Amends Tales: Summer Princess Reached Out!

 A few weeks ago, something really nice happened! I wasn't even sure if it was real until I checked in with a mutual friend. I thought it might be a catfish situation! A friendfish!

I hadn't been in touch with Summer Princess since I left the camp job a week early in August. This is partly because I was embarrassed/finishing up trauma work, but the main reason was! After The Future Mrs. Summer Princess found out about my crush, she had written a few unhinged, gently-threatening-yet-somehow-friendly DMs and texts, and I wanted absolutely no part of any of that. I missed Summer Princess but I never would have imagined she would miss me!

But she did! She messaged me on Instagram to apologize for her fiancee's notes and for how bad everything had gotten. She said she valued our friendship and would understand if I just told her to fuck off.

But of course I didn't! Her fiancee had every reason to be protective of her, and I was being so weird. But Summer Princess said she knew there was nothing to be protective about!

With OCD, I've had to train myself not to seek reassurance. When my mind tells me I'm bad and scary, I'm practiced in just telling myself "Maybe, maybe not." But knowing that Summer Princess liked our time together and felt safe meant a lot to me. My heart filled up with fluffy pink relief.

We don't talk often, but I'm so happy to consider her a friend again, to be out here rooting for each other. I like when I'm playing Animal Crossing and my Switch tells me what she's on there playing. I like being able to send her a K-Pop Demon Hunters song to wish her a happy Friday.

So, a friendship appreciation post. If you've been here for me reading or in person or *swoons* both, just know you're appreciated and loved. I want to take better care of my friendships, cause I would be absolutely NOWHERE without you.

A Backtrack, A Cliff, and a Buffy Sing-along

After the last post, all full of accomplishment and yoga-y goodwill, I was inspired to send a sorry-I-was-a-jerk note to Scrabble Boy—I’d been thinking of him because our dalliance was an April thing and because our friendship ended, as so many of mine have, with me getting superpissed. Since the divorce, I’ve been working my way through the list of people at whom I’ve misdirected anger.

He accepted my friend request right away, as if he’d been waiting for it, and was equally apologetic and forgiving. We planned to do a call after I got back from Easter. (Hey everybody! I drove up to my sister’s and back without having a breakdown for the first time post-Sweetie! Credit to my cute little red car, I think. And time.) A funny thing happened when I hit the road though—all kinds of daydreams started to unspool about him—holding hands under the flowering trees, throwing him into my pretty princess bed and finally having my way with him, running away to join his life in Ann Arbor. (Cue Get Up Kids song…)

Though I loved the idea of reuniting with my poet self through him and seeing the last three years’ adventures through his eyes, the adventures seemed to pale in comparison with him. He was, at least in those daydreams, still the best one for me, the guy I’d choose out of all of them if I were given a chance. I hadn’t so much gotten over him as put a bookmark in that day we spent together, and as soon as we were on good terms, love started bursting out like so many tree-petals.

Easter was SUCH a good trip. I played Mario Party with the kids and earned almost no mini-stars. I took my niece and nephews to their local comic shop and bought my niece some manga and my nephew a sonic screwdriver. After we finished lovingly perusing the old-school Star Wars figures, we all went out for cocoa. It’s finally sinking in that I can still have my family, even post-Sweetie.

When I got home, I knew I couldn’t really bear to be updated about Scrabble Boy’s life. I’ve come too far to pretend that I want to be just friends with someone I love. (Annoying) gold star for being honest with him about that, and in the process I learned that he’d found someone shortly after his divorce and was happy with her. I sent him a perfect, distant, congratulatory response and that was that, but I was completely devastated by the news. I don’t know why it hurt so badly, but it did. I sometimes feel like everyone just pairs (or whatevers) up so easily and it’s still just a mystery to me.

The more I dismantle the defensiveness and fear that came from The Bad Thing, the more I realize some of that stuff was what’s holding me up, so it’s hard to hold myself together without it. I will probably find more of these pockets of feeling that got stuck because I was ill-equipped to face them at the time—my heart might be a TARDIS ride for a little while.

With that loss added to all the others and my defenses down, I felt like Wyle E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walked off a cliff. The bottom dropped out from under everything and for a few days, I was completely lost. I felt the loss not just of Scrabble Boy, but of my school, of Sweetie, of everyone I’ve lost in the past couple years’ adventures. I was so hyperventilatingly sad that I wondered if I did need a Girl Interrupted interruption, or shock treatment like Rory Gilmore got when she was on Mad Men. I thought I would never find love the way SB did because I would be tangled in this web of grief forever.

The feeling only lasted a couple of days—with yoga, sitcom episodes, and lots of writing, the devastation passed and I was able to get back on track. The main thing I learned from the Scrabble Boy thing is that hermit time is over, that reaching out has got to become the norm again. I’ve enjoyed these months of focusing on taking care of myself, but the loneliness is deep and wide and it’s time to rejoin the world.

So I did. Last night I joined some friends-of-friends for a Buffy sing-along and ice cream birthday party. (Can you believe that was a thing?!) I felt nervous because I’ve almost completely forgotten how to be social, but singing “Walk Through the Fire” with a bunch of cute near-strangers was as transcendent an experience as I’m ever gonna have, and I have been actually set on fire.

So I will. Walk through the fire, I mean. Though it seems impossible sometimes, I’ll keep moving forward until I work someplace safe and love someone(s) kind, until vulnerability and lightness and heart can thrive. Next weekend, everybody, is the Sparkly Festival of Awesomeness, not a moment too soon.

Facing Grief and Hoping for Forgiveness

For the last few weeks, my street, like many of the streets in our city, offered only snowbank/glaciers disguised as parking spots. Last Saturday, relieved to be home after a bout of sobby snow-driving, I pulled into one and was promptly stuck, pulled-in but crooked, my tiny front wheel drive car unable to move forward or back.

Though part of me saw this as a permanent condition, I went out every evening after supper and shoveled it a little, watching the sunset in the process, getting in long, somewhat overshare-y conversations with my downstairs neighbor while his two-year-old goofed around with the shovel. I wasn’t really hoping to unstuck myself, just to thin the layer a little bit so I could get out sooner if a thaw ever came.

Yesterday was the most beautiful day, the perfect day to finally drive somewhere, anywhere. I was shocked, shocked! when the car pulled right out and I was on my way. I drove around for hours listening to old mix CDs and stopped at a state park to take a walk. I loved the sunlight and the smiles on the other hikers. One girl behind me was so overcome by the relief of the weather that she began singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a way that made me immediately want to agree. I stopped and watched in awe as a constellation of geese made bright white shapes across the sky and disappeared into the distance.

When I stopped at a Whole Foods for supper, the girl who was ringing me up must’ve thought I needed Buddha so badly that she gave me my copy of Tricycle for free. From what I read over my sushi and chocolate cookies, she wasn’t wrong. I drove and drove, belting out early Beatles songs at the top of my lungs until the rottenness inside me started to break up and be replaced by warmth, the way the parking spot ice had begun to. I started to be free as soon as I realized that I have to just go ahead and be stuck for a while.

When I look with compassion at my most vexatious connections, I see a common motivation for all of us: trying to fight grief with love. All of my most painful mistakes happened with people in the midst of dissolving relationships, mourning deaths, post-traumatic stress, or just trying to forgive themselves for their parents’ sins and their own. People, that is, just like me, trying to build a fortress of sensation, experience, and love in the face of unfathomable loss, a pain so big it’s hard to even see, let alone start feeling it. I’m sorry for the ways I’ve combined with their pain to make it worse.

That last night, the Mystery Family asked me for forgiveness, but if I look honestly at the situation, there’s nothing to forgive. Once I stopped coming from a place of fear, stopped fighting to regain some imagined loss of dignity, I can see an honest attempt at connection that just didn’t work. Of course it’s possible that he could have been both missing me and playing with someone else—I was never nothing. I just wasn’t the right thing for me to be, and that was my responsibility too.

More important, though, is the fact that they were not nothing. The pain that I’ve caused others every time I’ve failed to take care of myself, failed to say the good no, is real. When I’m in that place of helplessness and smallness, I feel as if nothing I could do or say can have impact, so I scream and rage thinking no one will hear me or ever be affected, but I know they are. I know we were all trying to do what we could for each other and that every accusation, rejection, and harsh paragraph breaks down whatever was good between us. I’m very lucky to have been forgiven by some of them.

I know I can’t make it up to anybody, but I know I can act in better faith from now on, recognize my real limitations and not just what I wish my limitations were. Instead of trying to solve grief with outside love, let me turn and face it, let it be where I am right now. I’m not cute or compersiony, I’m pissed. Sometimes I’m simmering with bitterness and rage that my friends are at the center of loving families while I am here alone. Though I’m alone for the best and most necessary reasons, I hate it with every cell in my body. I want to be the person I want to be, not the one I am right now. I want to be loved and embraced and to do the same for others, but right now I have to admit that I can’t.

As long as I try to correct grief with new relationships, I will be dehumanizing people in exactly that way that drives me crazy. I’ll be the contradiction that upsets me most in others: both nakedly available and completely inaccessible, a plate-glass window for sparrow hearts to keep smashing into. The way I’ve played through grief has often been deeply irresponsible, and for that, I’m truly sorry.

I will try and honor the hearts I’ve harmed, accept the love they gave for what it was, and do my best to care for myself, shovel myself out a little each day until the thaw comes.