finding the balance
I admit that I am a rather extreme person – I always want to completely ditch and do everything over again. I guess its part of my whole my-life-is-broken thing. But one of the things that I have discovered in this last week is that there *is* a balance between moving forward and being yourself. I’m proud that I’ve come to this conclusion on my own, because even though I’ve always sought balance, I never realized what I was trying to balance.
Since I came back, I’ve been on this mission to change my life. New person, new furniture, new job, new boyfriend. I have tried not to clean or be obsessive about to-do’s and projects, because I wanted to “relax”. I’ve tried to force myself to let John go by imagining him with this girl he’s dating. And the thing is, I have felt like a complete stranger in my own life. I tried to tolerate mess, but in the end, it just made me feel transitional.
I have seen something really incredible in me the last three weeks. I have seen the person that I can be, the person that I am inside, the person that I want to be. I have had moments of pure love and peace. But I am still the same person. And just because I know what I want to be, doesn’t mean I’m going to get there right away. And just because I have opened up another side/aspect of me, doesn’t mean that what I was before isn’t valid or cannot be a part of me.
I’m not ready to sustain that “new me”, because I haven’t lived in it for long enough. Its going to take micro concrete steps to ingrain it into me, to stop feeling the fears that I have. Additionally, I’m still the same person I was. It took me 31 years to become who I am, and even though I often feel empty, or like I don’t know my identity, in fact, I do. I worked hard to get my chores done, to tackle projects and become productive. It took me 3 years to finally straighten out my finances. Why would I ditch – against my better instinct – a positive habit that I actively cultivated?
I was on an interview last week, and someone asked me if I had to choose between doing X and Y, what would I choose? My answer was that it wasn’t about choosing – it was about prioritizing. I may enjoy X, and choose to make that my primary career choice, but I still want to explore Y. It just means that Y gets less mental real estate and time.
This is the way that I am seeing myself, and my gradual transformation into a stronger, more open person. I have seen the X that I want to be, but I still am the Y. As I develop the X, and it becomes more natural to me, it may become my priority or focus, but the Y is still there. I just may spend less time on it. And it makes sense, right, because I have spent years developing the Y part, so its more a natural part of who I am now. It just takes less time to be Y. I focus less on being more Y, but I still retain all the values of becoming Y to begin with.
The truth is, I’m no different than I was before. The compassion and love that I’ve finally released has always been there, just buried under pain and fear. I’m choosing to focus and develop it now, now that I have a solid sense of my personality, my career goals, my ability to be strong and survive. I don’t need to be any stronger, focus anymore on my career, or struggle to survive anymore. I have gotten to the saturation point with those areas, and continuing on that trajectory starts putting me in the negative curve where it becomes too extreme or counterproductive. At the same time, I shouldn’t just throw it all away.
Today, I got off my ass and did laundry. Yes, you heard right. And that made me feel more normal again. I don’t want to change everything about my life, because I am realizing that not everything about my life was miserable. I don’t want to be a completely different person, because I like who I am – I just think I could be a better person. And frankly, if this is not what J wants in a partner, as much as that hurts me, it is not something I am willing to give up.
As far as J goes, well – I’ve decided my path there. My goal to regain his trust by just being is ultimately the kind of person I want to be: someone who will sacrifice her own sense of safety, vulnerability, and pride to preserve a relationship or put someone else’s needs ahead of hers. If I am ever to be a wife and a mother, I better not be walking away and saying, fuck all, I’m moving on. So even if my friends think I’m dumb for putting myself out there, I’m going to do it. Because I believe that that is the right thing for me.
I’m not ready, by any stretch of the imagination, to put myself in that vulnerable position with J. I do not trust that I don’t have ulterior motives, that I’ll be able to tolerate the time and potential rejection that it will take to rebuild his trust. I’m not strong enough, sure enough about myself yet, and I can easily fall into the trap of being controlling, or defensive. Until I feel ready, it would be counterproductive. But its something that I want to work towards, and it crystalizes my vision of myself as a loving and compassionate being, a mother, a wife.
And in the end, doing this would be the ultimate form of letting go of control – not even controlling my own vulnerability, much less how J reacts or what he chooses to do.
But I guess the biggest lesson that I’m learning – and the reason why I really believe that I am on the path to real change – is that everything takes time. Everything takes practice. I cannot just have an epiphany one day and suddenly things are different, just like I can’t explain J or anyone to just forgive me because I’ve realized the errors of my ways.
And finally, everything takes balance. Anchoring myself to my old life, by doing something as simple as laundry, as acknowledging that my life goes on as is, has helped me stop feeling like such a stranger in a strange land. Sometimes its good to see things from a different perspective, but its not sustainable.
So for now, I am focusing on getting a job, becoming whole, learning compassion. I need to give more love to Pumpkin, who has had my time, but not my mindshare as of late. If I meet someone, great – my profiles are all still out there – but I’m not in a rush. As much as I can understand J’s desire to find someone else to soothe the hurt, I know for me that that is not what will take the pain away. If I can feel happy in myself, then it will be a hell of a lot easier to say, well, if he doesn’t like me the way I am, oh well.
