Settling Down The Whirlwind

The past week and a half have seemed like a whirlwind. Last Wednesday I went to job #1 and had a great time even though it was late-night and stressful; then went to job #2 early on Thursday and the ceiling fell in. No, not literally. One of our number fell down badly on the job forcing the rest of us to pick up after him. We were at a very large event and as a result of being overworked I came home sick, exhausted and annoyed. I've recovered now, but boy was that a pain in the ass. Now that person has been let go or has taken a leave and so I have to be the only videographer for a while. Do I love it? Yes. Is it a shitload of physical work? Yes. Does it mean more time away from M? Yup. Does that grate on my soul and wear-down my defenses in every way? Betcher-ass...

M has been having nightmares. Project fears, personal worries. It's not easy pursuing your dreams. You have to own up to them, rise to the occasion, and actually accept that you're good at something. It's this last one that is the real slippery-slope. The comforting, previously ever-present self-doubt: "am I good enough?" is replaced with an answer we never planned for. "Yes." What the fuck do you do with "YES"?????? Yes means I have to KEEP DOING WHAT I'M DOING, have to STAY ON MY TOES and KEEP WORKING THIS HARD ALL THE TIME!!!!!!! Yes. It does.

I've always worked this hard. It comes so naturally to me. The only things I have to "gear up" for in my life are times when I'm going to be away from M. Those times are impossible to me. I see red, get anxiuous weeks before I leave, and start crying at unpredictable times. But for all the rest of the things one has to do in one's life to get from point A to point B I seem to do okay. I've trained myself to distill something down to it's most basic version and then look to see how that, in the end, and from any angle, could affect me. Once I realize that it's not going to kill me (as very few things will), I move forward to address it so I can move on.

This, of course, brings up the question: what does "move on" mean to me? Only one thing: M and I owning our own house.

I'd like to take a moment here to talk about how much "in a relationship" I feel I am. With the only other true one that I've been in there was always a distance, always a certain "this isn't the last stop on the train." But, of course, I was fairly young then, but still not as young as M is now, and so sometimes, in the dark, I worry. But not a lot, I have to tell you. That's why this one feels so real and so like how these things are supposed to feel. She feels like blood. Irremoveable. Biologically a part of me. Maybe that's the time in relationships when couples start looking alike. It's because they're so in love and have gotten to that place where they understand that their role in a relationship is just to respect the other person. Once you reach that place maybe the part of your ego that made you insane for so many years (being insecure about how you looked, trying to be impressive in a job, stressing about your dreams) falls away or just relaxes and you suddenly become what I feel is a human's natural state: relaxed, logical and kind as a result of being in love. But I think this can only happen when the love is mutual. And it doesn't come without a ton of testing. M and I are here after two hard, hard years of screaming at each other, walking away, and... always coming back. We have worked and worked and worked and worked at this relationship. We've worked so hard we've changed. She has actually changed herself for me and I have actually changed myself for her.

I don't want to speak for her on this issue, but for me the changes have all been ones that were so, so necessary. The most prevailing is one that's old and linked to my family. I've always suffered from a feeling of being a little bit invisible. I joke that for the first 14 years of my life my name was "Michael's Little Sister," and believe me it was a name I bore with pride, but after several years I realized it was an occurance that had affected me deeply by causing me to suppress my own personality. If I was proud of being "Michael's Little Sister" then it wasn't bad to be that, and, consequently, I didn't have to work too hard at finding out who I actually was. Anyway, so years and years of not trying to figure it out ensued: I coasted, and drank, and pretended to get by. I went through a series of 12-step programs, annoying friends, bad jobs, bad realtionships, being bad in relationships, blah, blah, blah...- finally, I hit the wall. I was emotionally completely drained. What was really happening was that I wasn't facing anything. Nothing. I was living my life from moment to moment, making it up as I went along and holding my breath in between. Ironically, when I finally crashed for real, in early 2002, it was to Michael that I went and found myself. I went and lived with him and he and I talked and I read for 2 1/2 months. Living with him and hearing the clarity he had for his own life, made me realize what I was missing: my own opinion. When I was little I always knew what I wanted and how I felt about things. By age 34 I had suppressed it ALL. It took Michael, his discourse and his library to bring me back. I began to develop opinions about world affairs, psychology, food, travel. I was coming back, and it was incredible.

The rest of the story most of you know well: I moved with him to Boston and worked at a great job and then met M, who has, effectively, completed this phase of my "retraining." With her I let go of every defense mechanism I had left. I realized, in the 2 years of fighting-and-figuring-out with her that what I needed to do was take a leap of faith. I had to trust her. I had to trust that she loved me. With that comes a period of emotional whitewater-rafting. It's relatively short, but also powerful and dangerous. Still, it's just rapids. You're in a boat, you've got your buddy, and you've trained for this. And the only real way down the river is on the river. Walking while carrying the kayak yourself will take a long time and you'll probably die before you reach the end of the rapids. Along the way you'll be starving and will have to fend off bears who see you as a good meal waiting to happen. If you choose not to go down at all, then you'll die there, in the woods, at the top of the river, and become bear food. So, trust me, play the odds. It's the best decision.

Isn't it funny? Braving the river is the scariest choice, but also the one with the best odds. Who would have thought...???