a slip of the brain

there was an exhausting period of several weeks early in the summer when i was churning through every major doubt and insecurity i have. it felt involuntary, like i had no control over where my mind was going as it yanked me into every deep corner in my psyche and forced me to look at every ugliness in my being. i was questioning my job and my future, wondering about my sexuality and doubting my relationship with kevin and my basic self-worth. i hijacked dinners with girlfriends and turned them into therapy sessions about my job, which i was unable to bring myself to care about. i wrote kevin pages-long emails, desperate missives, while he was trying to move his mom out of their old home and certainly dealing with plenty on his own. i remember that day crying in the shower as i tried to accept what felt inevitable–he and i wouldn’t work out and i had to break up with him. the panic certainly felt real at the time, and i’d spent so much time in my last relationship lying to myself and to my ex that i was willing to do whatever i needed to to shake off those doubts. i remember begging becca to make my brain just stay still for a minute, i wanted to give myself a break so badly. when my brain wasn’t working in overdrive i felt immobilized by something i wanted to call depression.

“chugga chugga chugga chugga. do you know what that’s the sound of?” kevin asked me a few weeks later when i interrupted a quiet moment with another stream of worries. i shook my head. “it’s your brain moving…”

i’m still not sure what was going on then. most of those big psychological battles have retreated–i am not beating myself up so much anymore. i am not breaking up with kevin. he’d never replied to an email so fast. his response that morning was long and thoughtful and measured and calm. i read portions of it to becca out loud over lunch and she told me to save that email and refer to it anytime i felt similar doubts creeping in again.

it turns out that the analytical skills that serve me so well in my work are a detriment to my well-being and personal peace of mind elsewhere. it turns out that the command to “chill out” is actually the quickest way to make me freak out; i’m super sensitive to being told that i’m on edge, for one. and clearing my mind and keeping my brain still are things that takes a great deal of discipline.

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it’s still a little odd to me to be so in love, to call a new person the pet names i used to call another. really vivid memories from my old relationship will occasionally pop up in the middle of a conversation or while i’m passing by a store–somehow it’s only the happy that remains. i take that as a good thing. but occasionally jack’s name will be on the tip of my tongue when i mean to say kevin’s and that is a little disconcerting. sometimes i feel like i live in the past and the future and the present simultaneously.

Filed under: figuring it out, friends, love, work

be brave, young lovers

hello young lovers, whoever you are

i hope your troubles are few

all of my good wishes go with you tonight

yeah, i’ve been in love like you

oh, be brave, young lovers, young lovers, and follow your star

be brave, be faithful and true

you’ve got to cling to each other very close tonight

i’ve been in love like you

i’ve had a love of my own

i’ve had a love of my own

i know how it feels to have wings on your heels

and fly down the street in a trance

you fly down the street on a chance that you’ll meet

and you’ll meet not really by chance

don’t cry young lovers, young lovers, yeah

i’ve had a love of my own

be brave young lovers

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some stevie. be brave. it’s okay. be brave. it’s okay to fall.

Filed under: love

a love worth talking about

i heard the song for the first time today and cried the whole way through my first listen. my first thoughts were that it was so honest, his heart laid bare in song. it was his version of what happened.

i have writing, he uses melodies. we each have our outlet, and we each depended on them to make sense of what we were going through. language is so much more explicit, too. i wonder what it would have been like if i were a dancer, a fashion designer. what does heartbreak look like on a dress?

there are a few words in his song, audio clips from good will hunting. they’re right and appropriate, but they cut like glass. each time that one line is repeated i can feel his pain anew.

i’ve written plenty here about the breakup. over the last nine months i’ve left a trail of words in different places around the internet of what it’s been like to leave the relationship and find some peace and understanding about the whole thing. like the crumbs hansel and gretel dropped on their path through the woods, i think i could read back my blog posts and diary entries of the last few months and find my way all the way back to those raw december weeks when i broke up with him.

i write and tell stories. everything is material for something down the line, even if it’s just fodder for conversation with my girlfriends or something for the margins of my notebooks. even at my worst, when i was writhing on the floor with tear soaked, rock hard tissue balls scattered all around my head, i knew that someday it’d be something i’d use for a story.

but my second thought when i heard the song was: everyone will know, everyone will know now that someone he loved very much broke his heart, crushed him and hurt him. my ego, you know? i guess if i regret anything it’s that in order for me to be true to myself i had to hurt him. if there was some way to live my life honestly without doing that, if i could have protected him from the pain of the breakup, ah, protected both of us from the pain of the breakup, i would have liked to have chosen that route.

i’ve always loved his music. soon he’ll be playing shows again with his new EP and maybe it’ll be part of his set list. he’ll play it live for people, answer questions from curious people about the new set of songs, and it’ll be like another story of mine saved somewhere on the internet. a time in our lives memorialized in notes and words.

Filed under: breaking up, love, writing