Disappearing...

I do it mostly for safety and cover.  I do it when I am not sure how to move forward.  I do it because it is often easier than attempting to work out things that I do not know how to sort through...

As I think I have mentioned...relationships are particularly hard for me.  Over the last two years, I have been through a relational overhaul, that I knew was needed, but prior to the seminal event, I did not know how to address.  I was not happy in a great many of my relationships.  And I was vocal about it, but that was about all.  I would talk your ear off about how unhappy I was, but I felt mired, completely lost in how to retrieve myself from a great number of relationships I had ongoing that were completely out of whack.

I did not know that leaving my job, that I loved so very much, would be the thing that caused this whole relational explosion.  I thought I was just making a change. I thought that I was finally willing to leave something that was no longer serving me and was actually hurting me.  I did not know there would be more painful relational exits to follow.

I have done a lot of thinking, and writing, and inventory and long walks and talks with myself.  My sponsor has heard about all of this until I am pretty sure she wants to throw up.  And what I could not see, no matter how hard I tried was my own engagement in relationships was flawed, severely.

I do not tend to relate to others in a healthy manner.  I tend to place my happiness and honesty on the shelf because I think that is required of me in order to participate in the relationship.  I mean, I sacrifice my own happiness in order for others to be happy then I resent you for what I have done.  And mostly I accomplish this by lying.  I don’t tell you that I don’t like something, your behavior hurt my feelings, I don’t appreciate the way you treat me, that your conduct is wearing on me.  No, I say nothing to you, but I do say a great amount of other things to other people, of course, none of the people who can actually do anything to help me right the relational faction.  But I do talk a great deal about how unhappy I am, but never to the person I have the issue with...so the long standing codependent relation continues.

And proliferates.

I don’t intend to be dishonest.  But perhaps that isn’t even true.  Perhaps I do intend from the outset.  I have tended to operate in relationships in the manner that what I think and feel is my own private business and you are on a need to know basis, and so very often, I decide you don’t need to know.

I am not sure how I ever thought this whole relational strategy would ever produce anything but chaos and confusion for all involved...I just know and can own that I did and have.  And very embarrassingly, I did not even know that I was setting us all up for failure and heartbreak and loss.  I really didn’t.

And I would like this fact to be some sort of benign neglect.  Some sort of gross oversight on my part...but it wasn’t.  I did this intentionally, repeatedly because I am absolutely terrified of letting you in.  So I created this whole dynamic where I appear to let you in, but you aren’t really in.  You are closer, perhaps, or I give you the feeling of closer, all while I am over here doing the same shit, different day.

I can see that I have a failure to invest.  And that failure is really just an exit ramp on the disappearing super highway of my life.    And while some relations are harder to leave or disappear from, leaving is my greatest battle won skill in my analysis.

I have been on this relational retreat for a few months now.  I didn’t intend to start this, it just kind of happened.  And it isn’t because I don’t love the people in my life, but just that I know my way of engaging is flawed and fucked up.  And I needed to take some steps backwards to feel safe enough to really look at myself and how I relate, to whom and what I am trying to accomplish.  It has not been easy, or fun, or really enlightening so far.

But lately I have asked for and received some additional help and I see things more clearly.  I can so easily walk away because I was never really all that invested in the first place.  That doesn’t mean that I didn’t care, don’t care or don’t love people, it just means, that for me, loving is something that I need to do from a safe distance.

It is kind of hard to see yourself in this new way.  To review all your old interactions and see just how misguided your efforts have been and are with a foundering hope that perhaps I can be different.

I want to be vulnerable, until I don’t.

I want to be present, until I don’t.

I want to invest in you and the us that is created, until I don’t.

I want to create intimacy and a true connection, until I don’t.

And because so much of us occurs only in my mind, it is easy for me to just disconnect those tendrils that actually connect us.  And I will admit that I have a long standing practice of disconnection all with the ardent and ever present hope that somehow by my aloofness and standoffishness, that I will somehow forge a lasting connection to those about me.

Looking back at my past has been hard, I can see that there are few remaining connections because I really never put forth the effort to maintain those relationships.  Even people from my past that I have made the effort to reconnect with, don’t really appear interested and I think, in part, that might just be because what I have to offer up isn’t all that enticing.

And I can own that today.

At the base of all of this is a gross admission.  I have used a great number of people so that I did not have to look at me.  It is easy to become subsumed with you, so that I do not have to look at or work on me.  Get lost in you, get hurt when you don’t respond the way I would like, then exit to disappearance island where it feels much safer than to meet you where you are and actually discuss how I feel and why.

Largely, my assessment of myself and all this relational quagmire boils down to this:  I am immature.  And wounded.  And insecure.  And that doesn’t make me unique.  We all are immature, wounded,  and insecure about something.  I am just owning it here.  This is my current truth that I am sure will give way to other truths.  That is the thing about owning hard things about yourself...every piece of hard that I must swallow, leads me to more hard chunks of shit that I have been avoiding.

And this would be the place that I tell you I now know more and better so I can and will do better...but I am not sure I can.  When I say that all of my life so far has been my best efforts, I am sincere in that.  I am not sure I can engage differently because deep within me there is this idea that somehow the way I am is better.  Now, I can see objective proof that isn’t true. And I can also see relational progress in the disappearing I have done from a great number of relationships that were not great in the past couple of years.  But how much and to what degree I can do it differently, I do not know.

What I do know today is that I value the current relationships I have...even the ones that are fraught with hardship, pain and codependence.  I see the why and the how, and I am doing new work to try to find a new path forward.  One that does not include disappearing as option numero uno.

It is a hard ask of myself but I believe that all the hard things we ask of ourselves, that great push to expand beyond our own borders, fears and insecurities give us passage to parts of ourselves that we barely know or understand.

So like everything in life, there is more work to do and more progress to be gained, or not.

Again...still.