Nice to see these notes from both of you waiting for me here... I've been away from the site for a while - and just kind of doing my best to live my life - and sort things out as they continue to come my way.
Maintaining self-awareness and minding the necessary boundaries have made a tremendous difference in my life. I still get a tightness in my chest at times - a sign to me of unfinished business - but it's something that I'm figuring out how to move through more and more each day.
A dear friend of mine sometimes tells me that she thinks I'm far too cruel to myself - mostly because of the ways in which she says I judge myself quite harshly...I know there's some truth to her words - that I do, on occasion, put too much focus on the problems I have with myself - and not enough focus on just doing what I have to do to get through those issues.
Though perhaps that's part of the lesson I was to learn through my experience with my second marriage. In B I found someone who had a knack for responding to my concerns about myself with the same kind of harsh negativity I had experienced while growing up with my father. It's not B's fault that I needed to work through my issues through our relationship - that was my responsibility - but it might also be the only way in which I can finally break from a pattern that just hasn't served me well in my life...namely...the tendency I have of tossing grenades in my path when things look most promising and calm...
I don't think I tossed to many grenades into my way with regards to my marriage to B - of course there were some here and there - but I am certain that I tossed bombs in my way with my personal journey that ran alongside our marriage...and I never fully accepted that I was doing this - and could not see it as clearly as I do now.
As I'm writing these words, I'm feeling in me a capacity to forgive abusive behavior, a capacity that I accept as a good thing - though also a sign of my troubled past. As I write, I get quick flashes of memories - of moments with B when things were okay - and I have to take a moment to reflect on the rest of the memory - not just the good moments that got me through a day - but the rest of the day - the tensions that made moments explode into bitter accusations and even insults...and I don't want any of that in my life again...ever. My goodness, I feel like I'm being so vague - and yet it's just how the words are flowing today - with an imprecision that almost has the capacity to mimic the evanescence of each memory...the imperfection of each moment once it's brought from the faded past into a different present and into a moment of inspection that's so far removed from the destructive dynamic that had become not just my relationship with B but also my relationship with myself.
I make a living with words...and yet recently I've been convinced that words are meaningless...that words have such small purpose when held up against a measure of one's actions...it makes me feel like words are fine for creating fictions - for telling stories - and admitting they are just stories - but that words just can't accomplish much in terms of maintaining a relationship...It's a harsh indictment of something that I love...words...and I think it may just mean that I've hit a point where I've tipped too far toward the negative side of my own movement toward what should have been myself...and maybe it's because there's still some fear or darkness there that I still have to resolve. At least the concerns are about how to improve myself now...not about how to protect myself from someone that I love...
