half right

well you shouldn't doctor yourself
well i pictured somebody else
someone that looks like
what i look like

would you say that the one of your dreams
got in you and ripped out the seams
that's what i'd say
that's what i'd say -- heatmiser, "half right" (a song I always thought was called "not half right," but those are really the same thing, are they not?)

I have so much to say and it’s so jumbled together and now even moreso, and, well, despite my ardent defense of confessional writing tonight in an interview on the topic, this may be a little vague by necessity, but still important to me to say.

I forget things if I don’t write them down (even if I do), and sometimes I’m much more prescient than I realize. “Show love by any means necessary” was my six-word New Year’s resolution, and sometimes I forget that included in that second word is loving myself. Not berating myself for having the “wrong” feelings or failing to meet my goals.

I also meant it as broadly as possible. I don’t think this year is so much about the romantic kind of love. I get that maybe I’m not ready for it, or maybe I am, who knows. But most of all I want the people I do love to know it, for real, not just on some crappy ass blog, but to feel it. To know that they make me cry and smile and make me so proud of them. When I forget to show people how much I care, when I neglect my friends or hibernate for too long, I feel a little lost, disconnected, not half right.

I was sitting listening to the panel last night and hearing Ellen talk and while I was listening to everyone’s words, I was also thinking about our friendship. About what friendship means and how, for me, so much of it is about getting to know someone well enough that you know their laugh, their inflections, their body language. To hear the things they say, and what they don’t say. To think about them just randomly and pass along my little tips and be able to look at pictures of them (and their kids) and just be made happy because of that. I know I probably sound ridiculous but it’s trueæI’m so honored to have the friends that I do. They are so smart and beautiful and brilliant and each in their own way they inspire me so much. I sometimes don’t know what to do with that love I want to show; I don’t know where to put it or when it’s appropriate, and sometimes people find it too much. I’ve tried to kindof shunt it off and slow it down or turn it around into work or other things, but ultimately I can’t really hug my laptop. Okay, I could, but it’s just not quite the same.

I also know that I wouldn’t have felt so out of it today, so totally brain scrambled, if what happened last fall had not been about my heart. I know it’ll get better even it takes what feels like forever, but him and K. just somehow got inside me in ways I don’t know how to undo or simply make go away.

don’t worry I’ve done plenty of practicing
these days I say goodbye more than anything -- the reputation, "alaskan"

Rejection, or just that slow fizzling out of what once might have had potential, I’m used to and lately have been so in my own head, I barely have time to dwell on that. But I just keep coming back to these same points over and over, ones I think I’ve tried to cover up with bitterness or anger or laughter (alcohol would be way faster, for sure) and I guess I want it all to mean something. Not in the sense that there’s some big dramatic scene or confrontation, not even that it needs to meet something to anyone else, but something to me. That I haven’t been so out of it for all this time for no reason whatsoever, over someone who’s just your garden variety “fucked up train wreck.” I want my own special fucked up train wreck, thank you very much.

In all seriousness, past all the anger and hurt, I just think the whole thing is sad. It’s sad to see someone with so much potential, not as a boyfriend even, but as a person, not live up to it. It’s sad because it’s a very “there but for the grace of G-d thing” to me; I always feel like I’m on the brink of failure, of letting people down, of not doing the right thing because I don’t think I deserve it. I feel like he’s been in the air even when he hasn’t been, literally, which is why I just wanted to get that over with, to see what I’d do. And, yeah, my heart again. It sped up, and then it stopped and it was like all my senses were on orange alert. I wanted to see him and not, I wanted to be there, and not, and I feel the same way about those artifacts of writing that keep popping up. They’re like ghosts written by some girl I used to know and when I realize that that girl is me it’s so jarring. It makes me want to hurry up and get 31 over with so this can be the year I made lots of mistakes, like 32 and onward will be perfect. I know it doesn’t work like that but I like to have my little illusions, as false as they may turn out to be.

I think what still hurts me the most is not the complete irony of worrying about being too slutty, of telling him how much integrity he had, of trying to be the best girlfriend I could be, but rather that, I suspect, sadly, that we are more alike than either of us would like to admit. I don't mean mirror images, I don't mean exactly, but in the ways that count, in the motivation, in whatever's lacking somewhere inside of us, I have a feeling in another life we could've maybe bonded over that. Or been codependent, or whatever. (Since this is my fantasy of another life, I'll go with the former.) And that’s not something most others would see, and that’s okay. I don’t need to crack my brain open to prove it. I know what’s inside it and I guess if I learned any lesson it’s that we all have dark sides, maybe ones we don’t share with anyone else because to do so would be to cross some unbearable line. It would mean admitting some flaw in our shiny surfaces, and not just some little flaw, but one that threatens us at our very foundation. Whether that’s real or imagined, I felt (and still do) that recognition, that sense of, oh, I get it, life’s too good so you have to find a way to self-destruct. I’m so fucking right there and have been most of my life it’s not even funny.

Okay, and lesson two is that I like the dark side, I suppose. Too much sunshine and perfection rings false to me, makes me unable to relate, simply doesn’t compute. And, yes, part of me wants that, but part of me knows it’s unrealistic. And, if I am completely, totally honest, if someone else is perfect, there is no way I can help them. No way I can be of use or maternal or all those other words like that that I thrive on. In a big way, I guess that aspect of friendships/relationships makes me feel a little less needy, less greedy, less fucked up, if I can help someone else. That sounds so…altruistic and icky, maybe, but it’s true. I keep plopping down on my new home base on my kitchen floor and there’s this thermometer I bought, when he was sick, still in the package. Honestly, more than any sex anything, doing stupid shit like that is what I want out of a relationship, what I looked forward to in that one. I liked being asked my opinion, liked what I think now was an illusion, that I was there for more than just my body. That feeling of being needed, by someone other than myself, is so paramount and I guess I felt like I’d failed in making myself someone he could talk to. (And I am not absolving his part in this, I’m just saying that that feeling is still there for me a bit.)

I hate facing my own dark side, so I get it. I get that just as women use food to thwart all those awful feelings of doubt and lack of self-worth and all the rest, all the things Caroline Knapp and Anna David write about, men use sex for the same thing. What’s most sad and ironic to me about all of it is that I wish I could’ve been that person he could confide in. That even if we weren’t fated to be lovers, we could somehow be friends. And maybe it’s best this way, of course it is, but sometimes I still want that.

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me last night, and today, and for the last six months that wasn’t wistful. That didn’t 100% mean things I shout maybe too loudly to people I hardly know, like “I’m so glad I didn’t get pregnant.” And that’s not just cause I want to have a baby, which I do, but not at all costs. There are plenty of people I’ve slept with who I’m glad I did not procreate with, and he would’ve been wrong in too many ways to count, so I should be grateful, and I am…except when I’m not.

What I’ve tried, and clearly not totally succeeded at, is figuring out how I can go down a different path than the one I feel somehow drawn to, especially when the chips are down. The one of various family members, the one of his, the one that finds the easy, emotionally numbing solution to things rather than the harder, more challenging, but ultimately more rewarding path. Sometimes I have to ask myself what kind of mom I want to be someday, what I want to role model for my kids. I have to almost pull myself away from the dark side because I know it wants too much, it’s an all or nothing proposition and I can’t afford to go there.

So look homeward baby
Keep your eyes on the sky
They will never forgive you
So don't ask them to try
This is your party, I know
it's not your ideal
May we all find salvation
In professions that heal -- shawn colvin, “cry like an angel”

I always thought that line was about healing other people, but I don’t think we can ever do that until we heal ourselves. Writing, for better or for worse, is what heals me. And by “worse” I mean that it’s not an instant process. It sometimes seems to stubbornly draw things out and yet when I have nowhere else to go with the thoughts that feel paralyzing, like, oh, all of the above, this is where I go. And to others, often songwriters, who just put their own poetic, beautiful spin on things. Part of why I’m extra psyched for Chicago and BlogHer is to see Elizabeth Elmore. It’s been way too long and she’s one of the most brilliant people I know, for me, the kind of person that just being around them, listening to them, makes me feel a little bit better, a little bit happier (or sometimes a lot). Her lyrics, more than anyone else’s, could literally be my life.

I have no real conclusion. Everything I thought I wanted to say got upended and spun around and I’m just trying to focus on being healthy, mind and body, on taking care of myself first and once I’ve got that under control, taking care of other people. And I hope even if I can’t show that love immediately or as intensely as I might like to, that the people who need to know, know.