Going the distance.

A few aspects of my (new) life have been naturally causing me to reexamine who I am, who I think I am, and who other people must think I am. Between hearing I’m quiet (I am?) and shy (wait, what?) I’m also learning that I’m not “crazy”—a positive, I suppose, until you really start dissecting it. I’ll get to this in a second.

{Another listen while you read, if you’ll indulge me}

I guess this all happens when you’re getting to know new people and they’re (hopefully) getting to know you, too. It also happens in the tender first stages of falling in love, a tricky puzzle to put together even when you’re mature enough to leave games aside. I’ve come to realize that love is as much like happily jumping off a cliff without a parachute as it is a series of questions and answers (more often than not unasked, and typically not answered with your mouth). It’s a series of coltish steps forward as we try to bridge the distance between one another, and it’s exquisite and exhausting in the most lovely way.

It’s as much brain as it is body, so you have to give time for that examination and overthinking and confusion—I mean, this is your heart we’re talking about.

I said this once in an old post, and it applies again and again: the mind can grow long, nimble legs when left to its own devices. Whether this was on long commutes alone, or in my more recent case, any small, echoey moment when conversation stops and hangs in the air—that abandoned second can cause me to turn my lens back on myself for a minute. And I’ll draw my hand back from his neck or arm or knee or hand like I’ve just touched a hot iron—and it’s not unfamiliar territory for me.

“Did I just say that?” “What did that mean, though?” “Am I too much?” “Wait, what did *that* mean?” And my favorite, the brain-frying: “I don’t get it, did my hair get flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s wrong with me?”

Trust me: none of these questions come on the heels of any super valid cause for concern. He does everything right, truly. They just churn themselves up like grunts on chum, and I’ll take full responsibility for that.

Not to be too much the wounded damsel, But I’ve been conditioned to be this way—and if you’d been through what I went through, you’d do the same.

[Free People 100 Degree dress, a.k.a. how I’m rediscovering femininity and actually wearing things that show skin for the first time since I was 19.]

It’s symptomatic of being a writer, I’ll hazard, but also human, and a human of the female gender. I’m conscious that being observant (cool) and self-aware (cool, too) can quickly tread into two related but dangerous territories: over-thinking and self-loathing. Two things we should all be leaving at the curb. But as clean as my scars are healing, they are still scars, and I have to both respect that and live with them, while also not letting them tell me how to live.

Allow me to explain. We can’t pick our poison. The one that was picked for me is perceived distance—speaking of brains getting long legs. I can beat you to the bottom of the rabbit hole on this one, and I can trace back some of the scariest, loneliest moments of intense questioning to it: When I think I feel someone pulling away. When I sense I’m being tiring, or even worse, uninspiring. When I’m coming 90% of the way and they’re only meeting me with 10%. I’d lived it for so long, and attempting to ignore it happened to have horrible consequences for me.

—

Holding back should be one of the seven deadly sins.

In September of 2006, I had flown up to Saratoga, sight unseen, to interview for the job that was going to allow me to move up there and give that relationship a real go. (A first of many red flags that would indicate who of that union would be most often pushing piles of chips forward onto the table, time and time again, making bets because the bet seemed infallible. That person was me.) At an antique show in Vermont, I followed him around as we peered in the booths. The awkward was palpable. My yearning for him to show me some sort of reassurance that he wanted me there was also crushing. As I stood running my hands along a $12,000 antique pine dining table, I looked up and he was gone.

Foreshadowing.

This pattern repeated itself throughout the day—the week, the months that followed, the years. I’d catch up to him, then he’d wordlessly move on, until I folded up the little ticket I’d been nervously creasing between my fingers, put it in my pocket, went into a bathroom, sat in a stall, and burst into tears.

It was the most alone I’d ever felt. And it followed me into the car, where we sat silently driving home. To the berry picking farm, where I would approach the blueberry bush beside him and he’d quickly find a new one to go pick from. This person who supposedly loved me and wanted me to move something like 8 states away from my home to be with him. It should be second nature then, right? You should have to be consciously reminding yourself to stop reaching out. Unable to peel yourself away.* Where was that feeling?

—

Things can ease your mind of distance, of course—a sentimental CD with a note through a door slot, an unexpected kindness, a note in your suitcase, even a proposal—but really, you know in your gut when that distance is there and nothing can really change that. These reassuring things were so elusive, but I could survive on them for months at a time, like sitting in a darkened cave nibbling on a hardened biscuit I’d forgotten was in my bag.

I believe in that perceived distance and what’s lurking below the surface to cause it. I really do. Maybe it was just my “crazy” before this all happened, but now, it’s my bogeyman.

—

I guess that’s why I wasn’t entirely surprised by the events of last year. And why I was partially relieved. I was done overthinking the way I felt all the time.

The curious and kind of hilarious side effect of that, however, is what I’m calling the kamikaze in love—the new me who isn’t afraid to overthink, but also isn’t afraid to be right. Or wrong. I think it’s because, after all of that, I’ve got nothing to lose. Fuck the upper hand—I just want to be the kind of love in the world that was denied me for so many years.

In that respect, I feel crazy, but not that kind of crazy—crazy because I’m throwing caution to the wind and dropping the bullshit and just turning ’em all over on the felt, and I really don’t care.

—

There’s a modern phenomenon we as women are up against: being the crazy girl vs. being the cool girl. With two words and the bullet list of archetypal personality traits that follow them, we’re put into two, neat little buckets. Emotions, second-guessing, gut checks, and honest questions are “crazy.” Dammit, ladies, be cool.

Going with the flow, burying emotions, dismissing nagging thoughts and playing aloof is “cool.” I’d say I’m about 50/50 but I can’t be sure—I’m not really following my head anymore, I’m following my nose.

Just kidding, I’m following my heart. But he does smell really, really good.

That Vermont car ride—the silent one. I remember thinking, “We should be talking our heads off right now,” which trickled into a year later: “We should be fighting sometimes,” to “We shouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other,” to “We should be wanting this,” and “We should be doing that.” It seemed unnatural, the dial tone of my life. It was quite happy, but it was a dial tone.

Don’t get me wrong—I spent plenty of time overthinking and questioning these lapses. And blaming myself. And constantly wondering what was wrong with me. What about me precluded my being able to have certain things. How I’d gotten into a situation where I didn’t have those things. Why I was rarely met halfway. Crazy would be the second-guessing and the paranoia and, if I’m being totally honest, probably the answers I needed and a lot less wasted time. But I didn’t choose crazy.

Being cool lulled me into a blind confidence that what ain’t broke didn’t need fixing and far-fetched outlandish explanations were just that: absurd. (FYI they weren’t.)

The long and short of it: Had I just done a little more overthinking, I’m pretty sure I could have saved myself the last 7 years. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Being “cool” screwed me. And whenever someone asks me “How did you not know?” my answer is always a calm, clipped: “Because I trust people.” It’s a trip, though, how it all shook out.

I guess my question is: how do you resume course after a wreck like that? So far, I landed on a pretty good option—one I wouldn’t have predicted for myself in a million years: you turn off that part of your brain that tells you to be afraid and you give as much of yourself as you can to bridge that gap.

You go the distance, because it’s worth it.

-C.

*I get to finally feel that way now, so it’s all good.