This is going to have to come out eventually so why not before the New Year. I’ll at least start it otherwise it’ll just sit here stuck in my ass like a dried turd after weeks of binge drinking and…what was I talking about…
You were right about powdered peanut butter.
It’s one of several things I learned from you but it’s the one I’m reminded of every time I open what used to be our cabinet. Here I am making fun of you when I should have been listening to what you were saying and right there is the lesson: I should have been listening to what you were saying when you were saying it.
Well if I have a brand it’s being prepared to win the battles I’ve already lost which is hilarious because professionally that’s just Reviewing Lessons Learned but in life it’s Hey You Fucked This Up, Huh? With that in mind, here’s my Hey You Fucked This Up, Huh? for our relationship, four months later:
- Powdered Peanut Butter – I needed to learn to listen with my mouth closed without judgment or pre evaluation. When I feel like I know something I take any challenges to that knowledge as personal attacks rather than stopping to review the possibility that I might be wrong and there is new information available. This along with several other things could have been a simple “huh, I didn’t know that thank you” had I been willing to listen without bias.
- Give me a minute, please 🥺 – I didn’t get this one at all at the time. My entire life I’ve wanted to jump right in and tackle whatever conflict immediately rather than let it sit but like we said if it was working it would have worked, right? Giving myself that space to absorb and process has been critical in so many moments since.
- Sex Factor – This is the one that makes me wish you were actually going to see this, but another thing you taught me is that healing means being enough on your own to be okay when people walk away. So:
You made me feel like the main character. Like the first choice. I’d never felt like that before. Not to trauma dump but it goes back to how all this started and why and I’m thinking lately mostly when. The when has shaped how I look at intimacy of any kind and how I express understand and give any concept of love. It’s the kind of “ah ha” that has made me look back at thirty-five years of these relationships and see the same things over and over again.
My superpower if I have one isn’t “resilience” or “character” or any of those nonsense words people use when they mean to say they would have killed themselves in your place — my superpower is my ability to take a look at myself in crisis, figure out where I am, how I got there and how to not be there anymore. This comes from spending too many moments since 2008 constantly responding to something unforeseen, some circumstance, some evaluation for which I was unprepared. Constantly. So I’ve gotten very good at picking up smashed little bits of myself and putting them back together again. I said all that to say thank you for your time. I’ve never had a relationship fail where I did not have an unkind word to say about the other person which is weird but it’s made the post-breakup process valuable and instructive. So thank you for that.
And thank you for powdered peanut butter.