Guarded optimism and second chances

Around the beginning of the semester--which of course was also around the time I met J.--I spent a lot of time writing around a problem that I was beginning to notice in my personal life: namely, a huge disjunction between the way I experienced my life and the way I represented my life. One of the immediate triggers for this awareness was a conversation with K. where he kept trying to tell me I was an alcoholic and I realized that while I wasn't one, I was talking to him like I was. And I couldn't come up with a reason why that would be a good idea under any circumstances. In a broader sense, this was on my mind because the new school year seemed really to mark a new leaf for me professionally and academically--leaving the institutional fold of Erstwhile Teaching College for Not-NYU, being finished with coursework and orals, and having two forthcoming articles in hand. Moreover, I was coming up to the year anniversary of the semester that just about did me in, the shitstorm that came down before I had the chance to heal from my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. Mostly, I've told those stories and don't really need to go back.

And there, my friends, was the problem. Is the problem, more likely. I looked around at the beginning of the Fall of 2008 and realized that I was still the girl with all the fucked up stories, the girl sleeping with the married guy and probably more famous than she wanted to be for sharing the more sordid of her stories. In a sense, I started listening to myself a bit more and realized that I sounded kind of nuts.

For whatever reason, not much of this made the blog. I started to get into it in a couple of posts that I abandoned as they got increasingly complicated or whatever. Maybe I just didn't want to admit to some of it. And I think that when things seemed really good with J., it was easiest just to pretend that the rest of it never happened, that from now on everything was going to be fine &c.

We see, of course, how that turned out.

A lot of things happened in the last 36 hours or so. When the Xanax and zazen combination didn't work, I went to the bar on the next block for some $4 happy hour pints and read more of "The Angel in the House" and realized in the middle of all of it that sleeping with The Poet on Thursday had been a horrible, horrible mistake in part because I had been thinking about J. the whole time and after two beers I decided that I needed to text J. and tell him that. I saw it as a last ditch effort. What I couldn't get past all yesterday (Friday-yesterday) was the sense that I had done a horrible thing when I called him on Thursday and that I was engaged in an acute form of self-sabotage without even really knowing why. And not long after that I went home to eat junk food for dinner and catch up on my Thursday night TV and just forget about the whole thing. If nothing else, I told myself, I've learned that being with The Poet no longer solves all of my problems, and as much as I'd like to think differently (because he is kind, because he cares, because after the last six or seven months we achieved a very wonderful coexistence), he would never be able to be the person I need him to be.

But he did text me back, and with no small sense of trepidation and outright panic, I went to meet him on the Lower East Side at 1:00 in the morning.

It was a strange conversation and a stranger couple of hours. Probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have with someone I barely know. I did a lot of apologizing and I don't think it was unjustified. I don't really want to go into the specifics (since that would, ironically, reinscribe and reproduce many of the impulses that got me here in the first place), but suffice it to say that I learned a lot of things about how I appear to other people (especially those who don't know me) and I also realized that I have a long way to go in figuring out how to deal with relationships. And a lot of what he called me out for can be related back to the problems I was writing about at the beginning, the experience vs. representation divide in my own life, and habits of speech and thought that have become kind of disturbingly entrenched over the last year and a half. It wasn't just the high awfulness of Thursday night, but things that were there from the very beginning, things that got exposed in part because that cleavage was there, that I had long since ceased to talk about myself in the way that I wanted to be.

But he came out to meet me anyway (and I him). I'm not sure either one of us knows why. And there's still a long way to go in any of this, and there were a lot of things that had to take place last night that were scary (beyond even the scariness of having someone call you out for everything you'd been feedback looping the self-recrimination about for the past three weeks), but I went through with it because I wanted to be with him. And it seems right and good and we've made some deals with each other (I hate to call them promises, exactly, not because they aren't but because that word seems overdetermined in this context) and I'm left just trying to do the best I can, holding on, relaxing, watching my speech, and trying to put myself back together again from these last couple of days. He's going to Montreal again this week, which means that I have no excuse for not writing my prospectus, prepping the next unit of my class, and all those other things that haven't been getting done. Also, of course, putting things right with The Poet in terms of not getting back together with him.

During the calling out, J. said to me, "You don't know how beautiful you are." But in a way that's almost impossible to parse. It wasn't meant to be flirtatious, it was almost sad and completely heartfelt, and that's one of the things that makes me nervous. It was nicer than when The Ex used to kind of browbeat me into confidence (which only succeeded in hollowing me out), but still...this moment sticks in my throat a little bit.

He's wonderful to fall asleep with, though. I was restless the first couple of times just because I'm used to mostly sleeping alone (and I almost never slept well with E. or The Poet), but it turns out that I can actually fall asleep while he's holding me. At least for a couple of hours. This in itself is immensely comforting, and I want it to bode well for something. Like I want to be my best self for him, to stop overcompensating for the hurts and traumas of 2007 and beyond. Even thought it's not going to be easy.

I don't know if I'll see him before he leaves for Canada. But I'm going to try to deal either way. And I'm still determined to go to the Village Zendo on Monday.

I may begin tomorrow with an eminently skippable prospectus-related post. Really must get back on track with that. And grading.