Family trouble

I've just come back from a lovely lazy day spent with my friend Am, her husband Vic and their cute baby Syméon. They are my age and PhD students, yet they make this parenting thing work. They've been married for some time now, and their parents have been married for a really long time as well. It made me think about my own family and my relationship to families.

Obviously I have a lot to say on this topic, as would anyone. We are molded by our childhoods and most people can be separated in two groups: those who are very close to their parents and those who break ties almost completely. It's hard to stay in the middle.

I'm in a tricky situation.When I tried to kill myself, I hurt my family for ever. They did not read this as my own struggle, my own battle: it was a reflection on their performance as parents or sibling. I understand this completely. If I did not have depression I would read the same mute accusations in my behaviour than they did.

So now I feel I have this huge debt towards them. Although I know that I won't ever try again, I can't take away the worry and the guilt they feel. All the love I can show won't erase their pain.

That's the way life goes, doesn't it? We try to be perfect in our relationships, we try to be in the right, to be the person who's behaving well. And then we're the bad guy. And there may well be no way to make that change.
What has been difficult for me is to accept that I have hurt my family and made them go through hell, but that I need to move on from that. I can't change what I did, but I don't have to obsess about it.

And spending the day with a baby reminded me how free I am. I'm single and childless: the world is my oyster! All the ties I have are my own choice: I choose to love and respect my family and treat them in the best way possible, but I want it to be a choice, not the consequence of something I did three years ago. So while I hope one day they forgive and forget, in the meantime I'll discover the world and become a happy person. In the end, that's what they also want for me.

Irony

My current situation reminds me a lot of what the lovely Britni was saying on her blog a few weeks ago. I give advice I find difficult to follow to my sister, who is also going through a rough time with her ex-girlfriend. The ex is with another girl, yet keeps texting and calling J to tell her how much she means to her, etc. I tell J to cut her off, stop answering her calls.

Wish I found it easy myself.

My ex is not a piece of crap like my poor sister's former girl. He is a lovely man in so many ways, which is probably why I'm still hurting so much almost a month afterwards. But once I get to move out of this town, I will not talk to him. I need to move on, forget his horrid new girlfriend, and be a happy single girl. All this will happen. I know it will. When I follow my own advice.

Lonely

Well, I've always been a lonesome cowgirl. Struggling with it all, to tell the truth. Never sure if I was OK with being lonesome, or on the contrary haunted by my potential loss.
For the first time in years, I feel lonely.

I miss you. I miss being able to tell you everything, trusting in your loving affection. I miss kissing you for no reason, miss having sex with you, miss the nightly comfort of your body against mine. I miss you a lot. But I don't want you back.

I just want to stop missing you.

Good

X and I had a nice talk last night. I managed to let him express himself, as oppposed to the usual sara-crapfest. Holding him, stroking his hair, I felt all the love I have for him become concern, not a selfish concern, but a true one, one made of years of friendship that transcend love and lust. Watching his huddled body, I no longer saw the ghost of Rebound Fuck all over him: he was himself, and I was there, and I felt privilegied to be there for him, to tell him that he needed to reaffirm what he wanted, that he could not get any friends if he didn't know, deep inside, what he wanted to give and how much he wanted to receive.
I have such hopes for him. He is the nicest, most lovable, beautiful man I have known. Right now, before my heart starts breaking again, before my system works overtime to get rid of him, of all the complicated emotions he stirs in my bruised body, I can revel in knowing that maybe one day, in months or in years, we will be there for each other, and be happy for each other, and treasure the secret past without neither hope nor bitterness.
To you, my darling X, I wish everything. But now, it is time for me to build my own protections and to find my own answers, it is time to leave him behind and to forget my pain for hours at a time.
To our future friendship, and to my present happiness.
To the future bonds we will have that will neither hurt nor scar.
And to me.
I'll drink to me this morning, before leaving for a week. Strong, beautiful, clever, resourceful, over-emotional, trick-pony, giggling, short-legged, lopsided-smile, imaginative, clinging me.
Happy recovery, dear girl.

Making rules

I'm not a rules person. Heck, I'm not even a good resolutions person. I can't keep a promise to save my life.
I need some rules at the moment though, to get over myself:
1) Do not call or communicate with X unless entirely necessary.
2) Do not read emails or love notes anymore. Avoid entirely. I will think about what to do with them in six months or so.
3)Avoid thinking about things that will obviously hurt me without any results.
4)Do not bore friends and family to tears with rambling. Write blog or journal.
5)Enjoy the small moments in life as much as you can.

Leaving

I'm leaving for Paris tomorrow, to spend the better part of the week with my parents and sister. I can't wait to leave Lyon and not see X for some time. I really need a new living arrangement, because seeing him all the time is difficult and painful, not to speak of jealousy and anger issues. In time, I will stop his Rebound Fuck from invading my assessment of our relationship, what I did right, what he did right, where it went wrong.
I want some distance in order to achieve happiness sooner, and I need to work.
Here's to hope!

Literature for the day

Colette is my favourite writer. Her style is earthy and luscious, and her life (I highly recommend Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman, the best biography ever written on her) is fascinating on so many levels. I will probably write a series on her, since I am a great devotee of her work. Today I would like to translate a passage from one of her short stories, which deals with recovering from separation and heartbreak.

"You must wait for recovery, for the end of your love. You are suffering greatly, but worse is yet to come. There will be a time-in a month, in three months, I don't know when-when you will start suffering by fits. You will experience the lulls, the moments of animal-like amnesia that come for no reason, because you've slept well or been a bit sick...Oh my child, how terrible are the fits of pain!They sweep down on you without warning or care...In an innocent, light-hearted moment, a smooth liberated moment, mid-gesture, mid-laugh, the annihilating memory of the devastating loss stems your laughter, stops the hand carrying the tea cup to your lips, and suddenly you are terrified, wishing for death with the naive conviction that no one can suffer this much without dying, but you won't, as those before you didn't as well...The lulls will return, irregular, capricious, without rhyme nor reason. It will...be quite terrible. But...there is something even worse. There will come a moment when you will feel almost no pain. It's when you're almost cured that you will be a lost soul, roaming the earth, seeking, not daring to say what you mean...At those times, the bouts of unhappiness are harmless, and by a strange compensation effect, the lulls become unbearable, an abyss of luke-warm vertigo that sickens the heart...It's the moment of stupidity, of loss of balance...Your heart feels empty, wrinkled, floating in a chest swollen by occasional sighs which are not even sad. You go on the town with no aim, you walk for no reason, you stop without being tired. You scratch at the old pain with stupid enthusiasm, without extracting from it any blood, you keep touching the half-healed scar, you end up regretting, I swear, the searing, blunt pain. It's the dry, lost season, embittered by regret. Yes, the regret of having lost the beautiful, desperate, throbbing, masterful pain, you feel diminished, withered, inferior to all other creatures...You'll be secretly ashamed of yourself until...until recovery. It comes mysteriously, without making itself felt at first. But it's like the gradual reward for so much pain. Believe me, it will come, I don't know when. A soft spring day, or a damp autumn morning, maybe by moonlight, you will feel something living and undefinable voluptuously stretch out in your heart, like a happy, long, long snake, an unraveled velvet caterpillar, a loosening, a soft and nurturing tearing up like that of a budding iris...Without understanding why, you will put your hands behind your head and grin unexplicably. You will discover, with renewed innocence, that the light is pink through the lace of the curtains, and the carpet soft under your bare feet, that the smell of flowers and of ripe fruit make you exult rather than recoil. You will savour a shy happiness, free from desire, a delicate happiness, a bit shameful, selfish and self-protective...Yes, my child, yes, you will have another love."