Dateline: Colchester, mid-September.

That someone is making use of their front garden brings me such joy, I cannot express fully.  When I get homesick for front porches, sweet tea, marking time, long goodbyes, I look for things like this to remind me I am not so far removed, that I am actually just around the corner, so to speak. 

I've been back now a week. 5.5 days. I'm tired in my bones. 

'We are born wise, we are born complete,' my Yogi tea reminds me this morning. It has turned to autumn.  

I am spending a lot of time working from bed this week. I came back from the US depleted, exhausted, nauseous. Even though it was beautiful - more than I imagined, it took a toll and things with my health are still not 100% at the moment. It is too easy to run down reserves at the moment.

If last week was a week of revelation anda familial discovery, this week is about self-forgiveness and treating myself with humanity I try to extend to others. So often, I have felt I don't deserve that. I spend time sleeping when I need it, crying as I will. This is always an emotional time of year for me, anyway, and I've begun to revel in taking time to remind myse on

L

L amlf that I am complete in and of myself. 

One person's light collision is another person's terrible accident. That's what a person I was involved with called it: a light collision. For me, it felt like I had run smack into a brick wall. I know what that feels like, because I've literally run into brick walls. I felt dazed and seen. But it was not light. There was little gentle about it.

In the early contact, for a brief time, I felt desired, which I confused with cherished. That feeling? That connection? It came in fits and starts and for the next year, it became a confusing cycle of what I can honestly say was a variation of narcissistic abuse.

 At times, I wasn't sure that I wasn't baiting, seeking it out it, in much the same way a drug addict or an alcoholic might crave their poison of choice. In retrospect, I am very sure I was and I am having to really examine the reasons as to why I would do that to myself, contribute to causing myself pain. 

It started with an intense correspondence through a dating website, escalating quickly. May be I didn't notice it because I had cabin fever, maybe I was bored. Maybe I was lonelier than I recognised. For what ever reason, it was intense.   Things I learned in the first aftermath included the following terms:

Idealisation or lovebombing, devaluing, discarding. 

I became boring on the subject, in shock. It felt like it to months for that feeling to subsided, if it ever did completely. The correspondence resumed but there was distance there. No more deeply intimate details of lives shared because there was no point when one person perpetually lies. 

Then at just over a year, the music stopped again, on an odd, but good note, with no devaluing. In fact, the last correspondence was almost...friendly, a hair ruffling, a shuck on the chin. The silence allowed me to return to myself. I was/am relieved. Returning to myself and to my attachments, to the things and people that I tend to that needed tending. But there was an itch in the back of my mind, an idle question: what happened? I think I thought he might be dead. 

Sometimes, we never get to know what happens in the aftermath, what happens after they collide. I only find out through curiosity, a background in research, and pre-flight boredom. The individual in question is very much not dead but, wow....even my Spidey sense was underplayed. 

I sat still with this discovery for a while. I felt sick with fear, with relief, with anger and confusion. There was a sense of leaning into that childhood bruise of want and hurt, of being neglected, passed over, not chosen. before I had to pull myself out of the compulsive repetition cycle. This is an instance where the greatest gift the Universe could ever give me is NOT being chosen. 

But let me be clear: the other gift? That I can now recognize the patterning and I can also see how still tender the pathways are to replicating those patterns are.  Too tender for given the rest of what is going on in my world. Given the similarities to a core relationship that is approaching it's inevitable end, I move slowly through it: an emotional haematoma.

Then I have begun doing what I do: Ichannel my inner Fred Astaire and pick myself up to start all over again. But this time, I've decided to change it up, to start tapping with my LEFT foot and see how that shakes out. But I am not rushing to the end of rehearsal. I need to take this slow. I'm not giving myself the benefit of doubt, I'm giving myself the benefit of faith: in myself, in humanity, in love. 

So, what did I get out of this relationship, this exchange turned out to be a layer of lies? Sigh. It's complicated, the unpicking, the processing. I suppose I got to feel desired by someone again, for being something other than a mama bear, a horse of instruction. Of course, I donn't know what of what I was told is true. What I was drip fed was tainted and it didn't taste feasible or sustainable. But it was convenient in the moment, and I was parched for romantic and social interaction.  But it's like drinking ipecac: there is purge afterwards. What it has given me is added clarity in the other relationships that I struggle to create, maintain, and reinforce secure boundaries and rules of engagement with and where I need to prune back or reconsider them completely where I can. 

But I also gained additonal humanity. I allowes myself care about someone. I got to connect with some one and have my heart shaken up on a deep level, to learn that familiarity and patterning are not love at a point in time where connection wasn't easy, during a pandemic. That lesson alone will ultimately be worth the self-doubt, the betrayal, the lying and ambiguity. And I got intellectual stimulation - outside of my work, which I do a lot of - which is so very necessary.

 On whole, this experience, it will make me a bit savvier but I don't want it to jeopardize my naiveté, you know? I like the softness emerging. And just because someone has behaved like a schmuck, well...schmucks are people too, after all. I don't think the person is completely terrible but they are definitely not for my world or reality. 

I get to be happy and right - I knew more than one thing was off-kilter, but I didn't push because I was also was playing with emotional fire. Now, I get to move to unashamed and unshackled by thoughts of what might have been. I get to be here. Free. In the sunset, watching a full moon rise over the riverbank. I get be my actual self, right now, in this moment/time/place. I get to do better, be better, grow. I get to move closer to being whole. I get to emerge from that cocoon of hurt and lapsed judgement as a more upright, softer, beautiful version of myself.  Not a bad way to ring in a new year.