My doctor asked me, during my physical, how I was managing my stress. I only recently started seeing her as my primary, and on both visits, she has asked me about my stress levels. I know it's written all over my face, but I feel self-conscious around her now, like she looks at me as this ticking time-bomb who is going to explode tears all over her office at the drop of a hat. I told her I'm just staying busy, filling up my time with creative projects. "You are also probably internalizing a lot of it," she said, "That can be dangerous. Your tension headaches have to be coming from that, at least in part."
I don't have time to think about "letting it out". The second you "let it out", you lose half of your friends because you're that girl. No one wants to be that girl. She doesn't get invited anywhere. I had a drink with a good friend of mine, who I work with but don't see socially all that much, updating her on a few things. I can't remember if I was talking about Mike or Gino or just hinting at feeling a little lonely part of the time, and she cut me off, saying, "Stop it. You're wallowing."
I changed the subject, pretended she was right, but in my heart of hearts I wanted to object to her assessment a little. Joan Didion brought up a good point in her book "The Year of Magical Thinking", where she remarks that when you are grieving, you don't even really get the opportunity to process anything because you are trying so hard to present the image of a person who is "dealing with it". The second you let yourself just say, "Fuck it, I'm sad," a million people rush in to tell you that you can't let it drag you down. I appreciate all of the help, but sometimes, help in the form of judgement is not really help. I have plenty of good help to counter the not-so-helpful help, and I know how to stay busy and help myself.
I was thinking about how busy I really am lately, how much I work myself into a lather over the side-projects that take up my time and how little free time I truly have. Someone asked me today what I've been up to. It was Gino's cousin, who has, for some reason, been sending me Facebook messages. "Oh, you know, takin' it sleazy," I replied.
"Really?"
"Actually, no. I have two knitting projects I was commissioned for, plus my blog, plus the novel I'm working on for NaNoWriMo. And, of course, my divorce on top of everything."
"You're a weirdo. Good luck with all of that."
I know I'm a weirdo, dude, find something better to tell me. I fill my time up with things that really kind of don't need doing if I don't have anything else to do. The only reason I started knitting in the first place was to have something to do with my hands, and the only reason I started this blog is because the end of my marriage created a vacuum I had to fill with something I felt was worth my time. I don't like being idle. When I am doing nothing, I tend to lose time. I go into an emotional K-hole, just dissociating, dividing one thought into a million pieces until I come to and realize I have not moved for close to an hour.
I've been thinking about time, more and more, and how precious it is, and how much of it I waste on people and things that really don't matter. I've also been thinking about all of the time that goes into a relationship, trying to estimate exactly how many hours were productive, and how many were wasted. If someone offered me the chance to get all of that time back, start back from square one and redo my twenties, without an imperfect relationship tripping me up, would I take them up on it? And, more to the point, would that even be the best thing for me?
I don't believe that the time I spent trying to make my marriage successful was a waste. My good friend Tony asked me, when Gino and I first split up, if I regretted not ending things with him years ago, when I expressed some doubts about my marriage. The doubts weren't baseless, but they arose because of the fact that I became attracted to someone else, for the first time, since Gino and I met. I had never had this problem, never met any guy who could divert my attention away from Gino, and the fact that another man could do just that really shook me to my core. I told Tony no, I don't regret it, because there is a reason why I didn't tell Gino that we should separate, or explore having some kind of other arrangement. I felt, in my, perhaps, misguided heart, that there was something worth keeping alive there, and I did keep it alive for a few more years. I decided on Gino, on how reliable I thought he was, and how much I thought he truly loved me, rather than decided to go running after some new shiny thing. I made Gino my shiny thing, and put all of my energy into loving him more than I could ever love anyone else, because I had to. I had to remind myself, every day, that he was the right choice, because I loved him so much.
I don't regret sticking it out with Gino. If I had ended our marriage at that time, when I was having my mid-twenties personality crisis, I know it would have been worse for me. I would have chased after the boy who caught my eye for a little while, until he told me to cut it out, and I probably would have gone back to Gino full of remorse, and he might have taken me back but probably not. I knew, at the time, that this was silly, that I would be risking a marriage that was not only still pretty new, but also seemed like if we both worked at it, could last forever. I knew there was still potential within our relationship, that we were still growing together. A reason why I knew, this time, that Gino was right, and that the time is right for our marriage to end, is because we had stopped growing together. We were shrinking, actually. Now that we are apart from each other, even though it is painful and scary and not at all like we thought it would be, we're growing again. I feel that I haven't even reached my full height, as it were, but that if I was still married to Gino, still living in that house and making compromises that needed to be made every day, I would continue to shrink until I just disappeared.
I already brought this up in an earlier post, but I still do want to help Gino become the best version of himself that he can be, but now only part-time. I can't go back to having Gino be my full-time job on top of my other full-time job. I know that if we got back together, it might feel, at first, like all of the problems we had just don't exist anymore, and that we've finally solved everything and can be everything to each other again. This is why I was weary of his backpedaling. I know my old, well-formed habits, and how easily I fall into them if I don't watch myself. I know that going back would be easier than going forward. Sometimes, you get halfway down a really long road and even though the distance back to where you started from is just as long as to where you're going, the path back seems easier to take. It's just because you've already been there. You know every turn, every divot in the road. There are no surprises. The path back might be bumpy and unsafe and covered in sharp sticks and shards of broken glass, but you've already seen it. There is nothing, really, to fear. I do like seeing Gino, and I love it that we are taking separate paths but still passing each other, occasionally, and talking about how the journey is going. I like that we can do that, even if one day we will both look up and realize that we don't need that from each other anymore. The only gift I have been given in exchange for having my life turned ass-over-teakettle is this influx of time, time to work on things that, I feel, need to be worked on, time to look at myself long and hard and figure out what it is about me that needs to be repaired. This is my time, no one else's, and I know I need to appreciate it, and figure out how it can serve me best so that I do not look back in twenty years and realize that I wasted it.
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