adventures

Christi is having a lot of exciting adventures right now and I’m happy for her. I think she thinks that being with me would mean having to give them up. And it might mean a bit of compromise on some things, but on the whole . . . we live on seperate continents. even if we were together, i couldn’t control what she did when i wasnt around. I wouldn’t want to.

So I went to have breakfast with Christi this morning. Spent the whole time trying to convince her that it would be a good idea to try to work it out. I’d been telling people that even when I did stupid things, it always seemed to me at the time to be reasonable. Well, as I sat in the restaurant, untouched food cold in front of me, manically explaining how things could be really great because we’d both learned so much, I was …um… kind of aware that i was not being reasonable or even rational. This didn’t exactly put christi at ease, or convince her. I’d think “I have to stop. maybe if i just say it a different way!”

Yeah, so she’s kind of extremely mad at me. We tried talking about my mom being sick a little bit. She said she was hurt. I didn’t come back with “my mom died!” which was my previous responce. I said that I was sorry I had been so angry, etc. She explained that, no, she was hurt because my mom had died, as in, it was really hard for her.
I blinked a bit. It surprised me to hear her say it. But I don’t know if it was a wow-she-was-upset-about-that-too kind of surprise or a that’s-really-not-what-i-expected-her-to-say kind of surprise. I mean, I got kind of caught up in my own devastating loss of my mom and wasn’t really foccussing on how it was affecting other people. On the one hand. On the other hand, of course it’s obvious that it would have upset Christi. She knew my mom for 7 years and they loved each other. I don’t think I would have failed to notice that, but I dunno. I feel very confused right now. And my memory from times of stress is all jumbled and unclear. This morning is jumbled. A year ago is more jumbled.
Christi really does not want to work it out and I need to accept that. Just because I think we could and should is not going to change her mind, no matter how I say it or how many times. Harping on it for over an hour is just going to make her not want to talk to me at all.
I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

I need very much to have a tumultuous, reboundy-type affair. Now accepting applications. I’m in California till the 22nd. Why not have some short-term drama?

Christi is gone

She’s gone to La and Ellen is using my room for other guests, so by the time I get back here, everything that Christi decides is hers (things get blurry when they’re acquired together and i don’t care about stuff so much anyway, just symbols) will be gone.

I’m still breathing

Other minds festival

is this weekend. christi and I are both planning to go. It’ll be the first time I see her since breaking up with her. I feel anxious about this. but I beleive it will be ok. i really want it to be ok. i’m really glad that i’ll get to see her.

After many plane delays, gate changes and a cancelled flight, I am now, finally, in Berkeley.

I don’t understand why people get angry and yell at gate agents about these things. there were weather problems. being angry won’t change anything and yelling at a person won’t cause a plane to appear. given all the indignities of life, late planes seem so small a thing.

Sometime in the last year or so, I quit being angry. I was an angry youth. It didn’t serve me well (see yesterday’s long post). I’m glad for this change.

I put Christi throught so so much and she still loved me. and i threw it all away. while this is incredibly painful, i still feel happy to know i was loved so much.

what does it mean that it took me breaking up with her to realize this?

Looking Backwards

The best case scenario, for a couple in a time of crisis, is that they will support each other. One will be able to turn to the other for love and reassurance. In the worst case, they will make each other miserable and end up making the crisis worse. When my mom died, Christi and I fell into the latter group.
Until this week, I blamed Christi for this. “She wasn’t there for me.” I broke up with her because I thought if I had another major crisis, like my brother, my dad or myself getting cancer, that she “wouldn’t be there for me again.” I thought she was unable. Trying to talk through it would bring up incredibly painful memories and at the end would fail, so why put ourselves through that?
My strategy for dealing with stress from the time of my mom’s death and the aftermath, was not to think about it. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t talk about. I started thinking about it for the first time over winter break. christi and I couldn’t even talk about the period and still can’t without arguing. It breaks down into “my mom died!” “i felt very hurt!” “I felt hurt too!”
After a couple of weeks of being broken up with Christi, it occurred to me that she was very very present for her brother. He had a nervous breakdown, which is worse than what I experienced (at least more personally debilitating . . . ) and she was there for him the whole way. Maybe is she was there for him, she would be there for me. I called her up and asked her if she wanted to work it out. I told her that I had some demands, but that I couldn’t ask them except with a shrink as a referee, because each of us is carrying an incredibly loaded stack of hurt and an attempt to discuss this without help would explode.
When my mom first was sick, I was sad, I was scared and I was angry. I wanted Christi to be there right next to me the whole time. And she was. She took time off work and sat with me and my mom in the hospital. She brought me sushi every night. She did everything she could for me. She knew my mom for about 7 years then, so she was directly feeling sad, stressed, etc too. My support network was primarily Christi, but was also some south bay friends, including Tammy & Vince, Mitch and the Kazes. Those guys were way cool. Christi relied upon them and her brother, who was living with them at the time.
The situation with my mom got worse, she was angry at me and I was supposed to be caring for her and she wouldn’t let me. Then her insurance company was declining treating her. And it was completely terrifying that my mother, the woman who raised me, was trying to run away from the house in her pajamas. I kept a list in my head of all the terrible things that might happen (she might fall, she might take all her pills at once, she might run away, etc) and how to prevent them and fixated on it. I also became increasingly angry.
I was angry at my dad for not implementing my list and for being afraid and for not realizing sooner what was going on. I was mad at my brother for running away. I was furiously completely angry at the insurance company. Christi and our friends began strongly encouraging me to get therapy. I remember trying to figure out how to work the therapists door system and becoming completely, totally furious and wanting to smash it. Then I spent an hour in therapy, stressing about my mom’s treatment plan and the insurance company, in a bitter rage and so so so much pain and the shrink kept saying, “it sounds like you have a lot to think about.” I went in wanting to figure out what to do about this problems. The shrink didn’t give me a plan of action. She didn’t make me feel better. It was clearly a waste of my time and I felt angry about it and angry that people made me go see her. Clearly my problems were all rooted in the physical fact of my mom being sick and that’s not something that you can talk your way into fixing.
I don’t remember my overall mood at the time, except upset, but it seems to me now that if I was that angry at a shrink and her door, I must have been angry at many many things. I wanted Christi to be right next to me as a crutch, but also as a human security blanket. I wanted affection from her when I needed it, but I probably also did what kids do to their security blankets and bit her when I was angry, which was probably most of the time.
Christi was leaning more and more on her brother, who was very kind to her and more and more hostile to me. I wanted him to move out because of his hostility. Christi saw that as me removing her primary source of support. He stayed and she leaned on him until he completely fell apart. He went to the hospital and then he went to Portland. Christi went with him. She didn’t want to come back. I insisted that she should. She had to be there for me! So she did.
We couldn’t be in the same room without fighting. We couldn’t work out the problem with so much stress still pouring in. My mom was still getting worse all the time. we told a shrink our tale of woe in factual terms. My mom had cancer. The insurance company hadn’t wanted to treat it. The surgeon messed up the referrals. We couldn’t start treatment until it was too late. And then Christi’s brother had become very ill and was living with us. The shrink was horrified at the awfulness of it, but said she could see how much christi and i loved each other. She gave us the temporary advice not to talk about it, so that we could at least co-habitate.
My memory is that Christi didn’t like that shrink and wanted to find a new one, even thought I liked her. Christi’s memory is that I didn’t like the shrink and she did. In either case, we went to find a different shrink. We would start telling our tale of woe, and it seemed to me that Christi would rattle off a litany of my misdeeds. I felt attacked. I nixed all the shrinks. I walked out of one of them. So we never talked about what happened with her brother and my mom at that time. We still haven’t.
I don’t remember feeling rage at this point. I remember having a panic attack and Christi taking me to the emergency room and me sobbing in the ER, but I don’t know when that happened. My memory is all jumbled. but I feel “comfortable” being angry. It’s an emotion that doesn’t scare me and than I can settle into when things are negative. I’m sure I was still angry. (actually, as i re-edit this, I remember being angry then….) I would have pointed this anger out in all directions. As the person closest to me, Christi would have gotten a whole lot of it.
Christi wanted space from me. She didn’t want to be my security blanket anymore. Her own source of support was gone. She was increasingly distant. Her brother blamed me for his problems. She agreed with him and was angry at me.
after my mom died, I was a mess. I didn’t get out of bed until christi came home from work. My conversational skills were shot. And I quit talking to my south bay support network or really anyone but Christi and Tiffany. Christi had to deal with me alone. I wanted to go on a trip to LA to visit my cousin. Christi did not want to go with me. she said she couldn’t get off work. I started arguing with her constantly about her work schedules and whether she could get time off (my mom was a major donor to the organization she worked for, it seemed to me that she could get time off . . .. ). I thought that she just didn’t want to travel with me. She might have foreseen a long road trip, trapped in a small car with the world’s angriest woman. It only occurs to me now that using work as an excuse might have been an attempt to spare my feelings. Or maybe I wouldn’t accept “I don’t want to” as a reply.
My rage must have gradually subsided. when I’m grumpy, tho, I can be snippy, so I must have been snippy for a long time. I think that the last summer went relatively well, but it must have been a relief to Christi, when I moved out, that she could be sure of no snippiness. then I came to visit her in Paris and was stressed with school and was kind of snippy . . .. Now things are as they are now.
When my mom was dying, I needed to find a better way to deal with things than being angry. even after she was dead and I was calming down, I didn’t want to see a shrink and I refused to discuss it. Christi was using increasingly forceful ways to communicate with me, probably out of necessity. We were angry at each other. It was a bad time. And I looked back on it a little bit and remembered feeling alone and Christi being angry with me and decided that she “wasn’t there for me.” I was bad, but I hurt and she should have cut me slack, I thought. But how much anger should a person have to absorb before they’ve cut enough slack? I pushed her too hard.
Trying to work it out based on “you weren’t there for me” would have failed. so I was right. Lucky me.

More navel gazing

I tend to see the world as a series of binary oppositions. I just read an article about this for my english class by Hélène Cixous (a french feminist) called “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks / Ways Out / Forrays.” In this article, she documents the essentially masculinist (phalocentric) nature of binary oppositions. She makes a claim that inherent in these oppositions are value judgements. Things binarily opposed are not equal. One is better than the other. Moreover, it is how some chooose to define themselves, but labelling on thing as “me” and another thing as “not me”, opposing them, and then comparing them to rate how we are doing in relation to everything else.

I do this and it has not served me well. For starters, it means that there is always a hierarchy and thus I can never equally relate to anyone or anything I put myself in binary opposition to. Furthermore, it creates false dichotomies. There are a lot of grey areas in life. Real life is not “do X or be a loser.” this has been harming my worldview and my relationships.
I think it might relate to my trying to supress mourning and not feel sad, something that has also not served me well. I wanted to bravely soldier on and put the past behind me and not look back. It’s like I formed my self image from outdated ideals of maleness and manhood. How did I get such a masculinist viewpoint? It’s bizarre. Reading my blogposts from last winter is bizarre. I know I must have been in turmoil, but I barely acknowledged it.
So I’m confused about how I have formed my concept of self, but, while I cannot change the past, I can effect the future. I’m not going to say “these things must go now (or i’ll be a loser),” since this would just put me in another binary opposition, but I can look at how I am reacting to things as I react to them and see if I am falling into a pattern that might not serve me well. I will feminize myself. But don’t expect skirts or lipstick. I have boundaries.