NaNoWriMo - Day 7 - Dear Mary

Good morning. It's 10:22 and I'm home. Feeling wonderfully gray today. I love mornings that are slightly chilly and the sky slightly shaded. Today. My jaw is still sore and I'm still taking my medication for the infection in my tooth and the pain in my jaw. Maybe that has something to do with me feeling wonderfully gray.

Right now I am preparing for a reading I have tonight at the Topanga Canyon Library with Ann Buxie and Jean Colomonos. I love reading with them and I really enjoy the crowd at the library out there. Now, am I prepared to read on the theme? Not really. But I will have everything together soon. I'm working on projects from home today, thankfully and I don't have to be in Topanga Canyon until 7. I'll leave much earlier and do some work out there.

I'm just rambling, Mary. This is my first post of the day and words and thoughts just spill out. Don't mind me. Are you like that? Did I get that from you? Do you write or paint, take pictures or draw?

I haven't been in the mood to be particularly creative lately. Even my writing feels blah to me. Forced. But I'm glad I am able to force myself to do it. There have been days, Mary. Days when writing was a dream too far outside of my reach. A dream like the nightmare of getting out of bed. I remember those days. I am so thankful that this is not one of those days. I'll take forced writing over that any time.

The theme tonight is on relationships and I've been going back and forth on what poems and stories to tell. I even thought about you. My relationship with you. Of course I thought about romantic relationships but that's so easy. Romantic relationships are not easy but it's an easy choice. I want to challenge myself a little more than that. Although I am really challenging myself in this relationship I'm in right now. You know by now how I free write. Don't expect me to stay on the same topic for too long.

This relationship though. Let me just say that I have never even been in a relationship for more than two years straight. Never. I was in one where we broke up every six to eight months and that flip flop went on for five years. I sure learned a lot. A lot about myself. Maybe more on that later. Maybe not. This one though. I've been here for a year now. We had a few months when we were not together but we are back. And better. I'm careful not to talk much about my current relationships on my blogs or poems I share publicly. He didn't sign up for this after all. If he wanted his life on a blog he would have one. So I don't give a lot of details. But I do give my lessons.

I have done a lot of work on myself in the past few years. A lot. Even in therapy now. I've worked on healing from the sexual abuse stories that have run most of my life. I have been in denial about how much pain the abuses have caused me. I let the pain surface. I was angry. Angry and more angry. I was diagnosed as being bipolar, thankfully. Thankfully because I needed a name for the trips I was going through. The mental ups and downs that I knew were not normal to everyone. So much luggage I carried into my relationships. So much. So much I thought I was hiding. So much I knew I wasn't hiding but was unwilling and unable to unpack. What would I do with it? Where would I put it? Who would love somebody with what I was carrying?

I started unpacking. The process was painful. The process brought lessons. The process was God. My relationships have run on the same cycle. The names and faces and shoe sizes changed but they were so much the same. Because I was the same looking for something different. At a year into the relationship the feelings would come. The signs would be there. I rarely, if ever chose men who were emotionally available so the signs were easy to read. Easy if I wanted to read. A year and a half I knew it was over and shortly after that it was.

This one is different. I am different. After a year it feels like the beginning of our journey. Not the end. He is not afraid of what I am unpacking. Both of us have stuff. Who doesn't have stuff? I didn't expect to say any of this, Mary.

11:14 and I have work to do. More later, okay?