Amy Confetti

On New Year’s Eve I took a moment, as so many people do, to reflect back on the prior year.  It occurred to me that if time did not pass, if we did not have these mile markers, we would neither look back nor push forward.  What would be the point of pushing forward if we had no sense of how time passes?  Or how things change?  We would be unaware of how much we could accomplish.

Jodi and I began this blog about a year ago.  In that time we have both been pushing forward.  But now, in looking back, I see how far I have come.  The realization encourages me to continue moving forward.  At the same time, I appreciate the journey so far.

It is harder for me to write now.  I have exorcised enough demons.  I don’t feel the same weight upon me that I did when we began.  Now a bad day is just a bad day.  I am hurt or angry or lonely and then it passes.  I dedicated enough time and energy to sorting out the past and how I arrived here.  Whether or not I agree with my “youthful” decisions, they are mine and I can live with them.  There were lessons to be gleaned from each one.  They will continue to reveal themselves, but I have to wait for them.  I can’t purposefully examine them any longer. These lessons are hidden, like a 3-D picture concealed within a pattern.  They will be there when I least expect to find them.

For years, my questions have been about the past and the future.  How could I have done that better?  Where will I go from here?

My head is tired.  And I mean that in a good way.  As Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  I have examined.  I have reflected, and I have hypothesized.  I have sifted through all the information I have and reached all the conclusions I can.

I need a bigger boat.

I have let go of the past.  I don’t want to continue looking for dark moments just so I have something to write about.  I hope they pass me by.  And if that means I write less, then I write less.

I am not ready for the future.  It too will reveal itself when I least expect it; or when I find myself in the middle of it.

I want to enjoy the present.  I want to explore.  I want to laugh.  I want to be.

And so I shall.

The guy I am long-distance dating has a habit of telling me he will call “tomorrow night” and then failing to call.  I haven’t kept track, but my guess is that this has happened 10 – 15 times since mid-October.

Each time it is because he got caught up in a conversation with someone else – family, the neighbors who are like family, or an ex-girlfriend.

We have not made each other any promises.  He is not ready for anything serious, and I respect that.  I don’t ask him to call me.  I try not to call him too often.  I let him decide the pace.

And there it is, in his “I will call you tomorrow.”

A couple of weeks ago his most recent ex-girlfriend was visiting.  He told me in advance that he would not have time to call, but he would text.  When he didn’t text I got upset.  It wasn’t that I thought he wanted to work things out with her.  I don’t think he’s playing games or just keeping his options open.

I think his focus remains on the person in front of him.

Unfortunately, when he says he will call or text, I wait.  When he doesn’t follow through I am disappointed to not have even those few minutes of tenuous contact, and I am hurt that I didn’t rate a few minutes of his time.  He was so focused on someone else it never even occurred to him to text that he wouldn’t call or ask the person to wait a minute while he canceled a prior engagement.  His disregard is foreign to me.  I can tell he wouldn’t be waiting if the situation was reversed.  And I am learning that even though I show people I care about them by making time for them, the two are not connected in his mind.

After his ex left town and we talked about the frustrated text I had sent him during her visit (while his phone was actually out of service) it happened again.  I asked him to just stop telling me he was going to call.  I would rather be pleasantly surprised than increasingly upset.  I can’t plan my evening around phone calls I don’t know are coming.

He insisted he would do better. I believed him.

On Thursday afternoon he told me he just needed to be more responsible.  On Thursday night he got caught up in conversation with another ex-girlfriend and didn’t call.  I had expected his call around nine and fell asleep just before 11, knowing the phone would wake me up when he did call.  Instead, I woke up around 2 and checked my phone, only to see the text telling me what had happened and that he was tired and going to bed.  He neither acknowledged we were supposed to talk nor apologized.

This time, I was angry, and I was done.  I couldn’t be less demanding of him than to say you can call whenever you want, but you don’t have to call, and don’t even worry about telling me when you will call.  Now I just felt disrespected.  Eventually, I fell back asleep – still hurt, still angry.  On its own, this was no big threat to him.  I am mercilessly forgiving.  A good night of sleep, a hurried apology, and I probably would have been apologizing for overreacting.

I dreamt about my ex.  J is my “one who got away” – though I use the term more loosely as time goes by.  When I am really upset I dream about him.  Sometimes they are just dreams, but sometimes we are so connected in them I wouldn’t be surprised if he were dreaming about me at the same time.  Usually, the dreams are littered with anger and recriminations.  This time it wasn’t.

In my dream J had cancer.  He was thinner than I ever saw him in real life, and parts of his leg and other foot had been amputated. The cancer was aggressive and had invaded most of his body.  The whole time he explained his prognosis the big, cheek-to-cheek grin never left his face.  He insisted he was fine.  He was going to go for an experimental treatment he was sure would be successful.  In my dream I knew it would be.  We were talking like the friends we once were.  It felt great to be surrounded by his happiness.  Then he told me that on top of everything else, his wife was pregnant and they would have a son soon.  And that was all I could take of his cancer and his happiness.  I distanced myself from him in the dream, but I was always aware of him.  Eventually, when he and his wife were leaving so he could start his treatment he caught my eye.  His wife wasn’t looking, so I gave him a thumbs-up.  And then I acknowledged with a hand gesture that we were still connected.  Then I woke up.

The dream was disconcerting.  It left me feeling even more tense than my original anger had.  Being a researcher with some time on my hands, I started looking up all the various meanings the ever-reliable online dream dictionaries gave my dream.  Eventually, one of them actually clicked.  It said that if you dream of cancer in another person, you have to determine what that person symbolizes for you to determine what the “cancer” is telling you to get rid of.  For me, J symbolized the best relationship I had.  If it hadn’t been deeply flawed, however, I wouldn’t have let him go.  One of the early problems in our relationship was a series of promises to call that never came to fruition.  Being young and dumb, I never stood up for myself or expressed my frustration the way I am now.  Silly as it may sound, I think my unconscious self was letting me know that I need to cut away the relationships that hurt me so that what remains makes me so unbearably happy I can’t stop grinning.

In other words, even though I hate staying mad or being demanding, it was not only okay for me to let the current guy know that I was upset, I really needed to let him know.  Which was good, because I had already sent back a text telling him.

It did not take him long to sincerely apologize and tell me it won’t happen again.  I believe he will do his best.

Dating long-distance is hard.  It is hard to get to know each other and hard to even communicate without the benefit of body language.  It is hard to define boundaries when “getting serious” is too much.  I’m not ready to call it quits, but I won’t regret expressing my frustration.  I want to end up unbearably happy, too.

Arbitrary deadlines move me forward, but they mean nothing.  By themselves they change nothing.

But they give me hope.  They quell my anxiety and make me feel constructive.  I have composed and imposed them so many times.  But lately I haven’t been able to form them.  I haven’t used them to move forward.

But it’s okay.

The last two years of sitting on the sidelines and ignoring my inner demands for productivity have led me to greater discoveries than I ever could have made just by pushing forward.

I had to stop and let my thoughts catch up.

My inner sureness is back, and it doesn’t come from the knowledge that somewhere out there a man loves me.  It comes from the knowledge that I love me.

I have a peacefulness I haven’t had – maybe ever.

I feel more comfortable trusting my intuition and leading with me, instead of someone else’s voice.

I don’t know where I’m going. But I know I’m okay. And I will be okay.

And everything will be okay

There will be joy.

There will be sorrow.

There will be change.

There will be stability.

Through it all, I will be

Okay.

“I am exactly where I am supposed to be.”

That was one of the quotes handwritten on the wall of the yoga studio.  I disagreed.

Yoga and I don’t actually get along.  I mean, I LOVE the way I feel at the end of my practice, but every twisted, unbalanced minute of the actual practice drives me nuts.

I used to practice quite often.  The drop-in classes were easy to make a couple of times a week, and then I hit the jackpot and lived with an instructor in training who led my friend and me in practice every weekday morning.  After two and a half months I still held a grudge against it.  When I moved I gave it up.

Last fall I joined the Y and started going again, but only sporadically.  The stars had to be perfectly aligned, and the excuses had to be hard to find, before I would trudge out with my mat in time to make it to the 6 a.m. class without getting lost on the track on the way.

But today a friend was having a bad week.  She is underemployed and recently single.  And because she is recently single, she is about to be kicked out of her house.  And today her car broke down.  And she really wanted to go to a free yoga class.

“I’ll go!”  I just felt like I should.  I went earlier in the week and it was fine.  One of my most enjoyable practices ever, actually.  I could definitely suck it up for a friend who just wanted some company.  So I pulled up the event on the yoga studio’s homepage.

108 sun salutations in honor of the first day of fall.  WTF? How did I get myself into this? I hate to do six in a practice.  108? Seriously? Balls.

But it got better.  When we walked into the studio I realized I had missed the line that said it was HOT yoga.  I didn’t even have a towel with me.  Awesome.  Well it could be great, right? I’d never tried hot yoga.  At a minimum the workout would have to be great.  And it was only her second yoga attempt ever, so I could talk her into leaving at the halfway point if it came down to it.

It started out great.  Downward facing dog, step to the front of the mat, mountain, fold, half-way up, fold, chaturanga, upward facing dog, downward facing dog…. The positions slowly awakened.  I liked the feeling.  We don’t do sun salutations at the Y.  But it was so HOT.  On about the sixth salutation the sweat was pouring off of me.  I said the same thing after Zumba this week, but it turns out I was wrong then.  THIS redefined pouring off of me.  It didn’t take long before a sweat trail led up the middle of my mat and onto the floor in front of it.  Fine.  Suck it up.  But it kept spreading.

The next few salutations passed quickly.  Then I started to lose my grip on the mat. As I lowered into chaturanga my left hand slipped out from under me.  On the next rotation my right foot slid to the edge of my mat.  As I worked to maintain my balance and complete the poses my inner arms began to tremble.  I couldn’t push up into upward facing dog without bracing my legs or bowing my knees outward.

Enough.

I’ve had enough injuries, I wasn’t going to set myself back by tearing a muscle in my arm or twisting my bad knee again.  I sat back on my mat and breathed.

I had made it through 26 of the 108 salutations.

Beside me, my friend was cranking.  As I watched her struggling to learn the poses and committing to her practice I knew I couldn’t ask her to leave at the halfway point.  I resigned myself to restarting at the end of the break.  When the break came so many people had left they asked us to move up in the room and fill in the spaces.  I did one more sun salutation before accepting that I was done for the night.  And now I was in the middle of the room.

I slid my mat to the end of the row and sat cross-legged.  I had an hour to go.  I opted to work on my meditating.  I have a hard time with that, too, but my head felt better for the yoga, even if the heat was threatening to boil it.

Best. Meditation. Ever.

I don’t know if it was a heat stroke or what, but meditation has never felt so… so.  I don’t even know how else to explain it.  My head was everywhere and nowhere.

I was thinking about all of the people I have practiced with in the past.  The instructors with their bits of sermon-like wisdom, the friends who keep me pushing myself, the roommate who gave up his mornings for us, and the couple who practiced on the mats beside us at one of the gyms but always checked on me and my back.  It turned out they ran a spine clinic and could immediately tell that I’d had a disk out of place that was still giving me trouble.

I was reflecting on all of the positive sayings on the wall about working through it, accepting your place in the world, and embracing the positive.

I was parsing through the past career and personal decisions I’ve made.

I was asking why I dislike yoga so much.

And I got some answers.

People can be awesome. Sometimes somebody else’s words open up a whole new perspective. Some things just are.  You do the best you can, you make a decision, and you move on.  And sometimes, even when you know a decision is looming, you can’t worry about it.  You will get to it when the time is right.

And I came up with two reasons why yoga is so difficult for me.  The first is that it’s just difficult.  I have to focus on my entire body in order to practice effectively.  I can’t just turn up the music, read the news, and turn up the energy level in order to succeed.  I have to concentrate.  The second is that it makes me feel guilty.  I feel like a failure when I practice.  Instead of appreciating the 10 poses I do well, I worry about the poses I don’t do well.  Tonight I was side-tracked by how many salutations I didn’t do until somewhere in the middle of my meditation, when I thought about how many I did do, and how 20 more sun salutations than I’ve ever done in one practice before is a pretty sweet achievement.

I worry over my practice because it isn’t as peaceful or as natural as it is for everyone else.  Which is ridiculous.  If there’s one thing yoga is all about, it’s finding your own practice and not worrying about the person on the next mat.

“I am exactly where I am supposed to be.”

Tonight that saying connected with my practice and my life.  When my meditation ended I was still smiling.

At the end of a practice the instructors turn the lights off and everyone assumes shavasana, or corpse pose.  The pose has you lie stretched out with your hands at your sides.  It is a pose of relaxation intended to rejuvenate your body and spirit.  It is incredibly uncomfortable on my lower back. The couple with the spine clinic advised me years ago to lie with my feet on the floor and apart from each other, but with my knees bent and touching like a twisted scarecrow.

When I got into position for my version of shavasana, I thought about how much more relaxing it was to be in a pose that worked for me than to struggle into the pose that works for most people.

Maybe yoga won’t be my favorite thing.  I’ll keep it up because I can feel the benefits, but I don’t want to struggle with it anymore.  I will accept my 26 sun salutations for the achievement they are, and I will let go of the rest.

With each man that I date and truly like I have a hard time saying goodbye.  It is as though, for a moment, a window opens and I see the future we could have had together, if it had only been right.  And even though it isn’t right it feels like it could have been good enough.  And when we say goodbye I feel myself saying goodbye to that future as though I am being pulled backward through a long tunnel.  I feel disoriented; much like Scrooge must have felt with the ghost of Christmas future.

It is as much the fear of what will come next, without that imagined future, as the sorrow in the parting that keeps me clinging to the shifting walls.  Regardless of the reasons, they stretch beneath my grasping fingers and shake off my fingerprints.  And that entire future just disappears.  It will never exist.

The sadness of letting go settles over me every time.  I don’t want to keep looking at futures that will never form.  I want one of them to be real.  I get attached to them as though they are.

The sadness lasts until I find a moment when letting go makes sense; when I see the world for the vast space that it is, filled with endless possibilities.  I offer up my hurt and my hope and I wait for the world to make it right.  Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes years.  It depends on how much I believed in my invented future.

I like variety.  I crave adventure.  It is the feeling of moving forward that keeps me satisfied.  I know these things about myself.  They are true.  And they are only part of the story.

As the weight of these goodbyes has begun to register, I see that a part of me longs for stability.  I don’t like that my entire life is subject to the whims of the next week.  I want a career.  A home.  A family.  I assumed that if I built my career I would be happier than if I sat around waiting to find a good man.  But my career is nowhere to be found, and I am still hoping to chance upon a home and family.  It always felt pointless to chase after something that is never guaranteed.  Despite my efforts, however, it turns out a career isn’t, either.  And I think it is time for me to look for everything else.

I need to design my future life.