H suddenly moved out 10 days ago...I'm devastated

[flowmom]

If you *really* only want to go out and hear jazz and you don't want to go alone (why not?) why not ask some female friends to go?

Maybe some of the moms can understand where I'm coming from? Motherhood sometimes takes over one's identity and there can come a day where one loses a sense of one's self. Not only that, but the people who know you and care about you also see you constrained within that role and that's what they reflect back to you. Connecting with someone who can see me with fresh eyes is a way of being reminded that who I am is more than my current role.

What bothers me about this entire scenario is you are unable to make yourself feel good on your own and you went right to another person instead of finding a way to do that on your own.

I am taking action to address how I'm feeling within myself. I think it will take time for me to feel good on my own. I'm assuming that you think I should be able to do something every day by myself that makes me feel good within myself, but the reality is that I'm not there yet. In my experience, sometimes personal change works from the outside in and sometimes from the inside out. I've worked a lot on my insides, and actually I haven't worked with acting "as if" very often. Right now I want to act as if I am a woman who doesn't have a care in the world and who wants to listen to jazz and who happens to have a male friend who would enjoy doing that with her -- nothing more than that. None of my friends invited me to listen to jazz with them...he did, unprompted. I don't need to flirt or have my desirability validated by him, just a simple shared experience (listening to jazz) is what would feel good to me.