Monday 12 May 2014

Watching hastiness unfold

I find myself in a perfectly imperfect situation. I am in love with a man that is in an imperfect situation, which means I am potentially in an imperfect situation independantly and as a result of his.
And the only way someone can do what is right for them is to think about what is right for them. The minute what is right for me comes into it, then what is right for them is influenced by it and then it becomes all wrong.

So I sit and see, watching a story unfold at a painfully slow pace, and knowing that this is not a scenario I ever planned on being in.  And I guess none us know what the future brings and how we will deal with it. Least of all me. and so I silently play out the scenarios.

My head hurts.

Badly



Wednesday 9 April 2014

Past imperfect

Over along period of time I have figured that there is only one way to get over a realationship and that is not to date anyone for a very long time. With a bad experience it is not so much getting over the person, it's getting to a place in which you have sufficiently recovered from the pain caused or at least, getting to a place in which you realise that you will never find the answer in anyone else. You cannot fully commit to another person whilst you have unresolved issues with another person.

There are times when you need to accept that you will never understand another person and no amount of understanding will make the carnage they inflict acceptable. The best place to be is to recognise that whatever the issues of another, there is no place for them in your life.

And this is where I got to a few months ago, the understanding that whilst I may have taken a disproprotionate amount of time trying to understand the issues of others, they were irrelevant. If I wasn't good for me it was time for a complete emotional disconnect.

And it's taken a long time to get here. To get to a place where I have no unresolved issues with a past partner. They don't need to be resolved since as relationships went, they sucked. None of them provided a feeling that I would ever want to feel again. All of them have served to warn me of the things I do not want to feel in a relationship. And to have them would make being single the only viable option.

And the irony is that this is the time that you meet someone, the time in which you are ready to love another wholeheartedly without any 'what if's' about anyone else. And for them to be in a place where they can truly love back. That said, it's not an easy path. People are frequently not conscious of their own emotional reactions, they don't necessarily have a full awareness of their own learned behaviour. I know without question that my emotional barriers can come up in an instant. My fight or flight mode is pitched higher than most people and with a history of relationships in which what people say being out of kilter with my gut instinct, it's going to be hard work for anyone to engender sufficient trust in me that I will commit whole heartedly.

And how do you ever really know if your gut instinct is telling you something you don't want to hear or if you are simply on red alert? It's an impossible question. And that's the thing about the future, you can only walk it with your eyes open and hope it's going in the direction you want it to. And you can only really do that when you have stopped looking back.


Tuesday 28 January 2014

Oh Lord, I have seen the light - lay your hands upon me

This weekend I shall be going away with a man that a barely know.

I am good at spontaneous but I rarely do rash. This man is utterly out of my comfort zone.

He's happy. Which means he's kind and that I have little experience of such traits. It's a fairly accurate rule of thumb that when people are unkind, they are generally unhappy.  And I have had too much of that in my life.

I'm not worried about the future for at this present moment, nice is good.

So I am going to go away with a man that is happy, kind, cooks, sings and is physically and emotionally confident.

The fact that he is in a three month deadline to the full abs look helps, but his qualification as a massage therapist has nothing to do with it.

Nothing you hear. Nothing


Monday 20 January 2014

When having a Tempur is a pain in the neck.

I recently did some extensive damage to my deltoid muscle and the knock on effect caused further strain to adjoining areas. Before I knew it, a planking competition with a teenager had reignited an old whiplash injury and I found myself in ongoing and considerable pain. The cause wasn't the planking, it was my ego. I intended to win, no matter the cost.

And so far, the cost has been £200 at the local Osteopath. Since my shoulder is attached to my neck, which is attached to my spine, which in turn is attached to my pelvis, I am - apparently, buggered and will need extensive healing. My body is like Newtons cradle - except it's not bouncing back.

It was an enlightening experience and with hand cupping my sacrum, he asked how my back had faired post twin delivery. "Perfectly fine"  I  exclaimed smugly, explaining that the purchase of a Tempur mattress had seen to it that I could jump out of bed in the morning with all the glee of a 10 year old.

"You have solved nothing' said the Osteopath "You have merely masked the problem"

And he is right, any more than two nights on a mattress not given the thumbs up by NASA sees me whimpering for all of the wrong reasons. My miracle cure only works as long as I don't venture too far from home or only stay in the very best in accommodation.  Since I live my life by the art of the tenuous link, it struck me that the tale of the Tempur mattress and the deltoid injury was just another of life's lessons on the journey to understanding the bigger picture.

And the bigger picture appeared when idly scrolling through my Facebook friends. Spotting a couple that had hurt me recently, my finger was itching to delete them forever and eradicate the things I wasn't prepared tp face. Yet pressing delete doesn't work, it's no more effective than sticking your fingers in your ears and humming when someone says something you don't want to hear.

Pressing delete would make these my Tempur friends. Get get rid of them and I would only have people around me that hadn't hurt me, yet. And there is no guarantee they won't so that list could just keep on growing. But you don't get rid of hurt by pretending it never happened, by looking the other way. You don't move on with your life when you leave things unaddressed and you do not grow as a person unless you choose to handle situations differently. Rather like the planking episode, turning your head from issues of discomfort is no more than an attack of ego.

When you cannot bear to face something, cannot bear to listen to something - so much easier to shelve the issue, to avert your gaze or pretend it didn't happen - but the things we do not wish to deal with are the things that create that annoying knock on effect.

So someone hurts me. I stop speaking to them, not because I want to but because I cannot verbalise hurt. Sure, it gets rid of the immediate pain but long term I feel guilty that I have avoided them and remain hurt that they didn't see how much they wounded me. Hardly a win win situation. And so I feel guilty and guilt is corrosive. So I feel bad about myself and the next time someone is horrid, I think I deserved it. And if not guilt, then shame or anger or some other pointless emotion until we learn that the only time that anything changes, is the time that we do something different.

It's the Tempur effect. Simply masks the problem.