Hey WCW - I know I'm allowing her to ask favors. As I wrote on another thread, everything was such a roller coaster that I really needed the space to leave the relationship on my own terms. Continuing to be friendly has been allowing me to do that.
Would it have been better to get pissed, storm off, and sever things? Probably - I seem to downplay what's in my best interest. But emotionally I think I needed to take it slower than the way it was going.
And for the record, I still talk to W, but I've stopped with the heart-to-hearts. Now I just listen to her talk about herself. She hasn't noticed.
More and more I see how I occupied a space similar to her father's at certain times, like now. She wants to react against my involvement in the things she does - to be totally independent. She becomes deeply resentful of any feelings of dependency, so will overreact to situations like me asking if she wants to use my bike light in order to get home (she got pissed and angry). But then she runs into a problem and rather than deal with it herself, she asks for favors. So it's a weird dynamic.
But the favors are getting fewer and she's going to start realizing that pretty quickly. By the time she gets back from field (with OM) in Sept, I will be ready to have no involvement with her, because I don't think she's a very nice person and I don't have a whole lot of respect for her anymore.
everything was such a roller coaster that I really needed the space to leave the relationship on my own terms.
I get that! I've had similar thoughts that it was one thing I could thank my H for was the amount of time I have had to adjust to his odd ways of disassembling our M.
It probably doesn't help in the long run to get pissed and storm off. Short term though it can feel pretty fine! Do you ever?
Quote:
More and more I see how I occupied a space similar to her father's at certain times, like now. She wants to react against my involvement in the things she does - to be totally independent. She becomes deeply resentful of any feelings of dependency, so will overreact to situations like me asking if she wants to use my bike light in order to get home (she got pissed and angry). But then she runs into a problem and rather than deal with it herself, she asks for favors. So it's a weird dynamic.
uhoh, I see some of me in that paragraph. Running away now so I don't have to deal with myself...!!
Live your life while you are still living. Riding the trail less traveled.
Just posting to keep my thread from sliding into oblivion.
Not much to say tonight. No great insights. I think my heart is drained now. Just a general numbness left as I plod along.
So instead I'll share bits of wisdom from an essay by Ed Abbey called "Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom":
"We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.
"What makes life in our cities at once still tolerable, exciting, and stimulating is the existence of an alternative option, whether exercised or not, whether even appreciated or not, of a radically different mode of being out there, in the forests, on the lakes and rivers, in the deserts, up in the mountains.
"I believe it is possible to find and live a balanced way of life somewhere halfway between all-out industrialism on the one hand and a make-believe pastoral idyll on the other. I believe it is possible to live an intelligent life in our cities - if we make them fit to live in - if we stop this trend toward joining city unto city until half the nation and half the planet becomes one smog-shrouded, desperate and sweating, insane and explosive urbanized concentration camp.
"We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men."
What does this have to do with DBing? Nothing. About relationships? Nothing. About forgiveness, acting as if, last resort technique, going dark, turning the other cheek, mars/venus, love languages, not just friends, 12 steps, 7 steps, 5 stages, personal profiles, quizzes, or the 10 myths about marriage? Nothing.
Nothing other than that the world is bigger than it appears on TV, so why not go out this weekend and remember what it feels like to be a fellow member of an ecological community.
