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| 'lil friend in the yard |
It's humorous for me, not in a "haha" way but that, y'know, other way, to look back at my great big goals for 2020 and how great things were going to be for me. I didn't put pen to paper on most of these goals, I certainly didn't make them law for my new resolution, but I had them. I'm sure everyone entering this new decade thought it would start out with exciting changes and fresh starts. Little did we know what those exciting changes would entail... little did I know what those would entail. And I think for the bulk of us, this little quarantine and removal of a lot of our normal daily tasks has forced an introspection whether we wanted it or not. Maybe that's just how I'm taking it? The opportunity to look at myself, my life, and my choices?
Today is day 23 under self-isolation.
Being apart from people, or being apart from what I had once considered a normal routine, has done strange things to me. When Pottery Barn (or rather, Williams Sonoma Inc) announced we'd be closing for two weeks (now another two weeks (who knows beyond that)) my thoughts were scattered in three directions.
The first was worry for my team of employees. Being the General Manager means being essentially a parent, despite most of my team being older than me (some old enough to actually be my parent). How would I keep them motivated, and if not motivated, reminded that I'm thinking of them? That I'm here and that I get it and that I understand what financially this means to some of them. That I know it's scary.
The second direction was fear for my own sanity. I'd been in such a blended state of emotions since Andrew left that I often didn't want to be around anybody, but I was finally getting back to a place where I was looking forward to going to work. A distraction, maybe, but also a place where the people love me and I love them. Where I could focus on day-to-day tasks and get through it. Now I had to stop?
And third, honestly, the excitement of having two weeks away from work (essentially) where I could have time to start working on a few projects and get my personal life in some form of an order. It was going to be great to catch up with friends, reaching out to people I hadn't spoken to in months if not years, and reconnecting. To finally get back to what I had always considered my own reality.
But then that ebbed.
It was a quicker realization than I maybe anticipated. That "reality" I was focused on returning to? It didn't exist anymore. I realized that while I maybe thought it was just within my grasp, it really wasn't at all. Not that it's a bad thing. Within a few days of isolation and having time to just be alone with my thoughts, I could see that some of the paths I walked in the past are gone now. Washed out by the rains, if you will. The directions these paths took, be they friendships or relationships or familiar bonds... the routes I myself took at the forks in the road, had shifted things in me. I realized that sometimes it's okay to just let the past be where it is. Maybe all roads converge again at some point, maybe they don't. Who am I to try to mess with that?
I've always been fond of the quote "dreams die hard and you hold them in your hand long after they've turned to dust," and I refuse to let that be me. I can't let that be me, squeezing the past so tightly in my grasp that I don't realize how everything around me has changed yet thinking I remained the same.
To start my isolation, I made a Multiples video. Bucking tradition, I excluded two of the multiples and just brought it back to the main team of myself, Lane, and Nicole. The point of the project was to write out something in a script that would be the slap in the face I needed. I could give Nicole the more "honest" things to say, because that's what she's here for. To shine a light on the dark bits and maybe brighten the mood as a result. Typically I love making these videos, despite the amount of work that goes into them, because I have such a fun time in front of the camera. I usually mess up a lot, make light of things, slip into voices, etc., and then you the viewer gets to enjoy (hopefully) a chorus of bloopers at the end of said video.
This time it just felt heavy. Aside from a few line flubs as Lane, hardly anything as myself, and then difficulty remembering whole speeches as Nicole... it was heavy. I was still upset about Andrew. Scratch that, I am still upset. I guess I figured having to scream the line "I AM angry!" directly at the camera would offer some sort of catharsis, but it didn't. I screamed the line four times and then broke down in tears. And I had a good cry. And then I finished a few lines with tears still in my eyes, and wrapped the shoot. When I was editing it all together, I sat and watched myself screaming and then the subsequent falling-apart, and then I fell apart again because I've never seen that side of me.
I don't know about you, but I don't really cry in front of cameras or mirrors very often. Could just be me though.
I released the video to general appreciation. It made people laugh, which is always my goal, because I love to laugh as well. Particularly I love to laugh at myself, because what's the point if you can't do that? But there were a handful of you that saw something deeper in the video, who picked apart at the subtext. And I wanted to say that I appreciate you seeing me.
The interesting thing about self-isolation... or I suppose isolation by government mandate, as it were... is just exactly how much time you have to think. So why do I still find myself thinking about Andrew?
Really, why?
It's more than a month and a half on, yet my thoughts return to him on a daily if not semi-hourly basis. I made the Multiples video to move onward, but if anything it just brought everything back into an incredibly sharp focus. I know this should change, and that everyone says it will change, but it hasn't yet. So I keep trudging forward.
I thought I would be good at a month.
The hours after he left turned to days. The days turned into a full week, and I wrote him a letter. Did I tell you that? I actually used to write Andrew letters often, my idea to deal with the hard time we were having with the distance between us while he was living in Wisconsin. I thought if there was something physical, tangible, to hold on to then maybe that would help to bridge the divide? So it was only natural for me to write a letter when all of this had crumbled. All the things I didn't know to say, that I didn't know I wanted to say, composed in hopefully something that made a little bit of sense.
And he did write me back... and it was what it was.
That week turned into two weeks though, and then before I knew it a month was gone. Is it like Charlotte said in Sex & the City, that it takes half the time you dated someone to get over them? And if so, does my feeble attempt at a relationship that didn't even hit the length of a full-term pregnancy mean by mid summer I'll feel better? I can't imagine so... at least right now. If anything I'm dreading summer because I'll just be thinking about how GREAT it was last year. What a fool.
I guess more often than not I'm just embarrassed. I mean, c'mon team, let's not beat around the proverbial bush here. If one of my friends was this torn up from a not-quite-nine-months relationship, I'd tell them to get the hell over it. And here I am... so why can't I? That's the embarrassment. It comes slinking in through the shadows like some evil swamp witch, going to rest right in the corner of my mind. It's an ugly feeling, and it's one I've not often faced as an adult, but I think that's the advantage of getting older, right? You care less about what others think and are therefor less embarrassed by your actions.
But again, here I am. Embarrassed.
I do find it curious that at this point I'm still recalling minute details about our relationship and expecting them to somehow continue existing. When I go to bed, I still roll over before turning the light out with a current event to share. I still sit down to play a video game and think to ask him if he wants to play too. I know this won't last forever... in fact, several things have already disappeared. This makes me sad in too many ways to list. There have been lots of quiet times during this isolation and plenty of moments to think, but it's the true quiet times that are the worst. When the lights are turned out and I'm alone in bed, the fan running and the cats circling me for a place to sleep, and that's when I think about what's gone. I think about scary things, too, like an intruder in the house or a monster waiting in the guest room for when I inevitably wake up to use the restroom in the middle of the night. Then I realize the only monster is an angry past and the fact I'm not over it yet.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I still feel like I'm paddling at the water as it tries to rise above my head. Every time I get a thought of him, that water creeps higher. Maybe eventually the thoughts will wash away from me and drown on their own accord, but I don't know that. What panics me is that I'm not changing in the way I thought I would. I'm not reverting to the old person, pre Andrew. Conversely, I'm not really transforming into some new version of myself, post. I'm just here. Existing. Going about the day to day and trying to figure it all out.
The good that comes from all of this, if you want to call it that, is the random messages I get from people. Some reached out after reading the breakup blog... one of the breakup blogs, I guess... and let me know how they experienced the same. Or similar. Or not at all but how it touched them. Moved them.
Those are the good.
They make me feel a little less alone, they make me feel like I can maybe help by sharing my heartache. It's hard for me to say I want more people to reach out, because it also depends on my current mood. Sometimes people reach out from the blue and say "how're you doing with the breakup?" and my mind is instantly catapulted backward from whatever good moment I had been having, and I get mad.
I suppose maybe that's because I haven't been as mad as I should be? I also suppose that at this point I do see the large amount of negative aspects that came with this relationship. His jealousy, my self-silencing, and the paranoia and the fear someone would screw up from both of us. The constant need to try to impress, the constant worry I'd say or do something that would cause disappointment or distrust. That's not a relationship. That's not the relationship I wanted, it's not the one I deserved, but it is the one I found myself in. For all of the flaws though, there were a million more bonuses. And for some reason those are the only things I have been honing in on.
That quote is what it all boils down to, I think. My friend Che posted it this morning and it was one of those "a-ha" moments I'm so fond of stumbling across. When the cards are laid out or when the dice are rolled, whatever you want to call it, Andrew just wasn't honest with me about a lot of things. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing that would make me say he's a liar, but he was not honest from the start. And what I felt... the love I exuded and poured into him... couldn't have been reciprocated with all of that hanging over his head. I know that, I do... but knowing and understanding are often two different things. And I'm still trying to understand it.
Self-isolation goes on though. Work on the house goes on. Editing of Episode IV of the book series goes on. I'm powering through shows I've kept on the back-burner, I'm listening to music I've never heard before, and I'm talking to people I never expected to find friendships in. Many of them are Instagram friends, from California to Spain, and their humor and attitudes and perspectives have been a truly wonderful thing for me to embrace and enjoy. I never had a penpal growing up, but I imagine it would've been like this. To an extent. It's never a bad thing to connect with individuals around the world, like my friend Salem in Spain who creates the most beautiful artwork I've ever seen. Or my friend Carlos in California who shares the same sense of humor I do. It's a time for branching out right now, because there really isn't much else to do.
I read a quote the other day that said "Maybe you're not healing because you're trying to be who you were before the trauma, and that person doesn't exist anymore. There is a new person trying to be born; breathe life into that person." That's where I'm at now. Who do I want to be? What road do I want to take, what changes do I want to make? It's an exciting prospect on the one hand and a scary one on the other. Maybe I just need to join my hands together and be nervously optimistic, both at the same time.
I'm not at post-breakup "anthem" levels of music yet, where belting out "Party for One" by Carly Rae Jepsen or rage screaming "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette both feel out of place. But I found a song recently called "Slippin" by Bre Kennedy that I felt comfortable enough attaching to this blog. With that, I'm going to retreat and find something to do around here. That part of me is still familiar, it hasn't changed... never gonna stop, either. Toodles gang (c:
Am I getting colder?
Time is just slippin' through my hands,
'cause I'm getting older.
Nothing is going as planned.
And every love I've ever lost
was just another line to cross,
for reasons I'm not made to understand.
It's time slippin' through my hands but,
I don't wanna say it.
I kind of hate it.
But it's fine, it's time,
just slippin' through my hands.
