This year- Day fifty-three. (break-up, rambling)
2009-08-21/2:47 a.m.

When Mike and I broke up I was in CA and not around many of my close friends (at the time, some are much closer friends now) and felt like I was a broken record to the ones I kept sobbing to about how shitty everything was. Out of that I decided to write about stuff to get it out of my system and be generally more pleasant to be around. In some ways it worked well though I didn't keep it up enough and hated the parts where I was really honest because I find that kind of openness to be embarrassing generally. Maybe I should attempt to be more open and honest and show the weak spots in my character more unabashedly? I don't know.

Here is something that I wrote over a year ago:

Back in the beginning, my friend David posted this comment:

"Just step outside of yourself for a minute and acknowledge things for what they are. Your longtime relationship has ended. Everything you've ever heard about that happening to people indicates that it's fairly terrible for quite a while. So, if the you that has just stepped outside of yourself for a minute were to make a list of things to do in this mourning period, the list would look like this:

- cry randomly and often
- feel like shit
- blame yourself
- blame him
- think you can still fix it
- realize you can't
- assume you'll never love again
- get to the point where you think the way you feel is way worse than you could have ever intended and probably way worse than anyone else has ever felt in the history of time
- become bitter
- think you're okay for a while
- realize you're not
- scoff at the idea of ever meeting anyone else you're interested in
- start thinking you'll never move on
- laugh about how unmotivated you are, then cry about it
- compare every minute detail of your daily life to something you did with him
- eventually start realizing that you don't feel as badly as you think you do
- feel guilty for starting to live a normal life again
- become terrified of the idea that you will eventually have to start a brand new relationship with someone
- get over him

There you go. That's what's going to happen over the course of probably the next four to six months. Now that you know, try to take time to put it in perspective every now and again. Understand that life will eventually no longer be about Mike, and even though that's sad it's a good thing."

He was very close to right except that he should have said this would be over the course of the next year or so. 4 months?? Haha, not likely. Especially coming from him, someone who has been hung up on an ex for years and years. It's always easier to give other people advice than to follow it yourself though.

This list actually made things easier for me sometimes when I would get upset. It was so specific that I'd use it to remind myself that what I was feeling was actually not unique in any way, it was really a cliche. Nearly everyone has felt like I felt.

I still feel pretty terrible sometimes. At this point it's for wasting so much of my life on someone who really wasn't worth it at all. It stinks realizing that. I'm more mad at myself than anything.

I have very little understanding of what do with boys like Eugene though. Do I just start over with all the family stories and things we stay up all night laughing about? I guess we do, but I feel like I'm repeating myself and boring him, even if he has no idea what I'm about to say. I'm bored with my same old stories I guess. Every once in a while I'll tell a story from when I was with Mike and feel really guilty about it. But that was also my life. I am exhausted by the idea of starting this whole process all over again, and I haven't even really begun it yet.


_____________________________________


Even that makes me cringe just reading it now. It's true though, I don't know what happens next. I am bad at it and keep most things at arm's length. Over a year later I think I'm STILL boring Eugene with the same old stories of my boring life, but he never says so. Back then I felt differently about him though, I admit. However, he sent me a photo of himself in a bookstore tonight that is really cute and made me smile.

David wrote a really great song for me when I moved out- Breakups are Bullshit

That still makes me sad when I hear it. However, "weird taint angle" was our joke band with our friend Erika who passed away this spring, pretty suddenly. Our song about 90210 will never be a reality but it will live forever in mine and David's hearts. "Ray Priutt, why'd you do it? Why'd you push Donna Martin down those stairs?" But, I digress...

"This love of your life's not the best that you'll get, 'cause your life isn't over yet." It's a really great chorus despite him claiming that he wrote it in 2 minutes and can't sing.

I do believe him, mainly because I really can't imagine doing worse than Mike at this point. I mean, the good times were great and the first years were much better, but the person he is now is just ...gross to me. I don't even really recognize him. It's such an odd feeling to look at someone that I knew better than anyone in the world and barely recognize him.

At first I would think that he was doing all these things and meeting new people and putting on shows and that I wouldn't know anything about them and that broke my heart. Just the day to day that I no longer knew anything about. Now I think "good riddance! they have to listen to your constant yammering and I don't!"

So yeah, I think I am over it in a lot of ways. My birthday will always be a little bit shitty (as Phil Collins told me on the This American Life about break-ups) but this year was slightly less shitty feeling than last year so I can only hope that I don't cry at all next year.

Now to get to work on actually building better relationships with guys that I think aren't totally boring and stupid and who I let make me laugh sometimes. Or figure out if the line between loving someone and being IN love with someone may be easy to traverse or if it would ruin my life. And then to figure out what I am doing career-wise while this recession puts me in panic mode. Those are two pretty big undertakings, I suppose, and probably not done well together.

I like to think that I am a far better person now and that he is a pathetic loser, sitting in his serial killer lair of an apartment, getting checks from his parents every month and thinking about how he'll be 40 next month and has nothing to show for it. Oh, did I veer off the high road? Ooopsie.

When I saw him 7 months after I moved out, for the first time he cried. It was the first time I saw him show any emotion at all about me in that whole ordeal. Then he looked sad the entire time we hung out. When I told Johnny about it he said "he's probably thinking he made a huge mistake right now" and I didn't get his meaning so he clarified- "about YOU! He'll never find someone else as good as you." That was a really nice thing to say.


me&luds 2001








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