You know when a relationship ends and a friend says, “They don’t deserve your time.” You get it but you also want to ship your well-meaning friend on a one-way plane to China. You are not ready to love yourself enough to quantify the loss in terms of your time. You had loose rocks and holes that this person patched to where you felt like a bad paper mache project in elementary school by the time they left. It was a one way street in a bad neighborhood that you wandered down thinking, maybe there is a renovation? No. There is not. It’s a dead end. And as you get older, you get increasingly aware of how you are losing time, but even more so that you are fucking around by not finding your person. How come someone can show signs of being dodgy and non committal but because they have half of what we want, we think, well, I’ll just give them hot summer nights and hushed conversations in coffee shops. I’ll just give them half my time and I will be safe. That’s delusional. You can’t give half your heart because you are being cautionary with your time. At least I can’t. If they are not 100% your person, you are wasting your time. Hit the road, Jack.
Who wants to say, “I lost years to them,” but most of us have. When I told a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile about the break up, he asked me how I was.
“I am shockingly fine,” I said. “Not angry, not happy.” He nodded.
“That, my dear,” he said, “is indifference.” I was thrilled to be indifferent. I felt almost like a Nordic sea captain (because that seems like a stoic vocation). Yet the next day, as I was in my new state of singledom, I thought, wow, now I have time again. Time not to wonder if I was really being loved. But uh oh, time to over analyze so I made the egg crack time rule. The ended relationship only got the amount of time in my head that it takes to crack an egg. And as you know, if you wack it right on the side of the bowl, that’s half a second.
I once added up the months and the hours I had spent with someone who hadn’t treated me so great, and a raw ache inside wanted that time back. Lessons also take time. There is no detour because Lord knows I have tried. We need to keep living “the lesson” until we wake up and go, “Oh, that’s what I do. I am not doing that anymore.“ This is not a freaking row of Girl Scout cookies. This is serious. This is our time to fulfill our sacred Karma on this earth, if you believe in that shit. I have been in calculating time mode and working hard to not be angry and okay with the lessons of time, but also making the firm leap to take better possession of my time and what I am here to do. We squander time in so many useless ways, looking for liberation, and deciding not to sit and deepen. We suffer when we try and do a dance for people who don’t get us or love us as much as they promise to. We have to be more intuitive and also stronger. Or you will just lose your shirt to time.
I had my wall leak during the torrential rains in Southern California. My new condo windows were apparently “weeping,” an irony considering I refused to shed a tear for the time this person took from me. My windows weeped for me. Nature sobbed for me. I stood there like a hard shell refusing to let my insides give another minute of precious emotion and all around me the world sobbed. We are all oceans of emotion inside but we get to choose who taps into our tides. I have sat by many oceans with my thoughts hijacked my someone who didn’t love me. Now I won’t do that. No this isn’t some song from Sting’s solo career. I am not building a fortress around my heart.
But I am becoming a better key master to my precious time.
If You Are Looking to do some writing:
This header should say, if you are looking to do some crying. My dear friend and mentor Rory Green held one of her signature writing workshops, and in a sacred circle, six women and I for two hours read our spontaneous writing and shed tears for each other. As I listened to the meditation prompt, I was profoundly aware of the conflict I was having with aging and the intimacy of nudity, and then when Rory instructed us to go into the woods and be met by someone, I found myself with my old friend Erik Ferrar from Long Island. He had a very nice message for me, but that was weird. And as I read my writing about feeling like I may never meet someone who was my person I could be nude with on a consistent basis, my stomach was all in knots about the emotion and I felt like I was going to vomit my soul. And then I cried about the other writers’ deceased mothers and friends. By the time I left, I realized I needed to do that more often. We walk around all bottled up determined not to feel something because we are so damn busy but we really have to. Nothing is more cathartic than going to a writing group with no intention of writing anything for publication, weeping and discovering you are ashamed of your own nudity.
What I wish someone would create:
A mail service that ships you the one thing you need when the weather is about to turn. When rain is forecast, you get a new umbrella in the mail. When it is about to be blazing hot, you get a sun hat. When the weather is a bit cooler in fall, a concert going blanket. In the winter you just get sent chocolate. I think it could be curated for each state, and even based on a socio-economic demographic.
Technology Tip:
Researching for a friend…
When you block someone, you can’t see their messages unless you unblock them and you then can only see the messages they then send when they are unblocked. It would be cool to continue to see what they are saying even when they are blocked because you need someone kind of revenge or redemption for finally making the decision to leave and love yourself. But alas, blocked is blocked and the general consensus on the message boards for this kind of thing is “Why would you block someone and still want to see their messages?” To which I wanted to just reply. “Duh?!”
Shameless Plug:
As an abuse survivor and author of the book No Longer Denying Sexual Abuse: Making The Choices That Can Change Your Life, I have a mission. I want every single person on this planet who is still in the dread of facing abuse to reach out a hand and get help. I want their lives to be illuminated and magnified with the glory of recovery and peace when they come out of denial. This week my book is available, and I hope if you can, you buy it, or buy it for someone else, or buy ten or twelve and give them away because there is no lack of people who need them.
Love this one. Lots of truth. I love metaphors and analogies and anything that makes more visual the simplest things we keep missing.
We are all a product of the time invested in ourselves vs. that given to others, whether by choice or circumstances. We have to decide whether we are worthy of self-investment or giving our time and effort to somone else that influences our life. The choice is ours to make and hold on to for life. We should be our #1 investor because who else is going to do it?? If we don't believe in ourselves first, no one else will do it for us (unless we are a childing with a doting parent .... not likely now).
As for bottling up emotions, leave the bottling to wine makers. Emotions, like wine, will only turn sour and bitter if not released in due time. Releasing emotions and bitter memories should be cathartic and feel like you just exhaled your last breath, only to realize you purged and are breathing pure fresh air on a mountain top for the first time in ages.