“No you see, I was just *second guessing* myself”
From: Julia
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 7:07 PM
To: Six Sheep
Subject:
I know I should have answered this sooner, but you know my propensity for saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, so I thought it would be better if I thought about it for a while before I answered it.
It’s not a mean email at all. It’s important that we be truthful with one another.
I think you’re right about the intensity being different for us. These feelings seem to be much more intense for you, due in part to any number of circumstances:
1) you don’t do things halfway and tend to feel really hard
2) I think there has been some projection going on on both our parts
3) I have to force myself to stop thinking about certain things at certain points whereas you do not
4) etc, etc.
You say your life is unfinished and that I checked out of that kind of life (for my suburban bliss, har har) but, I don’t agree with that bit. I certainly don’t feel my life is finished, or that the fact of mortgages and matrimony are things that make it finished in any way. Those things are not even requirements on the road to a life being finished, to me. But, I remember thinking that they were, before I had either. But it isn’t true. I am still Julia, with all sorts of weirdness and incomplete parts. Mortgages and matrimony do not complete me. And you have your adventures, but I have my sorts of adventures too that would bore you to tears but that are important to me (see number two above), such as that I am falling in blissful puppy-love with this dog we are fostering but I can’t possibly keep her but my little heart is going to get torn out when someone adopts her, etc., and I have *all sorts* of drama and angst regarding my yard which you would laugh at but which has become a huge deal in my life (it’s all about problems and solutions, which is what all our dramas are about, so what do the specifics really matter?). I’m not growing up. I’m just doing different sets of problems and solutions than you are. I’m just as emotionally tied up in mine. Part of what I like about you is that you are so open and honest about yours, and it’s nice to think of them instead of my own. And that feeling is tied to the warm feelings I already have for you, so. You are more than an escape for me. I genuinely care about you, even if you aren’t telling me all the gritty bits of your adventures.
I think you want to see how I feel about you as one thing or another, friend-love or love-love, when it is just what it is. I started to realize that your feelings were more intense and overwhelming over the past few weeks here when suddenly nothing was okay anymore. I also think your love for me is not as much love for me as it is for the idea in your head of me, which, even though we communicate almost every single day, we don’t see each other and talk to each other and watch each other’s stupid mannerisms that always become so annoying at about the three-month point in a relationship. There are some content filters between what we see of each other. On my end more than yours. I feel like you love the me you knew three years ago. Which, I mean, part of that is still me, but whole new sets of circumstances have come along and changed me. I’m not saying I’m a different person, I’m just saying some of the stuff I would do then, wouldn’t feel like the things I would spontaneously do anymore. (Like for instance, I hardly ever drink anymore because I just feel sick when I do, which is a pretty big change.) And you try to resist seeing this by saying things like, Julia you are Growing Up and “assigning yourself” a life in Cincinnati. When in reality, I chose these things. I chose to get married, I chose to buy a house and have three dogs and yard drama. I chose them because I wanted them. I feel like you think I was pressured into doing these things against my will, or that I just did them because someone expected me to and now I live with the consequences of wrong decisions. I don’t feel that way at all. I have drama and angst sometimes and think I would have done things differently, but shit, everyone has that. I can count on, like, two fingers the number of decisions I have made in my life that I have never second-guessed. My mistake has come in talking to you during times of second-guessing. I think you were clinging to that and thinking that it was all there was, that every day I regret what my life is now.
When, to tell you the truth, I am actually pretty happy right now. I mean, I have the odd episode of mind-numbing depression and angst, but overall. I am a pretty content person.
I feel like I can’t tell you much about the happiness because you
1) feel hurt by it because you aren’t here sharing it in some way
2) think it’s boring and suburban and everything you hated when you were growing up in the suburbs
3) think I’ve sold out
4) are bored by it
5) think I’m faking being happy when I’m really not.
So I filter out the happy because I don’t want to miscommunicate with you on those points above, and cause some sort of chaos.
I *do* love even your bad habits and general wretchedness, but I don’t think it’s the *kind* of love you are needing. I don’t think it’s the kind of love that is necessary for you to feel. And this makes me sad, because I feel like my feelings for you are not enough. They just are what they are. I wish it could be that anyone’s love would be enough for anyone else, but it just doesn’t work that way.
It has made me so sad from the get-go of this thing that the way you feel about me causes you pain. And I have tried to do all I can to make that not be so, but by its very nature, that is impossible. And that makes me so so sad, Six. I never want to be someone who hurts you. I want to be someone who makes you feel *better* because you are loved the whole way, the whole you, not just the bits I like.
So. If you need to not talk to me for a while, I can understand that, even though I feel sad about it. I don’t want loving me to hurt you. That is the very last thing I want. I should have told you some of this some time ago but it wasn’t really clear to me what needed clarifying and what didn’t, since this has been so weird from the start. I wish I could be more to you than a friend who talks about zany antics and the weather, because I so completely value our connection. I don’t like the thought of you cutting yourself off from me :( (I wish I could make that little AIM sad frown because it is the most expressive one, sad and worried and kicked puppy-dog at the same time) but if that is something you need to do in order to feel sane and quit drinking yourself into a stupor then I think it is important that you do it.
I feel sad. I want to hug you and have a cry before you go off and stop talking to me for a while and come back and be my zany antics and the weather friend.
I hope you read this, anyway.
hugs hugs hugs,
Julia
Six Sheep 