I dissolved things with Yana; I felt like too much of what I was sharing with her was just me sharing what I missed with Grace; there were a few times when I was talking to her about the apartment and I said "we've got," by default thinking of the apartment as mine and Grace's, even though I was now sleeping with Yana. I was, daily, dealing with memories and their attached sentiments, while I was supposed to be spending time with her. And then when I returned from Antwerp and I was tired and retracted, she was full steam, and seemed to try to make up for what I was not putting across by coming on stronger, and it made me even more uncomfortable. The next day, I told her that I had been experiencing a sort of blindness to the person I'd seen her as before we began sleeping together; that my boundaries had become porous and it was causing me to feel somewhat invaded, and that my identity wasn't clear to me. I don't remember quite everything we talked about, but we halted the romantic/sexual aspects of our relationship.
And now I see her and I still want to hug and kiss her, as much as I did at the beginning, because the boundaries have been reinstated, and I feel very soft towards her. But now I can't, and I am alone. And for the first time now since Grace left, I feel actually alone. Like there isn't anyone to care about what I do. I haven't told my family because I don't feel like including them in this; it won't help me. Yana is not inside my borders now; and Grace still is but I don't have access to her, and it makes me feel even worse. I've been drowning out the silence in political youtube videos; blocking the feeling by getting in snark-ridden arguments in comment sections. I don't think that is productive either. I have gone on tinder and okcupid, and there are women there I am genuinely interested in, but I don't have the energy to bother, and without some mojo, I'm just going to lose them anyways. Besides, am I just going to re-create this same dynamic, as with Yana? As with Grace, I just wanted her to be a bit more chill, and I think I would have been fine. I wanted her to be a bit more financially independent -- I ended up paying for us every time we went out, which I would have brought up as a gender roles issue, except I make quite a bit more than her, so it was kind of justified. The sex made me feel somewhat alienated because she was so intense during it that I felt like I was in a bed with an animal and not communing with another person so much.
It's like the opening of the borders is what eradicates the loneliness, but it's also what drives the insanity and the blurring of self. And yet, having no one within the borders is an incoherence, a nothing of self -- with no one else, there is nothing. I am nothing; nothing is anything.
I still feel the presence of great possibility in this, but I am not finding the way to take advantage of it. Meditation, creativity, reading, study. The possibility of being centered and self-accepting in solitariness. Discovering self-love. Deriving meaning even without dependence on the presence of aonther. Isn't that what gods and pets are for?
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Breakup, pt. 3
It'll be a month in two days. It feels like much longer.
At times, I'm feeling abandoned. This was something we were in together and she gave up on it. It doesn't help to imagine her being happy; I have the impression, rightly or wrongly, that she doesn't think about me except when I insert myself into her day, and then she feels bad. She doesn't seem to have any overflowing feeling that she feels the need to share with me. That makes me feel insignificant and spiteful, and so I'm barely talking to her. And thus the connection that we promised each other we'd keep intact dwindles.
I'm grappling with the sense of a lack of meaning. I keep thinking about how if I can't share things with her, then what are they? And I have no one of her status to share things with; there is something perhaps about sharing things with a person that is your intimate that is different. They are intimately concerned with your successes and struggles, because they are attached to you, and by extension, them. I miss all the things I was able to be to her, when I was able to help, and not just let her down like I did so often. I very much feel like she is a difficult person, and now I wonder if I will have trouble feeling like something is real if it isn't as much of a challenge as she was.
I'm grappling with the sense of a lack of meaning. I keep thinking about how if I can't share things with her, then what are they? And I have no one of her status to share things with; there is something perhaps about sharing things with a person that is your intimate that is different. They are intimately concerned with your successes and struggles, because they are attached to you, and by extension, them. I miss all the things I was able to be to her, when I was able to help, and not just let her down like I did so often. I very much feel like she is a difficult person, and now I wonder if I will have trouble feeling like something is real if it isn't as much of a challenge as she was.
Monday, October 28, 2019
Breakup, pt. 2
I'm feeling abandoned; no one betrayed anyone, we simply decided that it was best that the relationship come to an end. We still loved each other; I still loved her. She had been my support, my companion, the person I shared everything with, for years. And now that's gone. And dealing with her being gone means I need her even more, and her having been my intimate means I feel I should be sharing this experience specifically with her. Except now she's largely happy with her life elsewhere, and my sadness brings her down. She says it's too hard on her emotionally, and so if I say something to her that expresses that I'm struggling, I can expect not to hear from her for at least a day. It feels abusive; structurally, I am abused by it. I blocked her on FB and then immediately thought to check Whatsapp to see if she had messaged me there. I'm incredibly frustrated with the band, because of scheduling impossibilities, and I would talk to her about it, but now I don't have her. I have no one to talk to.
Breakup, entry 1.
The idea of posting writing on a blog dried up as an alluring outlet for me sometime around 2012. Perhaps it had something to do with the decline of Google Reader? The aggregation of RSS feeds really did guide my media consumption in a very specific way, and thereafter, I honestly can't remember reading blogs with any regularity, whereas I had been for years prior.
I kind of resorted solely to journalling, either in handwritten, typewritten, or digital form, and the results became increasingly inartistic, even inarticulate. The sense that there was not even a potential human that would be interacting with whatever was being written initially gave me license to cop to some of the most unglamorous, un-laudable truths I could sniff out in myself. It became more my practice to eviscerate myself than to justify, give context to, beautify, humanise, or be fair to myself. It didn't need to be funny or entertaining or even proceed logically or even end coherently. Many pages just stop dead in the middle of something because I was at a cafe and someone arrived, or because Grace came home, and there wasn't enough steam in what I was doing to pause the world outside to finish up.
But now, I'd like to have a place where I can share what I'm going through, because I can't always just drink it off, or have a friend to unburden myself to, or worse, start sending her messages. My emotions are chaos now, and my memory is bad. And I feel like perhaps having this page nearly constantly open, where I can update it anytime I have a fluctuation, will make me both feel a bit better, as though I had talked to someone, and will also allow me to look back and see where I've been, even over the course of a day.
Grace and I broke up, after more than five and a half years. I don't have the energy to tell that story again right now; I've told it to quite a few people in various forms and different levels of detail. I'm sure it'll come out here eventually. But for now, I'm just going to put down how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking of, and what I'm doing. I intend for the break-up to be the central feature here, but I'm not limiting it to that. Today I watched that Elysium film, and I'm now beginning another one in a similar vein, Captive State. I came home from teaching a student and sat in the dark for an hour after eating two сосиски в тесте (sosiski v testye), which are basically pigs in a blanket. I've been eating a bit of crap, and I haven't visited the gym once since she left, although right before she did, I paid 16,000 rubles, or about two hundred dollars, for a year long membership. I know that going would help me mentally, but I just haven't felt like it.
And then after having thought about suicide on the way home, messaged her, sat in the dark, closed the computer, fell asleep and woke up, opened the computer to check if she'd responded and saw it'd only been twenty minutes, I decided I'd make watching this film something productive. I would take notes; I would pay attention to the decisions made, the themes, the stand-out moments. I'd construct a reading, a thesis, like in university. I would do something rather than idly gorge my mind. And immediately thereafter, I picked up the violin and began practicing scales. I saw Capital lying there, still unfinished, beckoning to me with its power, its challenge. I saw my Russian textbooks, comprehensive guides to the case system, sat on the coffee table. I remembered how in the first day after she and I broke up, I was invigorated that I now had all the free time to develop everything I wanted about myself, and this is still true. I don't have a lot of students; I don't have a lot of money now that I'm paying her rent. But I have time; I have interests. And I have ability. I will make the most of this. I am sad; I am lonely; I am empty. But there's much more to it than that.
I kind of resorted solely to journalling, either in handwritten, typewritten, or digital form, and the results became increasingly inartistic, even inarticulate. The sense that there was not even a potential human that would be interacting with whatever was being written initially gave me license to cop to some of the most unglamorous, un-laudable truths I could sniff out in myself. It became more my practice to eviscerate myself than to justify, give context to, beautify, humanise, or be fair to myself. It didn't need to be funny or entertaining or even proceed logically or even end coherently. Many pages just stop dead in the middle of something because I was at a cafe and someone arrived, or because Grace came home, and there wasn't enough steam in what I was doing to pause the world outside to finish up.
But now, I'd like to have a place where I can share what I'm going through, because I can't always just drink it off, or have a friend to unburden myself to, or worse, start sending her messages. My emotions are chaos now, and my memory is bad. And I feel like perhaps having this page nearly constantly open, where I can update it anytime I have a fluctuation, will make me both feel a bit better, as though I had talked to someone, and will also allow me to look back and see where I've been, even over the course of a day.
Grace and I broke up, after more than five and a half years. I don't have the energy to tell that story again right now; I've told it to quite a few people in various forms and different levels of detail. I'm sure it'll come out here eventually. But for now, I'm just going to put down how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking of, and what I'm doing. I intend for the break-up to be the central feature here, but I'm not limiting it to that. Today I watched that Elysium film, and I'm now beginning another one in a similar vein, Captive State. I came home from teaching a student and sat in the dark for an hour after eating two сосиски в тесте (sosiski v testye), which are basically pigs in a blanket. I've been eating a bit of crap, and I haven't visited the gym once since she left, although right before she did, I paid 16,000 rubles, or about two hundred dollars, for a year long membership. I know that going would help me mentally, but I just haven't felt like it.
And then after having thought about suicide on the way home, messaged her, sat in the dark, closed the computer, fell asleep and woke up, opened the computer to check if she'd responded and saw it'd only been twenty minutes, I decided I'd make watching this film something productive. I would take notes; I would pay attention to the decisions made, the themes, the stand-out moments. I'd construct a reading, a thesis, like in university. I would do something rather than idly gorge my mind. And immediately thereafter, I picked up the violin and began practicing scales. I saw Capital lying there, still unfinished, beckoning to me with its power, its challenge. I saw my Russian textbooks, comprehensive guides to the case system, sat on the coffee table. I remembered how in the first day after she and I broke up, I was invigorated that I now had all the free time to develop everything I wanted about myself, and this is still true. I don't have a lot of students; I don't have a lot of money now that I'm paying her rent. But I have time; I have interests. And I have ability. I will make the most of this. I am sad; I am lonely; I am empty. But there's much more to it than that.
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