stuff

*sigh*
I’m struggling with my feelings of guilt over how sad you are. How could you not be grief-stricken right now? When your two beloveds can’t be in the same room together?

I’m feeling like it’s my fault. I have no rational reason for that except that it feels like you think that. I feel bad about saying I can’t or won’t engage to do whatever it takes. I feel like I ‘should’. I feel like that would be the ‘loving’ thing to do. I feel like sitting watching you in pain and not leaping in is ‘bad’. My head knows I can’t rescue you from this one but my heart is yearning to.

I struggle not to feel wrong, bad, at fault. I don’t think guilt is ever helpful and I don’t want to feel it. I want to give you freedom to have your deep real grief without demanding that you make me feel better and like it’s not ALL my fault. I want to look at what I actually think I contributed, clearly, without guilt, with acknowledgement, with understanding and acceptance and desire to move past or through, or release the triggers.

When I try to release the guilt I think about what you and Jenny have said and I get confused again about my boundaries. I’m confused about whether I’m making it up, how hard it is, or whether it just feels like I’m getting that from you and Jenny. I’m confused about whether I’m being paranoid in thinking that it’ll cost me a lot, and that it might not be the last time. I’m confused about my ability to hold my own when talking to Jenny. I’m confused about my experience of her. I’m desperately not going near vulnerability in how I express stuff to Jenny on her own; I’m desperately scared of the pain of opening up to her and feeling stomped on again. I feel the need for clarity in how I express stuff and the need for protection in order to maintain the clarity.

I’m scared of my confusion. It’s so sad and makes my world so depressing and meaningless and hopeless. It leaves me feeling trapped into being at Jenny’s mercy, and I don’t get much mercy from Jenny. I get so confused when I enter into Jenny’s world view. I find it so hard to make logical sense of it; I feel like it’s an epic trek to pin down one point of view to exactly what she really thinks. Where there are contradictions it’s a Mt Everest of a climb to identify them and express them as I feel/see them. Then I get so angry when I feel like my effort is dismissed. I’m angry because it hurts so much. I feel treated like I’m just there to justify Jenny’s world view. I feel so lost when I ‘buy’ Jenny’s point of view if it’s wildly different from my own. I am hurting so much over how much I have tried to divine what is the mature thing to do, and how to just be myself and also in my best space at all times for whatever comes up, and I have to have a wall up to how much it hurts that most of that effort feels unnoticed. I’m scared that I’ll never have anything to base my sense of perception on and without that there’s no firm ground anywhere for me. I feel like if I don’t trust myself then I’ll just get pushed around and blamed for everything.

I’m scared that without trusting myself I’m tossed on the wind of yours and Jenny’s opinions. I’m scared that if I don’t stand firmly in my own experience – there’s this thing I know you both pick up on, which I feel criticised for, which to you feels like I’ve put up a wall and ‘no further correspondence will be entered into’. To me it’s like ‘if I don’t keep coming back and deciding everything in the light of my own internal intuition and experience I’ll get pushed into doing something that isn’t healthy for me, again.’ It feels like if I don’t have that wall there then I do things like get upset at you for how you reacted to my letter to Jenny. It feels like I’m being asked to be my rawest most vulnerable self and my most in-control mature self at the same time. I feel like you want me to be able to – like it’s somehow an expression of immaturity that this stuff costs me so much energy, and that I can’t be both vulnerable and not-upsettable at the same time. I’m mostly angry flipping with sad and depressed that it doesn’t look to me like you ask the same thing of Jenny. I of course don’t know what you ask of Jenny.

I think about her email. I think about the subtext and the feeling that you see her writing in the best possible context, and yet you pulled out the worst possible interpretation of my one to her. I think about her inability to pull out her own subtext and how minutely mine gets pulled apart for subtext.

I’m sad at how you reacted to the letter I wrote Jenny. I feel distant from you – it feels ‘pushed away’ although I know you haven’t done that at all. I know you didn’t say it until I pushed you. I know you felt like I pushed you to express how you felt and then got upset about it. I feel bad about getting upset and also not, more bad about asking for it when I was feeling open and not protective of myself. I realise that I have been trusting that you can and will feel the heart of a matter, fundamentally. I think that’s been an unfair expectation, although I feel like you’ll feel sad if I say that because it feels like it’s important to you, like something we both value deeply in you, to feel and connect with the real heart thing and you’ll feel bad if you feel like you didn’t.

I really hurt that you didn’t feel it as I wrote it. It felt like you didn’t listen for how I wrote it, you listened for how Jenny would hear it. I feel just terribly sad that with the best heart-based thing I’ve written to Jenny forever it felt like you pulled out one minor element of it, the only one you could have a bad reaction to, and magnified it until it felt like the strongest thing or it was the thing you had the strongest reaction to. I feel sad at feeling like I should be in a protective state before I read things like that to you or ask you what you feel about it. I feel sad feeling like I can’t give you an open heart thing with an open heart because of how much it hurts if you don’t hear it like that. I want you to hear how much work I’ve done to let go of all the ego issues and be utterly warm-hearted and seeing and affirming the best Jenny I know in it. I guess it feels like the work I put in is never seen by you or Jenny. I don’t mind Jenny not seeing it but I feel carved up when you don’t see it. And now I feel that you’re in such deep grief that I ‘should’ once again just let it go, not worry about it. But I am left feeling like nothing I write will ever get heard how I intend it, no matter how deeply I write from the honest open vulnerable heart.

I feel like I need to put up a barrier to Jenny or else I’m scared I’ll get walked all over and lost again. If I imagine trying to say that the reaction I visualise is a sort of supercilious smile of “I know you feel that” as though it’s all my own internal problems and she has done nothing to contribute to me feeling that way. Then I feel angry. I then think about what she said about emotional abuse and I know she thinks that it’s an absolute truth that that’s what I’ve done, not just that she feels that way and it’s all her internal problem, or even that it’s a complex dynamic to which she contributes. I think about how hard I have to work to get my experience onto the table. I think about how for most of our relationship I haven’t felt I can really relax with Jenny. I think about how judgemental her words sound. I think about the effort it takes to take that in, process it, let it go.

When I meditate deeply I can be in the space where Jenny can say absolutely anything about me and I won’t get upset. But then I won’t get upset. Ah. I feel like Jenny wants me not to get upset on my own behalf, but she does want me to get upset on her behalf. Good insight.

Brings up how confused I feel about that ‘upset’ thing and why. Jenny never says she wants me to get ‘upset’ about how hurt she has felt by something I’ve done. She just keeps at something if I’m not expressing a vulnerable upset emotion. She has said she’ll ‘know’ I’ve ‘got it’ when my emotions shift. So the assumption behind that is that – what? Why should my emotions shift if I’ve really understood her? She wants me to feel remorse and ‘bad’ of some sort, although she expressly says she doesn’t want me to feel ‘bad’ and that’s my issue if I do. But if I don’t express what she calls ‘remorse’ she thinks I’m blocking. I’ve said ‘sorry’ and really meant it a lot and it hasn’t cut the mustard by the feel of it.