Tag Archives: letting go

The Woodwork

Posted on by under The Crazy

The woodwork is the magical place men go to live whenever your romantic involvement with them comes to an “end”. Of course the word end is in quotation marks because maybe things were over for YOU, but most likely not to this asshole.

Because I’m Happy…

I have questioned why almost every man I’ve ever been involved with has magically resurfaced in my life for Round 2, 3, 4 or 5. Just a few days ago I woke up to a missed call at 1 a.m. from a “private” number. I knew exactly who it was because he was always totally weird about the numbers he called me from as if I’M crazy and would end up excessively calling HIM. (-_-) This missed call did not surprise me, however. Now that I am happy with myself and in a positive, fulfilling relationship I fully expect temptation to emerge from the woodwork in full force.

It’s almost as if a silent alarm goes off to let men know when they’re exes are happy, prompting them to then come onto the scene and attempt to pee all over it. The catch, is that as soon as you do break up with your current man and are in a frantic search for a warm body, empty compliments and a free bottle of whiskey, NONE of these jokers are anywhere to be found! Because you’re too desperate—that’s why. THEY only want YOU to want them MORE than you want the current person you are spending all of your time wanting.

Guys be like

Hmm, No thanks

I must admit that I am only human, so I am definitely susceptible to hot dudes coming out of nowhere and showering me with attention, telling me how gorgeous I am and how much they miss me—all of a sudden. The problem is, a simple “Thanks, but no thanks,” will never seem to do with these woodworkers; it almost serves as more fuel to their fire. Personally, I alternate between completely ignoring them OR— if they are particularly persistent—offering to accept a meet up every once in awhile. Arranging to do so probably looks pretty incriminating on paper (texts….Facebook, etc) but I find that it usually sheds light on the fact that these men that have to have me so suddenly badly have not changed at all. They are not back in my life seeking redemption, they just wants to derail my emotions and BLOW MY FUCKING LIFE! My 31 years on this earth (and whopping 3+ years in the dating field) have taught me that men are not above playing with a woman’s emotions. If he can arrive suddenly on the scene and evoke chaos in my world without putting in much of an effort he is winning at life. The inconsistent dude who ghosted me, the jobless dude, the selfish dude who never paid for a single date, the cheater, the liar, the asshole—those dudes have not undouched themselves simply because they took a month to yearlong retreat into the woodwork.

Furthermore, I am currently content with the flawed individual I am involved with at the moment. One thing I know about him is that were we to ever come to an end I probably wouldn’t hear from him again. It sounds twisted to say, but I take great solace and comfort in that fact. We are both a final people: I will fight as long as there is something to fight for but when it’s over I’m not going to drag things out. In this day and age it seems like we just don’t know how to let things go! The people you have left behind you left behind for a reason and it’s not always necessary to go digging into your garbage to try to find a little piece of something good. That guy who sucked 3 years ago STILL sucks! He is actively sucking somewhere as I write this. In fact, he sucks even more if he attempts to swoop back into your life trying to establish himself as someone of importance when he knows he has empty intentions.

I swear, if I ever find where the woodwork is located, this actual place where men seem to hideout until they are ready to pop into your life and run amok with your emotions, I will torch that sucker! OR, at the very least, smoke the place out and shoo them all back into the past where they belong to stay.

Baby...

I’m Giving Up On You

Posted on by under The Crazy

The last heartbeats of this awful year slow; I can’t wait for it to finally die. I can’t allow myself to think of all the things—the people– I have to leave behind in order to gain sanity and start from the beginning again.

I believe in love and resurrection and rebirth of good things out of something that’s turned to spoil. However, this year I had to make the painful decision and realize that some things will never change. Some people will never rise to the occasion, the potential, the expectation—some people will sacrifice you for them every.single.time. You can never force others to do what’s right, you can only close the door and swear to yourself it will never be opened again.

I give up on you 2013. I no longer trust and believe in you. I know that you have no words to defend yourself; and that you choose to watch things unfold and to let the chips fall where they may. I know that you chose to sit idly by while children were tortured, cities were ruined, lives were ended. I know to you it means nothing, and as you come to an end you won’t right any of your wrongs or clarify any of your mistakes. I know that you have nothing to say of the destruction you’ve left in your wake.

I leave you behind 2013, and begin a new year gaining strength by picking up the pieces you left scattered, frozen by your coldness and shattered by your indifference.

Unreliable, incorrigible, inconsistent, malevolent, and worst of all: silent. While waiting for you to say something I gave up on you…

(Video from:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC8tP9Oo52Y)

…on Validation

Posted on by under The Crazy

Anyone who knows me personally and very well knows the following story:

I was enrolled in the University of Phoenix and lasted maybe a whopping 2 semesters. I was newly married and a new mom so I was on a roll of accomplishing shit and decided I may as well get my education as well. I won’t knock anyone that has attended or graduated from UOP but I will say—I hate that fucking school and everything they stand for! Perhaps I will share all my reasons for the hate in another post, BUT the main reason I just could not get with it is because their curriculum was bs. Your “facilitator” teaches you everything in a whirlwind fashion, then they rely on the end product of group projects to determine your individual grade. (Did I mention that I think that’s bullshit—because that’s bullshit).

Long story short, I hated my group. There were way too many of us, only one other woman and myself were even remotely interested in producing good work, and there was no rhyme or reason to how we operated. Because my grade was at stake, you’re damned right I took charge. I did my best to try to bring structure and make sense out of whatever the hell we were doing. I felt like it was me against this tiny little dysfunctional world, but the alternative was to just leave things to chaos and let my grades suffer. In the end, as we moved on to another class, the “facilitator” tried to keep us together but one by one the group members raised their hands and publicly announced their desire to remove me because of our interactions from the previous class. In the previous class, I did 75% of the group work and I had to ride ass hard to even get the collective 25% from the rest of them. I put in the work, and I still don’t care if they didn’t like my methods—they should have had the balls to speak up! Come the next class they kicked me out of the group and shortly thereafter I withdrew from the school—group work is not for me.

To this day I still feel like I did everything necessary to carry the group. No one else was stepping up as a leader and no one seemed to be able to work cohesively. We all tried to contribute portions of the work and compile it but if 7 out of the 8 people contribute shit, you’re going to end up with a pile of shit as your final product. I sound really tough about it now, but at the time it really broke my heart. I was 22, I had missed out on the college experience and I was really looking forward to having a decent one at the University of Broken Dreams Phoenix. For weeks I would check my email nonstop, just waiting for at least one member of the group to send me some kind of apology at least for publicly embarrassing me by kicking me out of the group. That email never came. This is SO SO sad—but I still look for that email, hoping that maybe someone realized that I was simply doing my best and perhaps my intentions were misunderstood. I tried way too damned hard to be accepted. I put in too much work and effort for people who ultimately did not care and I had absolutely nothing to show for it.

So…as things go with my very favorite musician friend. I feel as if I put in so much work and time and patience and I really expected to yield something good from it. I’ve never really been that ambiguous with a person before, either. It didn’t matter to me to necessarily be with him, but I just liked the dude enough to want to function with him in some kind of capacity: friends, acquaintances, relationship—whatever. Perhaps it says something about me that most of my relationships with people in general have to end in one big dramatic, knock-down, drag out fight. It was epic and draining, and while I got say what I wanted to say and I feel like there was closure—it bothers me that things had to end that way. However, sometimes you just aren’t compatible with people, or you don’t want the same things and you have to be sane enough to stop fighting for it! I was fighting for someone who didn’t even bother to show up to the war. I am really not all that sane, but as things came to a head I just had to drop it AND my incessant need for validation. Just as I still monitor my emails for a note from the University of Phoenix group, I still stalk my email and texts from ex-love interests expecting them to say to me, “I didn’t get it at the time, but I do now.” I don’t want to hear that I am right—just that someone understands me.

Justify me, vindicate me, validate me…

Home Invasion

Posted on by under The Crazy
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Image from: http://www.thedailytouch.com

A man approached me while shopping in Target, took down my number and text me the very same night. I wasn’t particularly interested in him, but you never know how things can blossom. It’s flattering to be picked up and I do feel like men deserve a reward for having the balls to walk up to a woman and express their feelings right off the bat. The man was 32 years old, which to me, means he’s old enough to know that you can’t carry on a “getting to know you” conversation via text. Furthermore, he asked me to tell him something interesting about myself, to which I responded that it was hardly my duty to entertain him with “interesting” factoids. I mean, if you don’t know me shouldn’t everything I share with you be interesting at first? I also politely told him that if he wants to get to know me better he is welcome to call me at some point later in the week. He called me a “tough cookie” and that’s the last I heard of him. I am aware that I may have come off as a little harsh but I’m just no longer interested in playing the game. Even my favorite dating blog encourages women to appear unavailable, wait to answer text messages, and not to answer on the first ring. I DON’T CARE!!!! If I’m chillin in my house and someone texts me and I read it, why wait to respond? It’s 2013, everyone is glued to their phones it is not realistic that it’s going to take me 2 hours to respond to your text—I’m a single mom but I can fucking multi-task.

Anyway, as much as I detest the “rules” of modern dating, I am also a hypocritical participant. As was revealed not long ago I was on the cusp of an uncommitted but committed relationship, and it is with heaviness in my heart I share that I finally did the right thing and let it go. It is with equal heaviness that I admit I am batshit crazy for doing so. I really don’t have anything bad to say about the guy, and I really can’t even narrow down a major reason for shutting it down. I am highly aware that I resemble stupid bitches in pointless romantic comedies that end things with a great guy over a “bad feeling” or simply to discover themselves. BOOORING….but where there was confusion as to how exactly I felt about this man, there is finally clarity after having made the final decision.

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Image from: readynutrition.com

This may not be a staple in modern dating, but perhaps more of a reflection of laziness on my part, but in most involvements I’ve made the mistake of inviting a man over to my apartment way too soon and eventually having to deal with the “post-up” syndrome. Post-up syndrome is when a man comes to your house, whether invited or uninvited, and for whatever reason kind of doesn’t leave. As a single mom of course I want to get out of the freaking house and go out on dates, but time is not always on my side for that and it’s just easier to have some dude come over and chill. It’s a dangerous practice so early in the game. Things progress way too quickly physically and seemingly emotionally and essentially it feels like playing house. The only thing is: it’s MY house!

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Image from: nonstop babble.com

He found me in the shower, sitting on the floor of the bathtub, water running and tears flowing. I resented being found that way and I knew in that moment I wasn’t ready to have someone in my space. I didn’t want him to know so much and I didn’t feel like explaining myself or reassuring him about the things that torment me. I’ve spent hours in the arms of my ex-boyfriend crying and trying to grasp at some sort of normalcy within myself, but that took at least a year of intimacy before we got to that point. Looking back I don’t know if I even consider it a healthy interaction. Anyway, on certain days of the week I was sharing a space with an almost stranger whose moods I never seemed to have the patience to deal with. Things had moved way too fast, and I don’t believe that dialing things back would have even fixed anything. As a woman who struggles, it’s quite easy for me to feel as if the walls are caving in. If only it were possible to co-exist with someone in silence. I think I’ve just become more painfully introverted and strange as the years go by, and that’s why I rely so much on vibing with a person as opposed to actual conversations. When I’m at my most relaxed (with the exception of the presence of a few old friends) I don’t really have much to say, I’m just happy to be where I am. I’ve been on dates where I just kind of smiled faintly and nodded my head as the guy talked and I didn’t mind it at all.

But I digress. This beautiful boy who found me in despair tried to save me, to hold me and do the things in his power to make my tears go away. I couldn’t quite explain to him that sometimes this was my life and that I couldn’t be fixed. He would leave dirty dishes in my room, put his unwashed hands in the potato chips, smoke weed on my balcony, and wake up early in the morning to express all his pent up aggression toward the world in general. It bothers me so that I couldn’t take care of him the way that he needed me—the way that I prefer to take care of anyone that comes into my home—but I have to take care of my children and myself. One hard adult lesson that I feel I continue to learn is that it is definitely possible to find a great guy, it just doesn’t mean that he’s the right guy for you. I wasn’t moved in the same way that he was moved by me and it would have been selfish for me to continue to be indecisive. He showed up at my door asking me to stay, his long lashes hooding his sorrowful eyes. My desire to be loved is not worth sacrificing the heart of another. I had been where he was, pleading with a love to bring life back into something that was already dying, and I wish to God that he would have said no to me.

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Image from: musingsonlifeandlove.com

I stayed strong in my resolve and I made the sober decision to let him go. His presence in my home was an invasion to me; it took me out of my comfort zone because I am just not ready at this time. His presence in my heart will linger and it will bring me comfort to think of him. I am a mess, one moody bitch—but he fell in love with me in this place and he fought for me with a tenacity that the men who have professed more couldn’t even muster. He is the one who deserves better.

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Image from: mypinkvisions.com