I realize it is a waste of time to wait and hope and twist oneself inside out hoping someone else will feel differently about you. Yet when it is such a convoluted pattern, intertwined with a sense of identity, it can be quite hellish.

Last night I talked with Thomas, and I did mention the email from Smitten, how confusing and hurtful it can feel. He said it just seems to be part of "my story". I asked him to tell me the story so I could be really clear about it (because to me it feels like the truth). He basically said it in one sentence: "Well, Duckie likes someone, they don't like her back, she gets rejected and feels abandoned, and gets to feel really really bad." But he also said, "But at this point, Duck, with all that you know, it's like those feelings are an indulgence."

I thought about that and it made complete sense... (and I know that whole thing may have sounded cruel when I wrote it... but Thomas prefaced it with being clear that he loves me and it was not a judgment. At some point earlier in my life if somebody said that to me I may have felt judged, but I didn't last night).

... because it is a consistent pattern. And all this time I've been thinking that the problem was the wrong factor. Basically thinking the factors were as follows:

#1 The other person
#2 The leaving or abandoning
#3 My devastated feelings

All this time I've been focusing on #1, believing, firstly, that there was something wrong with the people I chose, and then later in life, believing that there was something wrong with me for choosing those people... that I was destined to just keep picking wrong again and again.

I would also try to attack #2, in preventative measures. Trying to make myself the very most loveable, whatever was required. If it seemed I needed to be more available, I made myself so. If it seemed the person needed more space, I forced myself to give it. Still it never seemed to strike the right balance for #1 to not do #2.

The tricky one, and probably the one I spent the least time with, was #3. The feelings are just there... I could try not to feel them, but that's pretty tough. But what if I didn't feel them? How to stop? When Thomas said they were an indulgence, I understood him in the idea that I could actually be ADDICTED to feeling bad... consistently setting myself up by choosing #1 who would of course do #2 so I could have my #3!

If that just seems too crazy for you, well I don't know what to say. Some would most likely say that's preposterous, we can't control how we feel, and it is beyond our power to change #3. But I am a firm believer in creating the life that I want. In the realm of relationships my life has been quite miserable! I'm tired of it! In the whole of my life I haven't ever had a relationship that lasted longer than two years, and those relationships are few and far between and consistently disappointing. So if I could... approach #3... and if #3 were no longer an addiction, or attractive to me in any way (attractive yet painful like eating a can of frosting, for example), perhaps I could just toss it... feel something else.

Maybe the indulgence part is not even about the present so much but about the past. To grieve over someone I barely know, for months!, that I only had a couple of dates with, IS preposterous... but maybe it gives me the opportunity to feel a grief that is much much older but I was never allowed to wallow in... and if I could get that true feeling out of the way, the grief or the anger or the whatever about the shitty childhood crap- well then I would really be done with it and I wouldn't have to keep playing it over and over again in my adult life. What a revelation.

I'll get right on that.

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