Building Community

This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the end of my relationship with my ex, M.  The anniversary of the actual end will be this Wednesday, but I'm going to be on-call that day, and in the interest of not being a disaster at work, I am trying to get all the feels out this weekend.  I spent Saturday alone at a Nordic spa, warming myself in hot tubs and dry saunas, and yesterday I basically lived in my pjs.  The only reason I bathed was because I had made plans to go to the Mister Rogers documentary with a friend, and I thought she might prefer it if I didn't smell*.

Today, Labour Day, I'm rejoining the real world.  My fourth load of laundry is in, the fridge has been emptied of moldy olives (who knew they could go moldy?), and the dishes are drying in the rack.  And after days of wallowing in the hard stuff, I'm searching for the good things that came out of my "failed" relationship.  What have I found so far?

Community.

M's family has belonged to the same church since her parents met at a local bible college, so their connections to other church members go back decades.  Soon after I started dating M (once she had come out to her church in the middle of a sermon she was delivering), I started getting invited to events with members of her church community.  Fundraisers, potlucks, small group dinners, reunions at the bible college, board game afternoons, and trivia nights...my social calendar filled up effortlessly.  And it was really lovely.  She goes to a very left-wing, social justice-oriented church, so while I didn't share a faith with these people, I definitely shared a philosophy with them.

And then, it ended.  At the same time as I lost M, I also lost my connections to the dozens of people in her life who had become an extended family to me.  My social calendar emptied itself out.  It's been a year, and I still find myself grieving some of the harder losses**.

But the upside is that the loneliness I felt after the breakup drove me to work on my own community.  I had neglected some important relationships while I was dating M, and in the past year I've done what I can to strengthen them again. And because many of my friends chose the past year to start having babies and to disappear from the social world, I've also been looking for opportunities to befriend new people.  I've become really good friends with R, who is the ex-girlfriend of another friend of mine.  I've developed a friendship with the woman I dated after M, because although we were romantically incompatible, we have a freakish amount of things in common.  And I'm becoming friends with another woman I met through online dating.  (One of the perks of same-sex dating...online dating can be a source of friendships!)

I'm also joining pretty much everything I can think of to join.  I became a board member for a local theatre company.  I joined a conversational French group.  I started going to a drop-in knitting group.  I've joined a group of lesbians of "a certain age" who are interested in local cultural activities.  I'm even going to an upcoming information night about co-housing!

I'm not going to lie - it's been hard.  It sucks to have spent over three years in the midst of a supportive community and to have suddenly lost it.  I miss the ease of having a partner and a ready-made social life, at the same time as I recognize that it isn't healthy to be dependent on another person for all of my social activities.  As an introvert, it's also really difficult for so many of my relationships to still be in the early phase.  I want the comfort of 20-year-old friendships, not the awkwardness of new relationships!

But I'm working on it.  I'm taking the opportunities that present themselves, and I'm putting myself out in the world as much as I can.  And trying to be patient as I rebuild the community I lost.

*You should go see this documentary, but if you have any heart, go with someone you're comfortable crying with.  And take Kleenex.

**How am I doing with the whole not wallowing thing?

Monochromatic

Given that I took a week of vacation to go to a theatre festival, you won't be surprised to learn that I am a huge fan of theatre.  My love of theatre started at the age of 12, when I played the role of Weasel in "The Trial of the Big Bad Wolf"*, and it has grown over the following 28 years thanks to an impressive local theatre scene.  I have seasons tickets to the main theatre in my city, I can easily be convinced to see pretty much any play, and the annual theatre festival is my own personal Christmas.  Love it!

I also view theatre as something that's pretty important.  As a teenager, it took me a long time to understand and accept the fact that I am bisexual, and theatre made the entire process easier.  The plays that I went to often featured characters who were grappling with their sexuality, and when I watched them, I felt seen.  I may not have been able to tell my parents or even talk to my friends** about what was going on in my life, but I could go to the theatre and see myself reflected in the characters on stage.

Which is why I think it's important for a lot of stories to be told in the theatre, not just those of straight, white, cis-gendered, middle-class, heterosexual people.  But when I go to my theatre festival - my beloved, take-a-week-off, favourite-time-of-the-year theatre festival - those are the stories that are getting told.  And those are the people telling the stories.  Of the 25 plays I've seen to date, with over 50 actors in total, there have been only four non-white actors.  Four!  The population of my city is over 30% non-white, and yet virtually every actor at the festival is white.  And virtually every story is about white people.

I find this really sad, particularly because I view the theatre community as one of the most diverse and accepting groups of people anywhere.  If theatre isn't a space that welcomes and encourages the participation of everyone, then what space is?

*Because everything is available online, I found a video of a school performing "The Trial of the Big Bad Wolf", which brought back so many memories.  So many memories.  So many feels.

**Of course, my friends aren't idiots, and it didn't take too many times of me asking "Hey!  Wanna see this random lesbian play with me?" for them to figure it out.  

Back to Work

I've taken a lot of vacation already this summer.  In May, it was Egypt/Greece/Jordan with my (now ex-) girlfriend.  In June, it was Chicago with my family.  This month, I spent a weekend in New York City for a wedding and then took a week off at home so that I could go to our local theatre festival, which is pretty much my favourite thing in the world.  Unfortunately, today was the last day of the festival, and tomorrow I go back to work.

There is actually a small part of me that is looking forward to going back.  Despite my Facebook posts to the contrary*, I mostly enjoy my job, and I am happy to have a bit more routine in my life again.  The past month and a half has felt very unsettled, and I'm hoping that being back at work will help me to feel more grounded.  More like myself again.

As I prepare to go back for a long stretch with no vacation in sight**, I have been thinking a lot about happiness - specifically, about things that I can do to be happier in both the short and the long term.  Find a new girlfriend seems to be the one that pops into my head most readily, but I'm well aware that I'm not yet in a place where I should start dating again, so I will just try my best to ignore that thought for at least a few more months.  Beyond that, there isn't one single thing that comes to mind; rather, there's a long list of small things that might help to make my life easier and better.  So...I'm back to trying to make some small habit changes. 

At the moment, there are three things that I'm trying to work on, which I will discuss very briefly, because it is suddenly late, and I have to set an alarm clock for the first time in 11 days.

Stop drinking pop: 

I know that I need to make healthier food choices, and I also know that sudden radical changes inevitably lead to failure, so I'm going to start small.  I gave up pop for the month of April, and I was really surprised by how little I missed it.  At the beginning of the month, I though about drinking it periodically, but the cravings for it always passed quickly, and by the end of the month I didn't even think about it.  I was actually a few days into May before I realized that I could start drinking pop again.  Which I wish I hadn't. 

Put my keys, wallet, and cell phone in the same place when I come home:

I am ashamed to admit that I spend a lot of time searching for my keys, wallet, and cell phone.  I frequently switch them between my purse, my work bag, and an assortment of backpacks that I use when I'm out at festivals or other events, and I can never seem to find them when I need them.  Not to mention the fact that my cell phone is rarely charged, which is inconvenient given that I recently gave up my land line.  A few days ago, I moved a storage unit into my front hallway and put a wicker basket on top of it, and I am trying very hard to put my things into it whenever I get home.  Except for the cell phone, which is getting attached to the charger.

Review my schedule on a weekly basis:

I'm pretty good about entering events into my calendar, but I'm not the best at subsequently looking at the calendar and remembering what I need to do.  So far I haven't missed any major appointments (in recent history, at least), but this leaves me with a bit of an unsettled feeling all the time.  My plan is to spend a bit of time every Sunday reviewing my schedule for the week (work and home) and to make a few work/personal goals for the week.  I will never come anywhere near sarah (SHU) in my organizational skills, but I am hoping to slowly improve them.

And that's it.  Three small habits that will not radically change my life but that will hopefully make things a bit better.  And once I've adopted these habits, there can always be more! 

*My Mom freaked out when I recently posted on Facebook that I preferred being at the theatre festival to being at work.  What would your patients think if they saw that?  Um...that I'm a normal human being who sometimes likes vacation more than being at work.

**Any ideas of fun things for single people to do on vacation?  The thought of booking a holiday without my (now ex-) girlfriend makes me want to vomit in my mouth a little, but I know that I will eventually need to go somewhere without her.  Or just work all the time.  Also an option.

Happiness Over Money

Years ago, soon after I had started medical school, a friend of mine who is a physician came in from out of town for a visit.  During his stay, I inundated him with questions about medicine and work life balance and time off for physicians.  When the subject of vacation came up, I was quite surprised to hear that he could take almost as much time off as he wanted to, but he didn't.  It was, he said, too hard to give up the money.

At the time, I didn't understand.  I viewed vacation as a wonderful time of happiness and freedom, and I couldn't imagine passing it up for more money when doctors already make lots of money.

Fast forward eight or nine years, and I understand completely.  When the amount you earn is directly proportional to the amount you work, and especially when you still have 5-10 years of debt repayment ahead of you, it's really hard to justify time off from work.  Every day off is a calculation: 

One half day of clinic x X patients/half day x $Y/patient = I think I'll go to work.  

It's so easy to look at that calculation and think that I don't need a vacation and that it's okay for me to miss out on the things that make me happy.  Except that I do.  And it isn't.

So I'm learning to value my time more than my income.  It started today, with cancelling a half day clinic so that I can go to a really interesting conference on work life balance.  And then, emboldened by that decision, I decided to take an entire week off during our local theatre festival.  A week!  It took me hours to commit to the decision, but now that I've made it, it feels right.  It feels entirely right for me to make time for something that I love that gives me joy.

After all, why else am I here?