Virginia. I remember hiking and talking to my friend Jen about it – this state of confusion and not knowing what to do next. At some point, probably on a hike, I started telling myself, happiness is what you make of it and can be found everywhere if you’re willing to see it. With a somewhat new (or rediscovered) abundance mindset, I stopped looking for jobs and committed myself to the idea of finding happiness where I was. I started going to the beach by myself, going to shows by myself, having Adirondack chair moments on my own. I started connecting with friends in more meaningful ways.
I continued to date, but most of the women I met were one-time meetings. A few got to the point of a week or two. They all knew I liked blues music and concerts and travel, and hiking and helping people, but we never got to the point of sharing those things. Selfishly, I’m not sure I could tell you what many of them were interested in. I never said I was above being self-centered or self-absorbed. I went out with one woman for about five months – and she did everything I wanted to do. This was not what I was looking for. We didn’t talk about a future, we just did things. For the most part, I was living my single life and she was tagging along. It didn’t feel good or right. When we broke up, she was upset that she had done all of these things for me and got nothing in return. The criticism hurt. It was both fair and unfair. I can have a big personality and I have a good sense of what I like to do. I can be really enthusiastic about sharing, and I love it when someone shares with me. Unfortunately, I’ve also had relationships where the initial enthusiasm felt like sharing, but it turned out that it was just a going along with me as a way to placate or secure or please. It is absolutely natural to want to please your partner…. but if you end up resenting it, or if it’s a misrepresentation of who you are or the life you want then it will lead to issues later.
Then came my ex-fiancee, B. We had a lot of similar interests. We seemed to share the same vision. We both seemed comfortable opening up to each other, and it took us no time to establish that we wanted the same things. For the first time in a really long time, I felt like I was sharing and paying attention and growing with someone else. She once told me about her parents and a VW bus, and within days, I was looking up how to travel and rent a VW bus so that she might re-live those nice moments (apparently I still have the note in my phone 1/27/19: Rent VW bus for road trip). One of the first things I said to B when we met was that I did not want someone who was just along for the ride. I told her not to let me steamroll.
It’s hard for me to know if we really had the same vision – if we really wanted the same things. I’ve questioned that a lot this past year. The reason I found myself repeating the phrase the circuitous route back to who I’ve always been is because in the wake of things falling apart, I questioned everything about myself (rightfully so). I spent a lot of time trying to untangle myself from this person with whom I was envisioning a lifetime of growth and discovery. It’s easy to get lost in a process of unraveling like that. When someone truly inspires you, you start to forget that there are other inspirations… or maybe we just hadn’t reached that point yet – where we were discovering things outside of the relationship and bringing them back to each other. Rereading a Vonnegut quote this morning. “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is,” reminded me that I’ve always had an appreciation for being in the moment and that sometimes, like many of us, I lose my way. Ruminating, while sometimes unavoidable, sometimes keeps me from being in the moment, and what I’ve had to untangle is that it was in the ending of things where I got lost, not during. Writing has helped bring me back.
***I started this post on 4/29. This is about where I stopped and got a rejection letter for some poems I sent out for publication. At the same time I was texting with my friend Cheri who was apologizing for using me to fill in as a distraction from being lonely. I can appreciate that she’s upfront about it, and it’s the role I’ve accepted. She really hates being alone, and she hates that the “world” seems to insist that she learn to be happy to be alone as if she’s defective if she can’t be happy alone. I try to tell her that I understand. She and I both agree that the things we like in life are made better when we’re sharing them. Nevertheless, I’m trying to suggest that she should sit with it for a little bit. It sucks, but it does bring back in to focus what matters and why (at least for me it has). She said without a relationship she is unhappy and she doesn’t understand how I’m not going crazy (without a relationship and without work). I try to tell her that there are days where I feel like I am going crazy, but then I realized she really just needs to vent and feel bad for herself. And honesty, I’m not sure my advice is all that good. I’ve spent a year trying to be the person I want to find and seem to be coming back to only a slightly different version of myself. For the most part, I was the person I wanted to find, and I had the relationship I wanted to have. The vision… it hasn’t changes all that much. I’ve mentioned before that B once told me that she also lost the future we were planning. The reality is, neither of us lost that future, we just lost the person we had hoped to spend it with. I still want the life she and I were going to have, and to some degree, I’ve been pursuing it anyway. And this is what I tried to tell Cheri. Yes, it’s nicer to share it, but you get to a point when you realize that if you can find happiness where you can get it, you’ll be that much better off when it is time to share it.