home again.

Loving and missing. My heart keeps on longing to reunite with your presence. Panging. For your laughter. Hungry for your gaze. The way that being next to you felt. It's like I haven't been home in a long time. Like I'll never be home again.

All Sorts of Confused

It's coming up on a year and I feel all sorts of confused.  I continue to be in this strange, disorienting limbo.  I openly talk about and make light of all the woes of dating because I don't really want to be doing it.  I know that I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life just because what I thought was the big love of my life actually destroyed me.  But as it turns out, it's incredibly difficult to heal from that destruction.  And it's incredibly terrifying to think of letting anyone try for that with me again.  I can't fathom trusting someone.  I'm in disbelief that anyone will make the memories fade to the background. 

I've always prided myself on knowing how to sift through it all in dating.  Sure, there are awkward moments or things that are hard to say, but I've always been able to tell when someone isn't for me.  Aside from intentional questions and keen observation, usually there's this undeniable sense in my gut.  I can't feel that anymore.  Some men seem kind, smart, funny, are attractive, and have it together, but I feel nothing at all.  I find myself lost in not knowing what to do.  For the first time in my life, I know without a doubt I am scared to be vulnerable.  Not even just scared, I don't want to and I don't feel it.  I'm scared in general.  It's almost like I don't even know how to take dating seriously because I'm just...broken.  I was the most vulnerable I've ever been toward someone and it broke me. 

Yet, I try because I'm lonely and because I think, maybe somehow someday I'll find a way to be open.  Maybe I'll strike luck and someone truly good will find me.  But I don't really believe that.  And I don't know anymore how I'd recognize that.  Even the kindest are capable of changing you with their hurt.  Then I think, maybe I'll just wait for someone to fall for me, then I'll see if I want them too.  Though my integrity would never let me do that!  

My feelings feel the same as they did a year ago and I don't really want to wait for them to change if they haven't in that long.  Yet I don't know if or when my gut will speak to me again.  Maybe it's still in shock, too.  I'm confused, lonely, exhausted, and scared, nearly a year later. 

Sometimes

Sometimes I really wish I could just have a realization that he didn't love me. Sometimes that's the subtext and it fits, but then I rewind the tape further and find myself more confused - if that wasn't love, then what is? And then I find myself scared because I don't know what the fuck love is. I know that I think I still have it for someone who I think didn't have it for me. At best, liked some aspect of my company, but not my heart. Couldn't have liked my heart, or he would've been careful in how he let it down.

Sometimes that all feels very true to me. Then I get scared if I believe it, I won't know how to move forward. I already don't know how to move forward. My heart is frozen in place. Memories playing as a montage, interrupting my thought. I'm constantly asking myself: how did he just let that all go? How did every one of these million little moments just disappear from him while they haunt me? 

Sometimes I get so confused, reconciling the truest moments of him, to the ending; the kindness of the person I knew, with the cruelty of how he treated me after. Which one is true? Because they're incongruent, they can't both be true. I see these little flashes of who I thought I knew as him; the deepest place in him, the core shining through the cracks at the surface. I loved that core. I've truly never loved someone like that. And it was found worthless. Disposable. Meaningless.

No wonder my depression morphed:  The very best thing I thought one could offer to another in this life, didn't actually matter. And I didn't know it, I thought it was all that truly mattered, to love and be loved deeply. It's terrifying that I thought I was loved and thought the love I gave was significant, but neither seem true anymore. As time passes and I'm still trapped in the mystery, the cognitive dissonance is too strong – I can't believe that it was ever real. It feels like it was a dream I had. 

Now I hold myself in without even trying. I keep me from being touched. I have no desire to be open. It feels as though I might disintegrate, if I ever dare to love again and still only lose; if I let myself be seen to my depths, only to be unwanted. The pain of that is still so heavy, I find myself amazed I've survived it this long. 

Far From Through

It dawned on me, this isn't going away. I've never loved someone that way. And like the drop on your stomach on a rollercoaster or driving down a steep hill, it hit me: I might always feel this. I don't doubt that I can love again, if that's where my life and path leads. But I have this anchored feeling; grounded in me heavy and settled, like gravity of a thing - that this love will persist in me. It brought me to tears writing that, because the missing is so heavy, too, and I don't want to feel it. The weight of carrying a care that is severed and knowing it will be my companion for a long time, maybe even indefinitely. It's another facet of grief. 

I realized recently I'm in another wave of grief. I didn't really feel it for a while, at least not often, and my life went on fairly normally. Perhaps I even distracted myself from it. But you can never do that for long with grief and longing. They make themselves known; demand your attention when you've turned away from or lost sight of them. They remind you that they are far from through here. 

Though I've never done *this* before, I do remember feeling like I'd never not feel it. I've loved someone in a romantic relationship before, but this was different, deeper. This was past the infatuation, to the part where you've examined it and you choose it. I knew this was what I wanted, because it was like the way that coming home feels or the way you know your own name. It's a strange and confusing feeling to reconcile now with the fact that he's not in my life. To find yourself in a mix of certainty and want for something that no longer exists. Yet the knowing presses on as if bent on torturing me, while my grief attempts to chip away at it. As it turns out, when you know and you choose like that, it's an arduous process to break down. 

While I know I end up sounding mellow dramatic, I try to explain that this wasn't like any old breakup. This is removing from me the fragments of it all. This is coming apart from a whole lived and envisioned life that was based on a togetherness that isn't anymore. For some reason others can be quick to dismiss its significance, but I'm still here, one half of the togetherness, living with still open wounds it left on me.

There is a gaping hole in my life that I'm forced to become familiar with. In spite of my loneliness, as I succumb to it, I'm finding right now I need to be single. I'm finding my heart needs indefinite time to sort through how such certainty became such uncertainty, calling my intuition into question. I don't know if I know how to choose someone. I don't know if I know how to receive love or what it even actually is. I don't know if I know how to love someone else. I don't know how my heart will heal from this ... but I know it's far from through. 

What Dating Has Taught Me About Myself

People always talk about how you learn so much about yourself through dating.  I guess I never realized until now that they're right, but in reality how it is so harmful.  See, the men I've dated have taught me that I'm wonderful, "enchanting", amazing, kind, intelligent, sexy, - but not worth it.  "It" being effort, communication, honesty, time, respect, self-reflection, being heard, buying a drink, leaving a prime parking spot...you name it.  I'm great – but not worthy.

Don't get me wrong, as I've had to tell my therapist many times, I don't believe this at all – but they all seem to.  So I keep getting my hopes up and dashed, whether a shallow or deep encounter.  Each and every time, I can think back and find somewhere he didn't want to put the work in.  Now, I'm not demanding backflips through crazy hoops, or asking for anything unreasonable, by any means.  In fact I think I'm asking for what I deserve, as a human being offering my time and heart.  Somehow I haven't met a man that is willing to put in the effort where it's needed.

It's exhausting and discouraging. I know I don't deserve to be treated this way, but I find myself questioning if there's anyone out there who will treat me as though all the things they think are attractive about me, actually make me deserving of their effort.  That anyone will treat me as if once found, I'm someone unquestioningly worth effort to keep around.  I find myself taking what I can get, until I am frustrated that I have to tolerate these things – because even confronting is too much. 

Dating has taught me that I'm both too much and not worth it.  Can you blame me if I feel completely closed off to admiration always intermixed with rejection?

Love and the Grief of Vacancy

I miss him in such a deep way, it's almost become subtle. It's not in my face every day anymore, it's just down in my gut, just there. It's something I live with now, a perpetual sense of loss. My new companion is the void left by my old one. Yet, I can't count how many times lately that I've felt happy or okay and then felt guilty, realizing it feels like continuing on after someone's died. It feels truly like that kind of grief. And sometimes still like I'm crazy and the whole thing probably never happened. That seems more like my mind still trying to make sense of it, whereas my body, my gut knows that I had someone close and I lost them. 

I've had and lost love before, and that hurt, but not like this. The love wasn't like this, neither was the pain. At first, in the weeks following the end of the relationship, I had the sense that it had changed me and that it was in a way that no loss had before. It broke me down to a degree I can only remember one other time in my life coming close but it still misses. More stable now but still living with it all in my gut, I know that it changed me. 

For a while in the relationship I'd get flashes of anxiety about losing him someday, to the end of life – I was that kind of in love. I was already predicting how painful it would be to have loved long and deep, then lose. And I experienced that, yet, I don't regret it. I thought I did, in the heaviest of the pain. But when you do love long and deep, it's not something that can simply be undone. Even after incomprehensible hurt, it did not go away. Days, weeks, and months have passed without a word, since we last touched, since I said goodbye not even knowing it was going to be the last goodbye; he chose to die to me, and still love persists in me. I suppose that's why I also felt anger: in spite of it all, I longed for him.

The strange thing is that lately I feel mostly okay. I also often feel a pit in my stomach and heavy tears overtake me. But a lot of my life feels okay. Only there's this big, vacant space in it, where something is undoubtedly missing. It's as if standing in your home, but there's no furniture or belongings. Everything sounds different and you feel peculiar wandering about in it. It's both foreign and familiar; it's a little normal and yet completely wrong. Disorienting. Yet it's reality.

It wasn't my choice, this reality, but I've survived it by a strand of hope I somehow had for not ending up alone. The tiniest belief that maybe someday when I choose someone, they will also choose me back; someday, when someone really sees me, they will value what they see. They will be scared to lose it – not scared to accept it. I've been sustained by the littlest, faintest hope that the ability to see and connect and put in the work will be recognized for its value and held onto with a grip both fierce and tender. That I'll be loved with the same unrelenting love that I can't help but have for the ones who take up space in my life. That someone will lay their head next to mine at the end of the day and feel awe and gratitude that I'm sharing this life with them.

Taking Me Back

I love the visceral way that music can take me back to some moment of significance it played to in my life. I'm revisiting an album that's been with me in many parts of my life, but I haven't listened to in a while. The single from that album stopped me from what I was doing.

Immediately I'm transported back to being 19 and feeling youthful and hungry for life's adventure – alive. So alive. But it goes further back with me. 

17 years old, it was one of the lucky CDs on rotation in my 6-disc-changer, which was housed in the trunk of my car. I remember the car seemed so nice in comparison to my first one which had crank windows, no AC, and a loud muffler. This car had a 6-disc-changer and a stereo with great bass. Fake walnut accents on the dash. Most importantly: a moonroof. I felt like I was taking on the world, so independent and cruising around with the windows down, singing along. 

When the single came out, I was 15. I thought it was longer ago than that because that oldest memory, that version of me in my memory seems so young, so little just yet of who I am now. The single came on the radio as I was dropped off at the bus to go on my youth group's service project trip. Then it played over the headphones connected to my discman probably a hundred times on the long drive to West Virginia. On the bus ride home I sat beside my classmate since first grade who then became my lifelong best friend. 

All from one song, in a split second, the images and feelings from these different times in my life, really my adolescence came rushing in.  

The Strange Monster

Depression is a strange monster. 

There are things you can do to weaken it, but they're hard to do because of it. There are pills you can take to make you stronger than it, but just enough to survive. There are days you feel like it's finally gone, only for it to show up the next day, rearing its ugly head. And there are whole days lost to laying underneath its full weight. 

I don't have bad days all that often; depression hasn't been with me my whole life. In the pandemic my depression has felt more like an ever-present companion – at times it's more in my face than others. Perhaps there's some rhythm to the worst of it that I just haven't hacked yet. Today was one of those days. And sometimes it's kind to me and lines up with days I have nothing to do, maybe more the nothing to do invites it in, but today was not that day. 

Today was a draw a bath (well, that's every day in my house), bring the coffee up, and pour some salts in kind of depression day. Write some things, cry a bit, write some things, cry a bit... Sometimes I almost believe the monster needs to be tended to. It needs attention to stay away for a little while after. Which is what struck me today. I actually knew what to do when I realized it was not going to be a good day but that I didn't want to surrender to the monster's heaviness. 

I decided to drop the dog at daycare. I finished my long bath after really shaving my legs, and we got in the car. I had one of my favorite albums playing while I drove, and I didn't try but just thought, even though there are days like this when everything big feels hopeless, there's always this music. And I felt just a little better. When I got home, I thought since it was a balmy 10 degrees today, I should finally change the engine air filter in my car. I've never done it before, turns out it's insanely easy. Great! I got one little something done. Next, I made myself a delicious, quality meal and enjoyed it without anyone whining at me. Just before my first session, I put on some makeup to brighten up my not-so-cheerful face. And wouldn't you know: my last session of the night was a home run. 

When the dust settled, it's still one of those days; no simple magic had slain the dragon. But I found a little relief that if you care for the monster and meet its needs, it isn't quite as treacherous to have in your company. 

Worth & Hurt

I do want it again. The head over heels love. Gratefulness just to be near them in the day-to-day. The inability to imagine life without them. But I find myself wondering, do you get that more than once?

I know I can open my heart again, but won't anything else feel a little less sparkly? Or will my heart be resistant to feeling head over heels, grateful, and like something could possibly be forever? Logically, I think it's the latter, as I know my wary heart is fearful in resisting hope that there can be something sparkly again. I sit with a mixture of longing and fear; daunted and yet unable to let fear keep me from being seen. 

After my last relationship, I kept hearing this thing to me that drove me nuts: "it's not a reflection of your worth." I know rejection isn't a reflection of my worth, though it is my painful and perplexing reality nonetheless. When what you really want is to be seen for who you are and found captivating, inspiring to gratitude, and an undeniable fixture in one's life; for someone to recognize your worth and grab hold of the chance to share in life with you? Yeah, rejection of that very idea is painful. It feeds hopelessness. It bolsters fear. 

Yet the only reason I can dare to try to open my heart is because I know my worth. I value sharing life with others and find that the most fulfilling relationships are the most intimate ones, in which full selves commune. I know that what I have to bring to a relationship, especially a partnership is something worth having and being grateful for, committing to. But all of that doesn't mean I'm not scared to offer it because the last time I did it was rejected, and that hurt. I am not concerned that I'm unworthy, I am afraid of ever knowing that pain again.