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aseriesofthrills · 2 years ago

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My heart won’t stop beating. It’s good that it’s beating, preferable actually, but not this fast, and not this loud. I’m at my parents’ apartment sleeping on a thin pull out couch in their guest room. They just retired from Florida to North Carolina, breaking the mold of retirees flocking further south. They haven’t found a house yet in Asheville so we’re in cramped quarters, an apartment far more elegant yet much smaller than my shitty but spacious house in Los Angeles. Less than 24 hours since my feet touched east coast soil, I’m already feeling a little claustrophobic in the space. And it is just that - a space, a place, not a home. It’s not where we brought my younger brother home to from the hospital, the host of my first sleepover, the bathroom where I got my first period, the home held together by the walls I stared at wondering if everyone would immediately sense a difference in me after the first time I had sex, the bedroom where I came out to my parents. When my plane landed in North Carolina, my mom desperately wanted to “get the first hug” - a game our family plays - and left my dad stranded in the car in order to track me down near baggage claim, simply unable to wait the extra 30 seconds for me to make it outside. I used their guest bathroom only to find the toilet paper folded over, like I was at the Waldorf Astoria. Sometimes my mom even puts chocolates on my pillow when I visit. My dad texted me the day before my flight to ask for grocery store requests, as if the right brand of cold brew is the key to my happiness and they’d do anything in their power to unlock it. So, maybe, who needs a home when you have a lot of love? And anyway, this all has nothing to do with why my heart’s beating like a drum. It would be in any space or place.

My heart won’t stop beating fast and loud. I’m lying on my stomach, and I can hear the beats reverberating throughout the metal springs, the frail skeletal system holding this flimsy pull out couch together. The beats feel shockingly loud, as if I’m stranded at some heavy rock concert that I didn’t buy tickets to. I never understood why some people willingly go to concerts but bring earplugs, the weird fibrous orange material poking out of their ear canals. Supposedly their “pliable design slowly expands, conforming to your ear canal to help block out hazardous noise.” I would consider this noise Hazardous, but it isn’t just an aural problem. The bed is vibrating with my aliveness, abuzz with my analyzing. Could my heartbeats be shaking the whole apartment complex? The beating and throbbing makes it feel like I’m sleeping inside of my own giant ribcage, taunting me from the inside out. I should try turning over onto my back, but somehow that feels worse in other ways. Like I’m opening myself up to the world, vulnerable, singing, “Sure! Come and devour me!” Even if it meant the end of the incessant sounds of my blood pumping, I don’t think I could sleep like that. I want to feel cocooned and enveloped, folded into myself, a child and its mom all at once, someone capable of self-soothing. A feeling only possible by being on my stomach, relentless beating be damned.

I have a crush. Aside from being alive, it’s undoubtedly the source of the fervent beating that now must be registering as at least a 4 on the Richter scale. Noticeable Shaking of Objects and Rattling Noises. Felt by Most People in the Affected Area. I take solace in the fact that Moderate to Significant Damage is Very Unlikely. The crush is complicated. She told me she likes me, but we have to wait. I’m not good at waiting. Terrible, actually. Two or three weeks feel like months. I truthfully have no concept of how far off it feels to my warped brain, and the nebulousness of that might be even worse than being able to ascribe a timeline to it. It’s like I’m stranded in a foreign country where I’ve lost my passport, and I’m trying trying trying to get home but there’s no guarantee when I will. Someday, yes, it will be worked out. Things will fall into or out of place. But when? When when when? I wonder if she’s as preoccupied with me as I am with her. For my sake, I hope yes. For her sake, I hope no.

At a certain point the beat beat beating seems to let up, or maybe it’s just turned into a frequency I can thankfully no longer hear. But in some diabolical plot by the world to hold me hostage in an awake state, I’m now hyper aware of a clock ticking. Not metaphorically, though that would be apt, but the literal ticking of a time-keeping device in my vicinity. Tick. Tick. Tick. I hate to be this dramatic about something that was likely placed in the room by my mom in a casual attempt to decorate, but frankly, it’s ruining my life. And why would she pay such careful attention to decorating anyway? This is a temporary apartment, a space, a place, not a home, and it doesn’t need little clocks. It needs my newborn brother and my first period bathroom and my sleepover room and the walls that watched me grow.

Thoughts about my crush keep flashing through my brain, almost like jump scares. You expect it but it startles you all the same, grossly over-buttered popcorn flying everywhere. Like Fleabag suddenly remembering things at inconvenient times about her best friend, Fleabag plagued by guilt over her death. Except I didn’t kill anyone. I just like someone. I think back to the way she touched my hands at the bar, surprised by how cold they were, warming them up. How she put her hand on the small of my back when I was walking in front of her. How she asked, “Can I kiss you?” in my passenger seat outside of her apartment at 1am. How she tasted sweet, like candy. How I didn’t want her to leave my car, how I wanted to go inside with her. How she texted me after that she’s glad she ran into me. How she said she has a crush on me and wants to take me on a date, but after Thanksgiving, because it’s complicated. I need to be patient, because it’s tricky with work. We might be working together. And a big holiday is right around the corner. So we have to wait. But the pit in my stomach is ignoring all of the nice things she said. The playful, flirty things she did. I can’t stop wondering: what if she changes her mind about me?

My heart won’t stop beating fast and loud. I think about the counting sheep trick, and my depleted little pea brain can’t remember if it’s a wives tale or if it’s actually supposed to help lull you to sleep. I figure it can’t hurt. I start counting, but instead of sheep, I count every time the clock ticks. One. Two. Three. The clock has still been loyally ticking this whole time that my head’s been off doing its Olympic Mental Gymnastics, going for gold, burning so many calories that my brain might get so lean that I’ll only ever be able to think about this crush. A broken record player scratching the same spot forever. Four. Five. Six. After Hurricane Katrina, I went to New Orleans with a group to help clean and rebuild, and one business that I helped repair had a big analog clock hanging on one of its walls. The classic black and white one. Like everything else in what was left of the building, it was broken. Whatever time was displayed on the clock must have been the moment Katrina’s flood waters got so high that it short circuited and stopped. I am certainly not likening my personal anxieties to a massive natural disaster, but I am saying I think my brain has hit its maximum flood level of thoughts, and if it turned off soon I would not be the least bit surprised. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. It’s actually working a little bit. I can only focus on counting, not on crushing, and I feel myself seeping deeper into the bed, begging it to engulf me and kill my brain. At this point, that is a thing I want.

For better or worse, I still have enough gray matter in my broken brain to think of all the permutations of how our date could go. The date that still feels like it’s in an entirely different calendar year from now. Where we might eat. Our feet touching under the table. Wondering if she’ll gently touch my hands again. What we’ll talk about. What’ll happen after dinner. Will one of us suggest going to a nearby bar to talk more? Will we go back to her place? That’s where most of my daydreams lead. Her place. I haven’t been inside her apartment, but she showed me around a bit when we met virtually for work a few months ago - when I wish I’d more overtly tried to forge a connection so things might be further along by now, but how was I to know I’d feel this way? - and I’ve seen other bits and pieces on Instagram. Still, I have no real concept of the layout, but my brain has created its own blueprint. We walk inside and she offers to get me a drink, and I don’t really want another one because I’ve had one at dinner, but I say yes and hoist myself up onto the kitchen counter while she makes it (a cocktail) or pours it (wine). She brings it over and I barely wait for her to hand it to me before I put it down and we start kissing. In another version, I ask to use the bathroom once we get inside and then, when I’m done, I open the door and she’s just waiting outside for me. We start kissing. That one’s a little weird, I guess. In a different permutation, we sit down on the couch to watch a movie. She asks what movie I want to watch, and I say some version of, “It doesn’t matter… I don’t plan on watching for long.” We start kissing. The last one’s sort of a bold one. I’m not always bold in these situations. Sometimes I am, but only if I feel almost certain that the other person feels the same way I do. When we ran into each other at the bar, she made a comment about wanting to kiss 28 people at her 28th birthday party. A friend who saw us interact reminded me that I apparently responded with, “I hope I’m one of them.” At any rate, impatience is clearly a common thread in all three of these scenarios. No matter the route, all the daydreams lead to the same place.

If my parents’ behavior - the hugging and the toilet paper folding and the grocery shopping and the loving - is any indicator, you would think my attachment style is so firmly, unquestionably secure that I should be memorialized in the Museum of Good Mental Health. Give me a ribbon cutting ceremony, give me pomp, give me circumstance. As it turns out, I might just have an anxious attachment style, which is a realization that only occurred to me relatively recently but I’m sure occurred to my friends 6 crushes ago. It hit me out of the blue one morning when I was brushing my teeth, my intrusive thoughts picking a moment to strike when my defenses were down and I was unable to distract myself. And it makes perfect, crystal clear sense. Being closeted for so long, you get accustomed to feeling wrong. Feeling bad. Feeling like your thoughts aren’t right, you’re different, you don’t belong. You’re so wrong so bad so wrong and so bad. For the longest time I didn’t have many people around me who I knew were queer, so my crushes were either on fictional characters or straight girls. And do you know what fictional characters and straight girls don’t have the capacity to do? Like you back. Return your feelings. Living in a cycle of desperately wanting someone who doesn’t have the ability or desire to want you back does something to a person: after a while, it makes you feel unlovable. You internalize it and conclude you’re not worthy of love. There is a problem, and the problem is you. Reciprocity starts to feel like a never-going-to-happen-thing - it’s not situational, it’s global. And it gets reiterated over and over because you get caught in that dynamic, addicted to the pattern. Even though it’s miserable, it’s familiar. With all that said, I also do want to acknowledge that being a human is hard. I would submit that we all feel insecure and, at times, unworthy of love or even being liked. It doesn’t require trauma or any particular type of hardship to have an obsessive crush, a lack of self-confidence, a difficult time navigating feelings. But I do think my early relationship with my queerness is inherently part of the mix for me, personally.

It feels as if my crush is camping out in my brain. This crush, and all of my baggage surrounding this crush, is making my heart beat really fast and really loud. Have I allowed this to go too far? Undoubtedly yes. Should there also be room for some self-empathy? I think also probably yes. Definitely yes. Someone told me that they like me, and it has sent alarm bells throughout my system. Someone has both the capacity to like me and does like me. And because I have a scarcity mindset when it comes to romantic love, my body is trying to hold on so tightly and doesn’t want to let it go. I keep replaying those moments of compliments and touch and feeling good on a dizzying loop because my brain thinks that might be the last time it will happen. A sign of a crush pulling back - a non-response for a few hours, a different tone, a shortness - it all feels like a total dismissal, my worst fears confirmed. It sends me right past Go, Do Not Collect $200, in fact Why Don’t You Go Right To Loveless Jail! My neural pathways have been carved throughout time to expect rejection and disappointment, but I’m trying to free myself from the tired maze of my own myopic thinking. Ultimately I have no idea how this will turn out, and that’s incredibly anxiety inducing. Gaming out all of the things I’m going to say to her, or where we’ll go on our date, or who will make the first move and what that move will be - it all creates an illusion of control. But this isn’t something I can control. It’s a thing to recognize, look in the face, and surrender to. Another person is a thing I really can not control. Uncertainty is an aspect of reality that no one, including me, is ever free from. I can, however, remind myself that this is not the only good thing I will ever experience. There will be more crushes, more reciprocated feelings, more Can I Kiss Yous?, more grazing hands at a bar. If we’re lucky, we’ll all have many spaces, many places, many people to call home.

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aseriesofthrills · 4 years ago

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Suzie Is Back

Suzie is back, and so are long, overly emotional, rambling posts.

I matched with Suzie mid-October 2020. Caileigh and I had broken up earlier that summer after 3.5 years together, and my plan was to take some time off dating to “figure myself out.” Caileigh was the first person I ever dated, so I thought being single and out at the same time - for the first time - was a necessary step in figuring out my identity as an individual. Well, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there’s this big thing called a Global Pandemic going on that’s forcing us all to choose between our physical health and a social life. Put simply, I was lonelier than America’s Dad Tom Hanks on a deserted island before he found Wilson. Or maybe even lonelier than America’s Dad Tom Hanks after he struck up a friendship with Wilson, because after all, Wilson was a volleyball. I wanted to find my Wilson.

And boy did I find a lot of Wilsons. Unfortunately for me, I found a lot of off-brand Wilsons that were the wrong color, didn’t hold air well, or came out of the box with fabric missing. This is not to say these Wilsons are undesirable. I’m sure any of them would provide solid companionship to the next unfortunate soul whose fallen plane renders them a castaway. They were just not for me.

There was Emily, someone who I had strong feelings for and made me realize I’d really like to date someone who’s also Jewish. I was wowed by her philanthropic agenda of making candles and donating half the proceeds, until she did a very gay thing™ and got back with her ex, which was when I began to wish I instead had simply donated that $100 directly to charity and didn’t have to stare at her Tender Flame (more like Tinder Flame, amirite) candles sprinkled around my house. Looking back, we really were not compatible. Emily taught me that just because you have good banter with someone and a shared belief system, it doesn’t mean you wont clink teeth when you make out for the first time. It might even mean she will be extremely silent while you go down on her for what feels like hours, then not reciprocate because she is… probably thinking about getting back with her ex.

Then there was MK, someone who I’d actually met once before at a Hollywood Ladies Drinks Night Before The World Shut Down We Used To Have It So Good Oh My God. I remember wondering that night if she might be queer, but my gaydar couldn’t figure her out and I was in a relationship so it was a moot point anyway. I was hesitant to send her a “like” on Hinge because what if she didn’t feel the same way and then I ran into her at a work thing in 2023 and she KNOWS I liked HER but we BOTH know SHE didn’t like me BACK and -

It took me 3 seconds to get over that existential crisis because I remembered that thousands of people were dying every day and nothing actually mattered. So I liked one of her photos, and she matched with me in literally 4 minutes. I normally like to talk to someone for at least a few weeks - pandemic or not - before meeting in person, but she almost immediately suggested getting together the following weekend. Maybe that’s just her, or maybe she felt confident that I’m most likely not a serial killer since we have mutual friends, but she went for it and I agreed because I hadn’t yet figured out how to assert my own boundaries. But also, why not. It was just a picnic.

It was not just a picnic. It was a picnic conveniently a few blocks from her apartment. It was a picnic and then it was dinner and sex. I enjoyed spending time together at first, but the more we talked and hung out the more my feelings dissipated. In the middle stretch I thought for a second that I had perhaps cracked the mythical Friends With Benefits code, but after a few more dates I realized the code was far more complicated than I’d originally anticipated and what I thought was the treasure map key was actually just meaningless hieroglyphics and OK I will stop this metaphor now. It was time to take the high road and be honest, which for me manifested in telling her I was going to quarantine the next 2 weeks before flying home so this would be the last time I saw her before 2021 and we should check in when we’re back in LA in January - and then I texted her once I got to Florida to say lets just be friends. Not my proudest moment, but we’re learning.

There were a few other short-lived dalliances, but we all have places to go and people to see (from a distance). Just know I somehow managed to make the Pandemic Year my own personal Slut Year. And we’re using the term slut lovingly, simply to describe that 2020 was the year I managed to sleep with more people than any year prior. Tell me I can’t do something, then watch me work.

If you pay attention to detail, as I’m sure my 2 consistent followers do, you’ll remember Suzie and I matched mid-October which was in the midst of my MK chronicles. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was lovestruck by Suzie just from her Hinge profile and pictures. I don’t mean like, “Oh, she’s pretty, I hope she likes me back.” I mean like, something happened to my brain immediately that can only be described as some version of virtual pheromones invading my bloodstream. It felt uncontrollable and biological. And if we learned anything from Dr. Fauci this year, it’s that science knows best. The first real conversation we had - meaning that sweet sweet moment someone on a dating app finally admits that they, too, were looking at the app at the very same moment you messaged them - felt engaging and electric and right. At the end of the conversation I gave her my number and she immediately texted me “Talk to you tomorrow *kissy emoji*,” which probably made me precum.

What ensued was months of talking every day. I’ll drone on for paragraphs if I let myself, so I’m not going to let myself. I’ll just say for a while it felt amazing. I liked her so deeply. It took us a good stretch of time before we broached the subject of seeing each other in person, but then a combination of her horrific time management skills (her words), a potential Covid exposure, and a highly contentious presidential election got in the way and lead us down a windy path ultimately culminating in a Zoom first date… a week and a half before I was supposed to fly home for 2 months. The Zoom date was everything I hoped it would be and more. I’d never felt more sad to click “End Meeting For All” but was too giddy to notice. She asked me about my holiday plans, so I told her about my impending travel, and then she more or less said we should have sex before I go. So we did. And it was the best sex of my life. And then I left the state of California, our mutual residence, for 2 months.

Things were somewhat fine at first - we were still talking every day, with a few more Zooms sprinkled in - but then she went home to New Jersey, and suddenly we weren’t talking every day. It was more like every 3-4 days and rarely in actual conversational form. It was more like me waiting for her to reply, then waiting to respond since she’d waited so long, then we’d do it all over again. I felt anxious and tortured and dejected and had no appetite and my mom asked me on more than one occasion if I was ok. I was not ok. But I told myself to bE cHiLL, something that is often diametrically opposed to my natural state of being. I reminded myself that, despite the fact that we had spoken every day for 2 months - which is practically one step away from engagement in LesbianLand - we had only had one in-person date. I was careful to not make It seem more serious than It was, so instead I workshopped a lot of dramatic WHAT ARE WE? texts that I sent to all of my friends and never to Suzie.

We had mutually agreed upon “See you in January,” so I told myself I’d just ask her to hang out when we got back. Then she postponed her flight to LA for 2 more weeks because our Covid numbers were at a scary peak, the worst it had been since the beginning of the Pandemi Lovato. Finally she told me she’d rebooked her flight for the 15th, and I optimistically thought to myself, “You simply don’t tell someone the exact day you’re getting back into town if you don’t plan on seeing them! Right?” Wrong. I shot my shot, and she shot me down. She replied with a long series of texts explaining that her mental health wasn’t in a good place, and she couldn’t be accountable for communicating effectively. She sprinkled in some compliments for good measure, making sure to take a pit stop in “I think you are so wonderful so please don’t think this has anything to do with you” Town, which was reassuring but did not override my brain’s instinct to rethink everything I’d done and said the past few months. But I felt connected to her on a human level, and I didn’t want to lose that simply because she didn’t want to bump butts anymore, so I suggested we be friends and she enthusiastically agreed. End of conversation.

Until later that night, when she texted me Greetings after landing at LAX. I was confused, but I assumed that just meant she was taking me at my word, and this friendship started n.o.w. What followed was some of the most perplexing behavior I’ve witnessed as a living person and hands down the most confounding I’ve ever experienced in my dating career. She’d text me about a new vibrator she bought, or send me a song link then simply “heart” my response and be done with the exchange. It felt like she was just reminding me she existed, as if my small brain could forget. Sometimes she’d ask me how I was doing and we’d have semblances of a real friendship, but other times she’d tell me that I’m SO HOT or send me DMs of a sexy Phoebe Bridgers photo or a Normal People instagram post of Connell telling Marianne she’s pretty. Somewhere in the middle of all that my patient friend Caroline finally hit me with some tough love and told me I needed to block Suzie’s number and hide her on social media. For all intents and purposes, Suzie couldn’t exist anymore. Caroline was right, but I couldn’t do it, so I compromised that for the next week I wouldn’t reach out to Suzie first. Caroline told me “Alcoholics have to quit cold turkey, they don’t get to say well I drink on the weekends” but I decided I was simply not able to do anything more drastic than not text this freshly 25 year old girl who was slowly unraveling my emotional stability first for a week.

You will not believe this but I survived the week and actually felt better, so I did it again the next week. And the next. And the next. Until it had been a month and I hadn’t reached out to Suzie first. She was still texting and DMing me, but I felt my feelings finally waning! Gone were the days of finding her high school ex-boyfriend’s blog in the depths of the internet or looking her up on Venmo to see who she’d gotten Chipotle with the night before. I absolutely still liked her - those fucking pheromones are relentless - but it felt less fresh, so I started to formulate a plan. Once I felt FULLY (lol) over her, I’d text her the next time I was horny. Best case scenario she’d come over, worst case scenario she’d be so disgusted or insulted that she’d never want to talk to me again and I’d actually get over her, not pretend-get-over-her-so-I-could-trick-myself-into-safely-bootycalling-her. But then she sent me potentially the most flirtatious message yet, and I took my opening at 12:53p on a Wednesday and simply said “when are you going to fuck me.” She fucked me that Saturday night.

So. Suzie is back, and Saturday night (and Sunday morning, *wink* she slept over) was great. But now it’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad again, to borrow some words from Judith Viorst.

How we left things this time is that she does want to see me again, but it can’t be a talk-everyday-thing because she’s ~bUsY* and moving to NYC this summer anyway for grad school (did I forget to mention that? Oops!) and for whatever other reasons that exist that are preventing her from being obsessed with me. She asked what my boundaries and needs are too, and both her actions and words that night really felt clear that she still liked me. I asked if she thought she’d ever see me again. There are some things you really can only ask while cuddling post-sex, and that’s one of them. She paused and said yes. She explained the context around her poor communication and that she never wanted to stop talking to or seeing me, and the way she was holding me felt like she was feeling just as connected to me as I was to her. You can tell when someone just isn’t there with you, and this was not that. We were both right there.

But we were also right back to there being a power imbalance between us. There’s no escaping the fact that this is really on her terms in its present configuration. Our best plan was to promise to be honest moving forward, which felt like it had a lot of potential at the time, but it turns out being honest is hard. Things sort of reverted back to how they were, except with all of my feelings and expectations that I’d worked hard to push down rushing back to take their place on the frontlines of my brain.

It’s been almost 2 weeks, and we’ve talked a few times every 2-4 days. I’m fighting the urge to memorialize exactly what’s transpired, but there’s simply no use in holding onto the details. What finally made all of these not-at-all latent emotions bubble up to the surface and inspired this Intense Feelings Word Vomit is two pronged. First, because I love to torture myself, sometimes I look at Suzie’s Hinge profile to see if she’s changed anything. For some reason, if it stays the same, I feel safe that she’s not seeking out anyone else but me. Which is somewhat logical but also farcical in this particular situation, and I fully understand that. I guess I was really wanting to invite some pain into my life tonight, because even after she texted me yesterday and then proceeded to stretch a very short conversation into something that still is in limbo, I decided it would be fruitful to check her Hinge profile. I’m here to report that all 3 of her prompt questions & answers were different. And readers, I had previously checked it recently enough to know this was a very fresh edit.

The second thing that pushed my feelings over the top, out of my mouth, and directly onto my keyboard is that when she finally texted me back at like 11:30pm, she seemed to entirely brush over two clear attempts, in my opinion, at relaying that I’d like to see her again. And that feels not good. My instinct is to tell myself that maybe my comments weren’t as overt as I first believed them to be, but I think that’s a thinly veiled excuse and a defense mechanism. If someone wants to see you, they will.

I’m almost certain (I am certain) all of my friends - ALL of them! I have A LOT! - are up to their eyeballs in Suzie-flavored-shit, so before writing this I must admit I did the loneliest thing of all: instead of being honest and sharing my feelings directly with her, I texted them… to myself. Raw, unedited emotions that I hope to never re-read one day but probably will and when I do I sure hope I’m in a healthier place and can laugh about it and think about How Far I’ve Come.

The truth is, I’m sitting here all over again picturing the dates I could take her on (the Carlsbad Flower Fields), what restaurants she should experience before leaving LA (Pace), and what fun at-home activities I could plan for us before the world fully returns to a post-Covid society (the DIY pottery kit I bought for myself, fully aware she loves to make clay art). Dare I admit I even daydream about the cross-country road trip that I’ll offer to accompany her on when she moves back East. I look at the contents in my fridge and think, “Maybe I wont use that ingredient tonight in case I need it to make us dinner next time she comes over.” I was ready to plan trying to get vaccinated this weekend around her availability, which is actually insane. You look up simp in the dictionary, and there I am. I took the crumb she gave me and turned it into a huge fucking Mrs. Fields birthday cookie cake that serves 20. No wonder I feel sick.

Unless I’m entirely miscalculating, which I can safely say I am not, Suzie is not sitting in her home thinking the same about me. I think she does like me - I have to allow myself to believe she does, because she said she does, and if I don’t believe it now I never will - but I also have to admit that 6 months into this game of Suzie Mental Gymnastics, I can recognize that all signs are pointing directly to the fact that I like her far more than she likes me. I don’t say that as a form of self-flagellation; it’s just a fact that I need to finally accept. Not just accept, but also let go of the possibility that it’s going to change. That’s the hardest part. I naively thought we were getting back on the ride again, and I buckled up for what turned out to be just a detour.

It can feel nearly impossible to pull yourself away from someone, especially when it feels like their claws are deeply embedded in your brain and your heart. That sounds wildly dramatic, but it is genuinely how I feel. What’s doubly hard is being able to trust my own instincts. I can get attached very quickly, and then it’s almost indecipherable whether someone is actually mistreating me or if my unrealistic expectations don’t allow the other person a chance to actually meet them. This whole essay could potentially be described as an overreaction, but the more I think about it, the more confident I feel in the validity of my feelings. Even if part of the issue is setting my expectations too high, the bigger issue is how I’m being treated. Suzie and I did agree on a low-pressure situation, but it doesn’t take much more than the bare minimum effort to consider another person’s feelings. And I don’t think my feelings are being considered all too much.

Not that Suzie ever really left my life in a real way, but I’m starting to think she came “back” for me to get a second chance at prioritizing my boundaries, my feelings, myself. I don’t want to overreact and call a party foul too soon, but perhaps I need to readjust my idea of what constitutes too soon. After all, maybe it was a mistake to not have asked for clarity sooner the first time. It would have probably allowed me to enjoy my time at home with family more and saved my brain a heck of a lot of overtime I am still saving up to pay. A not-no doesn’t mean a yes, and waiting does not change the outcome. It’s a natural reaction to hold on tighter to someone while loosening your grip on your own needs when you feel them pulling away, but it’s often something you can’t stop from happening. And that’s a tough pill to swallow. Sometimes you have to assert your needs when they’re not being met and watch things fall apart, not because you have those needs but in spite of them. You start again. I will start again.

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