Brave Enough To Be Bliss

But those were the old days when I saw him almost every day. When we communicated deeply and regularly. When we saw one another and still knew each other intimately, not just physically. He knew me. I knew him. But the catch was, we still had to learn to trust ourselves. Only then would we be able to trust each other.

“I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.” Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

Truer words have never been said of me than in that quote, which is why I struggled in relationships. I didn’t want to let anyone in. It was safer that way because then maybe I could draw out the time frame before they would take off. Again, it’s not like I consciously made the decision, it’s just that I can look back now and see how I lived my life that way. Even with the few people I did “let in,” I still only let them see the parts of me that I felt safe showing, and that wasn’t much. It wasn’t just with men; it was everyone. And if I thought they were getting ready to leave, then I’d wrap things up as quickly as possible so maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much. But I was always mentally prepared for the pain to come. In other words, as I would learn, I would engage in self sabotage. I was married for 18 years and when you’re living with someone and raising a child together, you tend to get to know them pretty darn well. It’s hard to hide everything when you’re living that close. And yet, I think if my former husband read this book, he would say that he had been unaware of the deep self-hatred I had because I was years away from truly letting anyone know that. He might say I had some self- image issues, but I don’t think he would have said anything deeper than that because I appeared to have myself and my life together. It was just the unspoken things that were a real mess. I needed to draw out the time before everyone left me, so I couldn’t let him know it was quite like that inside me. Who would want to be married to that ? If I let him know how I actually felt , he’d run away even faster. That was the baseline fear of my existence. It was much safer to keep people as far away from the real me as possible and instead just try to be whatever I thought they wanted me to be. I was constantly assessing what anyone else needed or wanted, and then I would try to be whatever that was. I would try to anticipate their needs or wants, then provide them before they even asked. That way they’d see how much they needed me in their lives to take care of them, so maybe they’d stick around longer than they would have otherwise. My life was spent fully enmeshed in other people’s lives so I could stay the hell away from my own. It was safer and nicer to be in their lives anyway. Mine felt anything but safe and nice, it was really quite a hateful place to be. I only had 11 years’ experience living with a man in the house , as my dad moved out at that age. I only had a couple dates in high school and no serious boyfriends. I’ve always been a much better friend than a girlfriend or wife. My knowledge of men came more from what other females said than my own experience until I was married, and then I had a sample size of one. And I made up so many stories in my mind, made assumptions instead of asked questions, etc., so I doubt I learned anything that could safely be applied to men in general. As an example, several years ago I had a friend who recommended I read the book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus after a particular incident with John, because it was clear to her that I didn’t know much about men. When I was married and Kylee was an infant, they were building a new retirement community about two blocks away from the duplex we were renting at the time. Not long after they started construction, we noticed mouse droppings and my husband set out some traps. It turned out to be a much bigger problem than we were even aware of. Every morning the mouse traps would be filled, so he asked the neighbors, and they said yes, they had even seen mice on the kitchen counter. It didn’t appear to bother them, but I was mortified. I didn’t like the whole mouse trap thing, it made me really uneasy, and even queasy . The last straw came when I picked up Kylee’s diaper bag I had stored under her crib and found that a mouse had eaten through the bottom of it in order to get into the small baggie of Cheerios I had inside.

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