It was me.
It was, in short, the relationship history and pattern I had created for myself since the age of 14. It was the same story I have been harping on to myself and to friends when I find myself wondering what I stand for without a guy. Its like I had lived up to the exact same vantage point she was telling her story from. I felt like she was speaking about me, to me, or stealing a page from my journal and reading it out loud over my car stereo. I know its mostly cliche boy drama, but as an overall guilt in my life, its been something I've really struggled with. Especially when I came back to Atlanta.
I've included the excerpt I'm talking about because, in a way, I find that her writing voice even SOUNDS like mine in this excerpt (or at least what I wish mine to sound like)
And I thoroughly recommend the read or, if you're like me, the listen.
Im not having sex for now. When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
It’s a kind of emergency life-saving policy, more than anything else. I got started early in life with the pursuit of sexual and romantic pleasure. I barely had an adolescence before I had my first boyfriend, and I have consistently had a boy or a man (or sometimes both) in my life ever since I was 15 years old. Each overlapping the next, with never so much as a week’s breather in between. And I can’t help but think that’s been something of a liability on my path to maturity.
Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that’s not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must HAVE boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.
I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how its always been.
Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, “You know, you seem like a completely different person now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.”
Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to discover what I look like and talk like when I’m not trying to merge with someone. And also, lets be honest – it might be a generous public service for me to leave intimacy alone for a while. When I scan back on my romantic record, it doesn’t look so good. It has been one catastrophe after another. How many more different types of men can I keep trying to love and continue to fail? Think of it this way – if you had ten serious traffic accidents in a row, wouldn’t they eventually take your driver’s license away? Wouldn’t you kind of want them to?
This much I know – Im exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions. By the time I left for Italy, my body and spirit were depleted. I felt like the soil on some desperate sharecropper’s farm, sorely overworked and needing a fallow season. So that’s why I’ve quit.
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