Week Three

Today kind of sucked. I woke up feeling good, went swimming, and felt great. Came to a coffeeshop and checked facebook and deciphered from a friend’s wall that E was probably with the girl he’s dating last night. That put me on edge. An hour later, E walked in here with her. That pushed me off the edge, and I said hi, then went to the bathroom to cry. I came out and they were still here, so I went outside to cry until I knew their classes had started, and I went back in. The spell didn’t stop for about two hours. I had plans with E for lunch at 1, and I decided to go home before that because I needed to punch something. I screamed into a pillow, used a hammer to bang in some loose nails on my backyard fence, and generally let myself freak out. When I thought I needed to intervene, I called my mom, put on makeup, and left to meet him for tacos.

Turns out, our run-in this morning set him simmering on a migraine. It also turns out that they hadn’t actually spent the night together – he went home after dinner and then her car wouldn’t start this morning. I need to not think about the potential seriousness of that relationship, and me and E both still need more space. I like not having a brick wall up between us, but we aren’t talking again until next week. It feels less required, but I need to keep up the discipline that I’ve had, no matter how much it hurts, because in the end it’s helping.

My sadness is about being replaced. His is about being afraid to be a trigger for my self-harm. He did want to know where I am emotionally, which I wasn’t sure if he’d want to know. After I had called him last Sunday and he talked me down, he went to dinner with two of our friends. I assumed he was going to dinner with someone else. When I texted a friend to see if I could stay with him in the event that things got rough, unbeknownst to me, that was one of the friends E was with. At first he was mad that I had texted the very person he was hanging out with, but then he realized that I had no idea who he was with, and having that distance helped him remember that I’m not actually out to get him.

When we first met for lunch, we were both pretty shaky. He stayed that way for most of the conversation. He’s buried under a lot of stress and I there are a lot of things weighing on him. We talked about how to deal with our changing relationship. The place we want to be is where we can care about each other, but without everything that is currently attached to that. I appreciate that he has cared enough about me to worry; I don’t want to lose the caring, but I would like to decrease the amount of things to worry about for both of us. Distance will help that.

He has been planning a big road-trip for his 30^th birthday, and I told him I was worrying about it. I wanted to leave my option to go open until we were right up on it and could decide if that was actually a good idea. He said he would prefer that the default be no. It feels good to have that out of my hair, even if it isn’t going to turn out the way I’d wanted. I told him that if forcing us to be friends enough for me to go on that trip would mean that we wouldn’t be friends in the future time, I would much rather miss the trip and be friends with him later.

I still have no idea at all about how to deal with him dating someone. I think maybe I’ll just need to have a backup plan for seeing them together. I still can’t think about it. And that’s ok. I don’t have to. I have to take care of myself, and 99% of that doesn’t involve him.