Lucid Analysis: Trials in Therapy – Cancelled due to exhaustion

I feel hung over this morning.  Which is odd considering all I drank last day/night yesterday was water and tea.

I cancelled therapy last night. I’ve been mentally wiped out. Which is why I did consider I should go. However I’ve also been physically exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open on the way home from work, so I decided sleep would be more necessary. Today will be me trying to figure things out on my own. Venting a bit. And at the end if you’re sick of me whining, I have some fun updates and stuff I have going on.

Last night was sad. Mostly I was worn down and tired. Took a nap. Then finished watching the new Season 2 (season 28) of Dr. Who. That’s what set me off. Silly isn’t it? It was a sad episode, it brought tears to my eyes. Which brought sobbing to my shower.  Ever have those nights where you can’t stop the tears? I ran a hot shower, sat down and felt the sadness and steam wash over me.

Tech Boy and I aren’t doing well. I doubt we’ll last the weekend.

Right now I’m incredibly lonely. I’m starting to miss him. The problem though, is I’m not sure it’s actually him I miss, or that I just miss having someone. That’s what kept happening with Boring-Ex. I knew we weren’t right for each other, but being alone was worse than being constantly underwhelmed and bored. Tech Boy at least isn’t boring, but…

Things have been rapidly dissolving since the end of July.

If I can get him to talk about things that have happened he expresses genuine remorse and I can tell he’s upset when he does things that hurt me.  There’s a recurring sentiment from him and that is: I don’t like to feel like I’ve failed.

I can certainly relate to that. I hate feeling like I’ve failed, which I pretty much always feel. Except afterwards, that’s it. I want to work on what’s happened, at the very least talk things through, so we can figure out where things are going wrong in order to potentially fix them.  < ----- Like I talk about all the time as being necessary. Communication is important.

And you’ll remember that last time he did sound like he was being sensitive to my needs when he said: “A supportive role seems better than trying to remedy something that’s out of my control.”

This is true. It’s something I think a lot of guys don’t realize. The problem with his saying things like this though, is that he recognizes them, but then he doesn’t follow through with them. This conversation was about 11 days ago. Want to guess how often I’ve seen him since then? Zero. None at all. We’ve both been under a lot of stress for various reasons (not related to our relationship) so I wanted to hold off on having a deep emotional discussion until we were both a little less stressed out. He agreed and said some “inward focusing” would be good for him and he knew I could do that as well (as if I don’t do that constantly?) Apparently though, this meant barely speaking and not hanging out at all, and working on our stuff separately without each other, even to just hang out and not talk about stressful stuff… which was where I had been leaning towards.

He does that a lot. Tells me I should ask for help, but when I do, he doesn’t come through.  It’s hard.

He has the words right, but he doesn’t have the actions that need to follow through with them. 

So now, the main stressors are out of the way, so I asked if we could talk about things. He replied with, “Yeah I suppose we could do that.”

::headdesk::

He was hoping that our “inward focusing” would resolve these problems on their own. My being stressed out, and being concerned about things in our relationship has been stressing him out, so he “took time off to de-stress, and would really rather keep it that way, so he wants to just let me keep settling in and getting everything in order so we can just go back to having fun.”  His policy apparently was ignore it and maybe it will go away. So much for supportive.  

I know the whole, “We need to talk,” thing never makes anyone excited to hang out, but could I maybe get some acknowledgment that this is something we need to do to figure out what is going on, if it can be fixed, or if it’s just played out? Nope. I got, “I’ve never been good at talking out problems. I actually usually try to avoid. It makes me very uncomfortable.”

I’m working to be sympathetic. I acknowledged this isn’t fun or comfortable, for either of us. Relationship problems are usually uncomfortable especially for someone that’s never dealt with them before. It’s normal and it’s okay.

He doesn’t want to talk, but it wouldn’t be fair to me to not talk, so he’ll do it. If we don’t talk, the only option left then, is good-bye.  (I didn’t say that to him.) It’s just, it’s important for me to feel like taking care of me in our relationship, taking care of us, is important to him, but he’s coming across as if he doesn’t really care, he’s just doing it because it’s unavoidable if I push it. (This I did try to convey.) At which point he just got defensive, called himself a terrible person, said it was all his fault, and apologized because clearly he was ill prepared or not suited for any of this. ::sigh:: I told him he was being way too hard on himself, and that it’s not about blame at all. We’re two different people with different life experiences, and different levels of relationship experience, it’s just something we have to work out. I also tried to make sure he understood I wasn’t angry or anything, just trying to understand where he’s coming from. To which I got a response of, “Clearly this is all brought on by me so I don’t see a need to not blame myself. You’re afraid of me, I stress you out… I’m just not ready to deal with any of this.” ::double sigh:: He only scares me and stresses me out when he gets fantastically drunk and loses control of his behavior. Solution = stop drinking till you black out and do hurtful things that you don’t remember in the morning when you’re with me.  But I think he’s probably right, if talking about things like that in a relationship is too much more for him to deal with, then he’s not ready for this. He needs someone to have a lighter, simpler connection with, with less emotional depth. Or less complicated emotional depth. And for the record, I stressed again that this isn’t about blame, but finding a solution.

Mind you this was all occurring via text message as well. Which I hate. The whole reason I wanted to sit down and talk in person (and not text), was because so much is lost via text. Texting is an awful way to communicate when you’re dealing with important issues. He finally agreed that a lot is lost via text and again I got, “But if you wanna talk Sunday, let’s talk.”

What I want to hear is something along the lines of: Okay, we’re having problems. I care about you. It’s important to me that we figure out what’s making us uncomfortable so we can make it better.

Not: If I have to, then I guess I don’t have a choice.

I’m crying as I type this. I feel very alone in this. This is not fun for me. I’m sad. I’m hurting. I just want it to stop. Through this all, crazily, I feel like this isn’t even anything unusual. I don’t think this is major BPD problems, just what happens when two people that aren’t meant for each other begin to realize it. (The real test of how my BPD will present is after we break up, if we break up… when the realization dawns on me that’s when I tend to freak the f out). I’m not world endingly sad or anything. Just sad.

I don’t feel like I’ve split him either. He doesn’t seem evil to me. Just emotionally immature. He has had some devaluation, but it hasn’t been a crazy Idealization/Devaluation cycle and I’ve never really done the Love/Hate thing with him either. The level of investment and intensity has never really been there. The devaluation is more a normal reaction to major upsets that have happened (like him hitting me during sex, or getting drunk and leaving me by myself in a bar then starting a fight with me when I’m not comfortable having sex).  

I will say, I am having the experience of more of an emotional continuum. Unfortunately because I’ve had more intense bad experiences, with huge gaps of not spending time together, and not enough recovery time together to feel loved and connected, it’s the bad stuff that stays towards the fore of my mind, b/c there just isn’t enough of the good stuff to balance it out.

So I guess we’ll see. I’m so worn down right now. I really do just want to be alone at this point. I want to go to work. Go to the gym. Come home. Eat/Shower. Write. Play with my cat. Sleep. That’s all I want.

Not that this’ll ever happen.

Hey! How about some fun stuff? Yep, I still have some of that!

Hanging out with xRoommate and her Boyfriend a lot lately. Tomorrow is roommate Monroe’s birthday as well. I got her a beautiful dress for her birthday and we’re going out on Saturday. I’m trying to figure out what kind of cupcakes to make for her.

Then I’m also organizing a day of extreme geekiness. We all know part 1 of The Hobbit movie is coming out in December right? Well you should and you do now. So I’m inviting a dozen or so of my geekiest friends over and we’re having a viewing of all 3 extended addition Lord of the Ring movies. We’re starting at 12:30p in the afternoon and probably going all the way through til 12:30/1a.m. at night. Yay! I’ll be making all kinds of food and snacks throughout the day… Including movie themed food. You don’t understand how excited I am to make Lembas bread. It’s quite silly. Then of course, the next day, we’ll all get together and go see The Hobbit in theater! It’s a good thing I just got a brand new huge LCD TV.

AND then! xRoommate and I are talking about the Halloween party we plan to throw next month. I need to figure out my costume! We’re both super, super crafty so we have so many ideas and this is going to be just an obnoxious display of spooktastic-ness. So much to plan! So much food to decide to make. So many decorations to construct!

Oh, and something else fun. My tattoo artist is an amazing painter. He got ahold of me a few days ago and wants to do a photo shoot with me so he can paint a crazy neo-Victorian/Steampunk type of portrait of me.  I do a lot of Neo-Victorian/Boiler Goth/Steampunk cosplay type stuff. I have a ridiculous amount of costuming so we went through some of my albums and picked out various outfits that would be interesting to shoot and work with. So that’ll be coming up in a few weeks as well! It’s crazy. My life doesn’t stop. Not ever. Boredom is death.