Claim to Fame

So there is this guy on the Bachelorette right now... and my coworker dated him in college. She hasn't spoken to him in years, but she doesn't think he is 100% on the show for Ali.

And also, since we are talking about the Bachelorette today, does anyone else think that this season is moving so slowly? She doesn't seem to know any of the guys yet. I purposely don't read the Bachelor blogs, so please no spoilers!

Hurry up and wait

I wasn't expecting to be feeling lonely in the month after I left Christopher, but I did and it was big and gaping and glaring. My schedule hadn't changed at all. If anything I was seeing my friends a little more frequently. But it wasn't like Christopher and I talked or texted every day, and we were only hanging out for a few hours one night a week. So why was I lonely on a Tuesday when nothing about my schedule had changed?

I guess the expectation was gone. Even though he previously never called on a Tuesday, with the breakup I now knew for certain he would never call on a Tuesday. I was done waiting. It's what I wanted: to stop waiting. My entire relationship was spent waiting on that boy. Waiting for him to call, waiting to pick him up, waiting for him to get a job, waiting for him to emotionally commit.

I never realized how much energy I had spent waiting on him. Because even though I'm still sitting on my couch watching TV on a Tuesday night, I'm no longer waiting, and that's what feels different. That's what has been missing, making me feel lonely. I guess I was the ultimate multi-tasker. I would cook dinner while waiting. I would eat dinner while waiting. Watch TV and knit while waiting. Sleep and wait.

I realized in my past two relationships, I have been waiting for the boys to catch up to me. Get a job. Get your finances together. Be productive with your life. Rise up and meet me. And the saddest part about that was that these boys were significantly older than me: S by 5 years and Christopher by 7.5. If you don't have your shit together by your mid-thirties, it ain't going to happen.

Somewhere in my mid-twenties I started dating older men. Adam was 35 when I was 24. Christopher, the first time, was 32. I guess it was those last few years of college when I had four boyfriends in a row break up with me because they weren't ready to commit. I remember crying to my mom about it and she said my father did the same to her and that men go through this weird stage when they're graduating. So I thought I would bypass the commitment-phobia and go straight into the thirties where men were supposed to be a little more settled. Domesticated, as I like to put it.

That turned out to be a pretty naïve idea.

I don't remember which friend said this to me—because apparently I have really wonderful friends who say really wonderful things—but she said that I needed to date someone who would elevate me. I just remember how foreign that sounded when she said it.

So this is my pledge to stop waiting, including the whole "I'm going to live my life and if he calls, great, and if he doesn't, I won't notice." Because apparently I do.

Cardiomy-empathy

Did you know that when you have heart failure, your heart gets bigger? I always thought that was interesting. What happens is the pumping ability of your heart becomes inefficient. The two sides of your heart do not beat in sync with each other, and as a result, the amount of blood that is pumped out of your heart is diminished. This is heart failure.

I guess growing up with Dr. Seuss, I always thought it was the Grinches of the world who were sick. After all, his heart was two sizes too small. It's the big things that are supposed to be healthy and the little things that are supposed to be dying. Babies become fat and chubby. Flowers wilt.

Not true for the heart.

When the Grinch learned the true spirit of Christmas, his heart grew three sizes that day. But the Grinch wasn't loved up. He was dying.

Let that be a lesson to all of you big-hearted daters out there.

*This blog post is brought to you by the morbid negativity that accompanies the period after any breakup.

Zero

I have this recurring nightmare that I'm living in a new apartment, sometimes the one I live in now, and I'm still with S, or back with S. We're fighting. We're screaming. And my main concern is how to get this boy out of my apartment.

He folds his arms in defiance. "I'm not leaving because I don't have enough money to move out," he pouts. "It's going to take me two or three months to save up the money." But I know it's not going to take two or three months. I know this is a permanent arrangement because why would S ever move out on his own when he can leach off of someone else?

But this is my apartment, with my name on the lease. He actually doesn't have a right to be here, but he still won't leave. It makes me think back to real life when I had that stupid fight with that stupid apartment manager who forced me to put S's name on my lease. That's where it all went wrong. Because he now had a right to be in my apartment, S lied to me and broke his lease so he could invade my space. It all just makes me so angry.

In the latest version of this dream, I catch him doing drugs in my bathroom. I call the police to come arrest him, even though the drugs are in my apartment and I could be held liable as well. The police bang on the door and I'm screaming at S. They break in my apartment as S eats the drugs. I want him gone so desperately that I climb on him and pick remnants out of his teeth to show the police the evidence.

Only the police don't know me. They don't know that I'm different from S. So when they draw their guns, they are pointing at me too. I'm crazy and I'm screaming at S and the police about the drugs. S is threatening to kill me and I know he means it now because I've gotten him in trouble.

While the guns were still aimed on me, I awake covered in cold sweat. These dreams take hours for me to overcome. It takes me several minutes to realize I'm in my own apartment and S is gone and he's not sleeping on my couch. It still ruins my whole morning while I process the feelings. It's just awful.

Maybe it was a good thing that Christopher was my first boyfriend after S. Because even though he wasn't good, he wasn't bad either. He was a zero, a scratch. And he leaves me with exactly that. Zero. Despite the dreams, I'm no longer so afraid and so damaged by S. I'm not in the negatives any longer. I'm at zero. And it's a good thing.

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

I was watching Change Your Brain, Change Your Life on PBS last week. I know, single me is thrilling. Anyway, Dr. Amen is going through all the different brain types. He says there are compulsive brains, impulsive brains and for the mack daddy of neuroses, compulsive-impulsive brains. He lists the types and the characteristics. When he described the compulsive brain, I knew instantly that was me by the flip-flops my stomach turned. Compulsive brains get stuck on one thought until they become over-focused. These are some of the other not-so-flattering characteristics:

Excessive or senseless worrying; being upset when things do not go your way; being upset when things are out of place; tendency to be oppositional or argumentative; tendency to have repetitive negative thoughts; tendency toward compulsive behaviors; intense dislike of change; tendency to hold grudges; trouble shifting attention from subject to subject; trouble shifting behavior from task to task; difficulties seeing options in situations; tendency to hold on to own opinion and not listen to others; tendency to get locked into a course of action, whether or not it is good; being very upset unless things are done a certain way; perception by others that you worry too much; tendency to say no without first thinking about question; and tendency to predict negative outcomes.

It was like Dr. Amen saw the things within me that I try to hide from even my closest friends. Every now and then I'll feel brave enough to try to explain my thought patterns to one of my friends and she'll just look at me without the slightest comprehension. My friends, obviously, do not have compulsive brains.

Having a compulsive brain has benefited me in many ways. Like when I was tired of being unprepared for the future, I went to the library and checked out about 20 books on finance, read them all and followed the steps and opened the necessary accounts and then I lived on $10 a day for about a year to fund those accounts. Having a one-tracked mind kept me focused (to the point of obsession), but it enabled me to succeed.

The same thing happened after I left S and started a new job in a new industry in which I had no previous experience. A lot of reading and a lot of work hours coupled with my strive for perfection made me a necessary asset to my company, at which I've done very well. Compulsive behavior wins again.

I'm also compulsive with my knitting, but for very different reasons. I am a yarn-aholic and have begun hiding yarn from my sight in my one-bedroom apartment. It was fine when it fit in a chest; and then a chest and a basket; and then a chest, a basket and then the laundry room. Now we are approaching on chest, basket, laundry room and hidden-box-under-the-bed territory. My mind is again stuck. Boyfriends have asked me why I love knitting so much to the point that I have to do it for hours every day, and I would just shrug and say, "it quietens my mind." I never realized how true that statement was. Because when I'm knitting, I'm not thinking about my stock choices or my wording choices at work or my many boy problems. I'm not thinking at all.

Do you know how exhausting it is being me? Having a thought pattern that works like a runaway train stuck on a mouse wheel? Running 100 miles an hour but never goes anywhere? Oftentimes I feel like a skipping record and would just wish for someone to come up to me and slap me on the side of the head just to get my thoughts to move forward. I once told a person I didn't want to believe in heaven, because if that's the case, then I'm stuck my thoughts for eternity.

Because having a compulsive brain also means that when it switches gears to boys, I obsess. I will review every detail forwards and backwards and sideways and unilaterally. And this isn't the cute, healthy compulsion that funded my Roth IRA; this is the damaging compulsion that makes me unattractive to men.

But wait! Dr. Amen is a doctor! And he has the fix-it solution to quieten my mind without making me the weird yarn lady or the Prozac popper. He has a list of foods to eat and supplements to take, so I am going to try it out.

It explains why I feel the need to write out my feelings on here, when you may think I am still thinking about things I shouldn't be. It's just the way I think. It is how my brain operates. I feel the need to reminisce every gory detail and disgusting action that happened in my previously relationships because I have a hard time letting go and turning my mind elsewhere. The characteristic of repeating negative thoughts could not be more spot on. When I am told how I should feel or what I should feel, I will take it and run with it. But I feel myself getting better. I am learning to love myself for the first time in my life, and I'm not going to let that derail my progress to the point that I am once again the midst of some shame spiral where I'm hating myself for not being as far as I want to be, or where you think I should be.

Today I thought about boys less than I did yesterday. Today is a good day to me.

You win, Internets

I'm single and stagnant and just stubborn enough to not want to put any effort towards any guys right now.

That doesn't bode well for a relationship blog.

I'll be back when I have a story to tell. Not a long or permanent hiatus, just posting from here on out may be a little more sporadic.