Very grateful for the guru and guide that is Zadra. We had a late lunch today and I was telling her about my blog on fear and that I felt like this was something I needed to explore further, along with some very harsh anger I’m discovering towards my ex. I told her I felt like I was on the verge of a breakthrough, of understanding something more. She encouraged me to pick up The Artist’s Way, which I have done on occasion, and check out the chapter on anger and how it is a tool. I had read that chapter but not in this state of mind.
The chapter deals with anger, fear and shame. How we, as artists, are often made to feel shameful or guilty about our gifts and how that can lead to anger. There’s a little quiz at the end of the chapter, as there are in all the chapters, but I’m never one to do these, really. But tonight, to avoid working on the edit because it’s too damned hot, I decided to take pen in hand and answer the quiz. There was a warning – “you may feel strong emotion as you retrieve memories and misplaced fragments of yourself.” Yeah, right.
It was actually kind of fun. Favorite childhood toy (an orange and yellow stuffed mouse named Bobo), favorite childhood game (Life), best movie as a child (Slapshot – weird childhood), etc., etc. Then question 17. What makes me feel weird about this recovery (the book is about recovering yourself as an artist) is… I wrote “memories of my ex and his criticism of everything I tried to create.”
Wham! There was that strong emotion I scoffed at. That’s why this whole thing with the OOMA scares the shit out of me. My ex and I started out this way – friends, collaborators, very comfortable with each other. Although he was critical even then but I considered it candor, not criticism. Because of my first marriage to someone who also had “candor”, I thought that was normal. I realized I’m afraid to say anything to him because, if we should get together, it might be just the same as it was with my ex. It’s been the same with the two most important relationships in my life, why would it be any different this time? There’s similar traits – he’s clear, he’s candid and can be sharply critical at times, but not very often. And never at me. That’s the biggest difference. He also lacks the hard core anger that my ex (both of them, I guess) possessed. But I’m afraid that, if I let myself be open again to this particular man, that I will again find myself lost, giving in to what he wants, needs, instead of taking care of myself. I am drawn to highly creative, gifted, ambitious men but they all seem to want to take my own ambitions and gifts and use them for themselves, leaving me with nothing. And I cannot be left with nothing again. I won’t survive it this time. I’m afraid because my ex always diminished my feelings and made me mistrust them. So now that I have all these strong feelings for this man, I mistrust myself – are they real, are they valid, do they matter, will he mock me if I tell him how I feel. I was robbed of the value of my feelings from this relationship with my ex. There was one particular night with this man that I saw a brief glimpse of my ex and that scared me to death. That led me to make a decision that I don’t think he understood and, at the time, I didn’t either and couldn’t explain it. All I knew was that I had to get away, I had to get some distance, because I’d seen something I had seen before and I didn’t like it. I’m afraid to embrace the possibility because I’m terrified of the probability of becoming lost again. I’m not sure I’m strong enough in myself at this point to be caught up in someone else’s life right now, especially someone who can feel so frighteningly familiar. I’m afraid I’ll lost the ground I’m gained. Yet he’s been so integral to that ground. But the voice inside me tells me he is biding his time until he can turn on me. And I’m so afraid that he will turn on me that I don’t even want to face it.
But the biggest difference, the one that makes me think maybe I can get past this, work through this, is that he doesn’t see me the way the other two did. They wanted me to build them, he comes pretty much assembled. I’m used to trying to be what these men wanted me to be, trying to figure out what I had to do to get them to love me, to appreciate me, to reward me. With him, I don’t feel that expectation, that he has this image that I’m supposed to live up to. And I don’t know what to do with that. I think he expects me to be me, the me he thinks I am. And I don’t know who that is right now. I think I’m in there somewhere and I think I’m finding myself slowly but surely. And I think that he somehow sees the “me” I’m working on in me. But how can I make myself be what he wants if he doesn’t project an expectation on me? I then have to decide who I am and trust he’ll go with me. But they never have before, why should he be different? Can’t I find myself with him? Or will I lose myself again? Maybe I can’t do it right now. Then I’m afraid that he’ll be gone by the time I’m ready. Then I guess he wouldn’t have been right, if that’s the case.
This has given me a lot to think about and made me realize that this is not about him. It’s about me. Whatever his feelings are, whatever his feelings may become, this is about me first, him second. I need to discover how to push through this fear because it will color every relationship from here on out, not just the one with him, should it come to pass, but any relationship down the line. It may keep me away from something amazing and it has almost led me to let go of something very, very dear and very, very precious. I hope he is there on the other side of this, I hope, if nothing else, that the friendship, which has held on very tenuously, will survive this voyage of discovery. And I hope he knows how much his friendship and his belief in the “me” that I am working on means to me.
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