I guess what intrigues me about this right now is the question: how much of the feelings those moments of intensity are based around is legitimate? If I can put so much energy into feeling angry, or feeling sad, or hell even feeling love or happiness, that when the moment of intensity passes I just feel...sort of used up and like I need to recharge, then what becomes of the emotion once it has consumed all of my energy? It makes me wonder how much of a flame was there in the first place, and how much is just some part of my brain leaking gas to feed it. Even if the emotion is negative, a large part of me very much enjoys letting myself be overcome by it: it's like lighting something on fire and watching the fire burn itself out. Except the something is me.
But I don't think it's healthy. Realizing it makes me not trust myself more than anyone else. If I keep shooting myself in the foot by feeling things so intensely it scares people, I am going to always be lonely. This habit gets me into all kinds of bad situations.
I'm going to put even more of my business out here than usual and walk you through a recent example: a little under two weeks ago, I got really scared that my then-boyfriend [who I am still in the long-process of trying to let go, though I still can't say I want to fully. I wish we could just change the nature of things and leave them as they were. But this isn't about that.] didn't think I cared about him like I should. He called attention to a mistake I had made in a previous relationship that I talked about here and without letting him explain himself at all or what he thought we should talk about about that post, I freaked out and I sent him an email of things that were (I still believe) entirely accurate about how I felt about our relationship and how I felt about him and I hoped that was enough. But that fear about what he might be thinking just kept gnawing away at me until I couldn't stand it any more [living alone and taking 4 trains every day and working in an environment where you have very little human interaction means you have WAY TOO MUCH TIME TO THINK] and I started writing a letter full of frilly romantic things, which I now believe to have mostly been exaggerations of how I actually felt. Throughout our whole relationship, he had been the frilly romantic one and I had been the one who kept how she was feeling to herself until it had to be let out in little bursts--this was a big burst and though I believed it then, I can't look back at it now and feel like it was real and/or legitimate. Love was the emotion I got carried away with then, and I think I could tell that I was unsure about everything I wrote (I don't even remember most of it) because I almost didn't put it in the mail the next day. But then I remembered our "open and honest" policy and how in the previous letter I'd written to him, I stressed that I wanted us to be able to tell each other anything. So I drew little hearts on the envelope and left it in my mailbox for the postman to pick up. And what clues me in that it was an emotion wave is that by a few days later, I was worried about us growing apart while he was gone and I had this terrifying thought of what if we get to the point where saying I love you is a habit as opposed to a truth, and that came with a sister-worry of whether we were already there. He pointed to other things that made him realize it was time to end this, not just that letter, but I can't help but feel like these stupid emotion waves ruined this for me.
Except the more accurate culprit is my apparent inability to voice my feelings about a situation with a person to that actual person. If we had just really talked and really listened none of this would have happened, I think. I'm beginning to believe that neither of us was completely open or honest or fair to the other for a very long time. And I think that's the reason I can latch onto for why I have to let this go. I've been struggling for days to solve this puzzle:
lust < x < love
What is x and how am I supposed to feel about it? But wondering how one of us is supposed to feel or what the other expects/wants us to feel is what got us into so much trouble in the first place.
So let's instead ask the radical question, how DO I actually feel about it? And the brutally honest answer is that as good as it has made me feel, and as much as I have an incredibly strong desire to just make it more casual and not stop, it is [very] possible that any improbably feasible course of action that involves lowering expectations and just enjoying each other for a while such as I have been privately entertaining over the course of the past few days wouldn't leave me feeling good in the long run. Where is the line between enjoying each other's company and using each other? I don't want to find out. I would rather this be over than find out. That's the first time I've been able to say this being over is not an entirely cruel happenstance.
So now it's time to perhaps buy a new vibrator since mine doesn't vibrate anymore, and figure out how to not get overwhelmed by the desire to have his (someone's? his? someone-I-trust-and-am-physically-comfortable-with-which-describes-him-more-accurately-than-anyone-else's? Door Number Three sounds like the winner.) hands and mouth all over me, so that I don't have to go back on my statement that I want to be friends come the fall. I will find a way to stand not being able to wrap myself around him and a way not to miss the warmth and protection of his arm around me while we sleep, because more unbearable than either of these is the idea of yet another mistruth between us.
And while I'm doing all these seemingly-impossible things [preferably without doing any of the aforementioned things with someone who doesn't deserve me, because the best way to get over a guy is definitely not to get under a new one...], I will also learn to keep myself in check. I will learn to take a step back from whatever situation I find myself in and say 'Maya, how much of this is real?' Because I just don't have the time/extra energy/desire to keep putting myself through these waves, no matter what they're related to. And more importantly, the other people in my life who are affected by these waves DON'T DESERVE THEM.
No comments:
Post a Comment