For almost all of my dating life, I have struggled to make failing relationships work. The queer community in my city is small, so I've tried to convince myself over and over that I can make do with someone who is too loud/too messy/not interesting enough in order to have a partner. The worst of this was with my second-last ex, whose many good features made me want to overlook the bad, resulting in four years of settling for not quite enough.
Towards the end of that relationship, I started seeking solace in literature. I would Google phrases like "poems about hating your girlfriend" and "poems to help me stay in a relationship when I'm unhappy" and then spend hours scrolling through the results. Somewhere in the midst of this, I stumbled upon Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese", which in my opinion is one of the best things ever written.
The whole poem is fabulous, but what stood out for me was the line "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." The line stuck with me for days, forcing me to realize that the soft animal of my body did not love my partner, no matter how hard I tried to will it to. I'm sure I would have broken up with my ex eventually even without it, but that single line was the thing that finally allowed me to walk away.
As I get back into dating after the end of my long relationship, I carry these words with me. They remind me that love isn't something that can be forced or willed. I can't change myself to be loved by someone else, nor can I ignore parts of another person in order to love them. The soft animal of my body is a highly discerning tyrant, and she is in charge.
Years ago, a friend of mine who was eight months pregnant commented that she hadn't set up her nursery yet, as she knew that it would upset her if she were so unlucky as to have a late complication and lose her baby. Another friend, who was already a mother, gave her a piece of advice that has stuck with me to this day:
"If you lose your baby, you're going to be devastated whether you've set up the nursery or not. All that you're accomplishing by trying to protect yourself from grief is preventing yourself from feeling joy right now."
I have been thinking about this a lot over the past ten days. Ten days ago I met "the new girl", and in addition to blogging about her here, I've also been tweeting about her incessantly. About how much we have in common. About how easy it is to talk to her. About how I kind of wanted to marry her after she told me that she has a plan to retire at 55.
I recognize that this is ridiculous. We have known each other for only 10 days, and while there are many things that work, 10 days is way too soon to be making any sort of decisions about anything. It is not impossible to think that we could end up in a wonderful forty-year-long relationship, but we could also be sick of each other by the end of the month. We just don't know.
And honestly, I'm scared. I'm scared that I am going to fuck something up, or she is going to fuck something up, or that things are just not going to align in the right way, and this lovely feeling I'm feeling is going to end. So part of me thinks that I should stop tweeting and daydreaming and feeling all of the happy feels.
But then I remember the advice. And I just go with it.
After a brief period of activity, I've been quiet here for the past few weeks. It isn't because I've had nothing to write about. I've actually had too much to write about, but I simply couldn't, and so I've been silent.
I will likely write more about this in the future, as I enjoy oversharing personal information on the internet, but that's all I'm going to write for now.
When I wrote my most recent blog post, I was feeling a little bit smug about how well my life was going. I was exercising, I was feeling calm, and my relationship was in pretty much the best state it has ever been. I was happy. I was about to start an 11-day stretch of 24-hour-a-day call, but I felt ready for it.
I've got this, I thought.
Except I didn't. It took less than one day of teaching residents, and rounding on inpatients, and answering outside calls (all while still running my normal outpatient clinics) for me to return to my usually high stress level. I went to a movie with M and a friend the evening of my first day of call, and I spent the entire time stressing about work and feeling annoyed that the two of them were calm and actually enjoying themselves. (How dare they?) After weeks of respite, my mind was back to ramped-up panic mode.
And that's where it remained for most of my 11 days on call. I worried and obsessed over the decisions I was making. I felt stressed by the increasing pile of undictated charts piling up on my desk. I lay awake at night rehashing everything I had done and questioning whether I was, in fact, good enough. As it often is, it was awful.
And of course, my life outside of work suffered. My relationship that had, until that point, been ticking along nicely, suddenly struggled. I was short-tempered. Everything she did seemed wrong and irritating. I had moments of panic that I was making the wrong decision about staying with M, even though a few short days earlier everything had been going really well. Also awful.
In the past, my approach when I've felt this way on call has simply been to count the days until it's over and to feel thankful that I'm only on call for 10 weeks a year. Now, having been through some counseling, I realize that there are things that I can do to make the tough parts of my life better, and I'm no longer happy with the grin-and-bear-it approach to call. I want my life on call to still feel okay.
So I've been thinking a lot about the things that I can do to make call less awful. This is what I've come up with so far:
Undercommit: I am about as introverted as introverts get, and as a result, I need a lot of time to rest and recover from activities. Evenings on my couch with a book and my cats are as essential to me as vitamins. This is particularly true when I'm on call and I'm dealing with a lot more people, decisions, and uncertainty than I do in my ordinary life. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of making just as many plans when I'm on call as when I'm not, even though I know that my work life will use up most of my capacity to function in the world.
The other downside to making plans when I'm on call is that I hate disappointing anyone. Somehow the pager always goes off when I'm getting ready to go out with M, and I hate making her wait for me or (worse) do things without me. It makes me feel like a terrible partner, even though she is incredibly patient and supportive and never says anything that even implies that she's disappointed that I got paged and our plans had to change.
I'm not saying that I won't ever make plans when I'm on call, but I do need to be very cognizant of my limitations. I need to plan much less than I often do, and I need to leave enough couch time to recover from my days.
Keep moving: It always comes back to this. Exercise is good. I need to do it. Regularly. End of story.
Talk to M: I have a really good partner who is loving and supportive and a good listener. I always feel better after talking with her, and I need to get better at being open with her about how tough my work life can be.
Let things go: The low point of this week was on Tuesday night, when I really needed to just relax and recharge, but I had a slow cooker of pork that was waiting to be turned into pozole. I normally love cooking, but I resented every minute I spent chopping and frying and pulling pork instead of reading a book. And the resentment was completely unnecessary, as there are clearly foods that are much easier to make than homemade soup!
I need to let go of the idea of myself as someone who always cooks elaborate whole foods from scratch. I can eat a fried egg with toast or a frozen fish fillet and the world will not end. Pozole can wait for a week when I'm not on call. As can many other things. Call weeks should be about doing what is necessary, not what is perfect.
Recognize my irrationality: I am an anxious person, and I am only now starting to realize just how detrimental a role anxiety plays in my life. When I'm in the extremes of my anxiety, it can lead me to think really irrational things. Like that my relationship may not be a good one. Or I'm not cut out to be a doctor. Or I'm going to end up on the street if I don't hoard every penny I earn. Thankfully, I'm learning to distinguish between true facts and crazy anxious talk, and I'm learning not to listen to the latter.
Keep going to counseling: I am somewhat amazed at the difference that six counseling sessions made in my life. It probably saved my relationship with M. It certainly made work better. It was worth vastly more than the $480 it cost, particularly because the cost was covered by our provincial medical association.
Unfortunately, the medical association only pays for six sessions, so I stopped going after the sixth. Which is UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY STUPID OF ME, because I can still afford to go. I spend $80 in restaurants without batting an eye, so I can spend $80 on a counseling session.
UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY STUPID. (I'm looking at you when I say that, Solitary.)
For now, call is done, and I am recovering on my couch with my computer/books and Callie. It is taking all of my self restraint to not add 85 other activities into my day (dishes! groceries! laundry! coffee with friends!), but I know that I depleted all of my reserves over the past 11 days, and I need to replenish them.
With the weekend drawing to a close, the girlfriend and I are relaxing by spending some quiet time together on the couch. I'm sitting with my laptop on...well...my lap, and she is reading the book The Language of Baklava. In the background, last night's wedding song, You Are The Best Thing, is playing on YouTube.
As I struggle to find something from my utterly ordinary day to write about, every few minutes my girlfriend breaks out in laughter at something she has read. I love when she reads funny books, because her spontaneous laughter is one of the best sounds in the world. Pure happiness.
Today is my last full day in New Brunswick, and I've snuck away to the sitting room for a few minutes of silence. In other parts of the house, my almost-90-year-old grandmother is playing classic show tunes on the piano, my aunt is spinning tales while chopping a seemingly endless pile of vegetables, and my Mom is laughing at my aunt while frying 5 pounds of scallops* for Coquilles Saint-Jacques. While I know that these are the sounds of life and love and family, I do find myself pining for the relative quiet of the one-bedroom apartment that I share with my love (and two asshole felines).
As it's almost the end of my trip, rather than recount the details of my travel that are interesting to no one but myself, I thought I'd share a few observations that I've made in my time away from home.
1) I hate being away from my girlfriend: She stayed back at home because of work (and being hesitant to meet all of my family simultaneously at a wedding), and I have missed her every single day. I miss rolling over to stare at her in the morning, waiting for her to wake up so that I can cuddle with her and tell her my dreams. I miss coming home to her at night and hearing about her day. I miss spending way too much time cooking supper with her and then being too lazy to clean up the kitchen afterwards. I'm clearly smitten.
2) I am unquestionably an introvert: My Maritime family is large...and loud. There is always someone around, and they are usually moving at top speed within a cloud of noise and chaos. As much as I love them, my introverted self has found it a bit overwhelming, and I've had to hide away from people on a regular basis. My Mom and I spent three nights alone at my grandmother's cottage, and I could feel myself recharging in the stillness and quiet.
3) I pack too much stuff when I travel: I had planned to go more minimalist and pack only my medium-sized suitcase (from a set of three), but my Mom asked me to bring out the largest one so that she could "bring some stuff back with her". No longer constrained by space, I found myself throwing in all kinds of things I was never going to use - a second dress (getting me into a dress for a wedding is miracle enough), a fourth pair of shoes, multiple pairs of dress pants. It's ridiculous, especially because we've changed location five times in ten days, and I've had to carry the stupidly heavy suitcase up and down multiple flights of stairs. In the future, I'm bringing one outfit and washing it in the sink every night.
4) I need very little to be happy: My vacation has included lots of exciting things, like trips to Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg, a tour of an artisinal distillery, and many fancy meals out. My favourite moments though? Waking up to the sounds of shorebirds outside my bedroom window. Cuddling with my cousin's adorable one-year-old daughter. Lying on the couch where my grandfather used to nap every day after lunch. When traveling in the future, I need to remember that it's the simple things that I most enjoy.
And now the doorbell has rung, bringing another group of relatives into the home. Time for me to make nice and play the extrovert for a while**.
*The scallops were supposed to have been taken home with us and eaten over weeks to months, but there was a malfunction of the system to keep them frozen, so instead we're binge-eating scallops. Life is hard.
**I was going to include photos, but I think my Mom will kill me if I hide away any longer. A photo post is coming soon!
I’m
currently in the beautiful maritime province of New Brunswick for my cousin’s
wedding, which took place last Saturday.As an unmarried, queer, almost middle-aged woman, it’s inevitable that
any wedding will evoke a lot of emotions and self reflection in me.This one was different for me, however,
in that I’m now more than a year into a long-term relationship, and the
girlfriend and I have started to dance around the topic of having a wedding of
our own.
What struck
me, as I made the inevitable comparisons between my cousin’s
relationship/nuptials and my own, was how much shit my cousin doesn’t have to
deal with because she happens to be in an opposite-sex relationship.For example:
When discussing her life with someone she works
with or has just met, she doesn’t have to make a split-second decision about
whether the person will judge her or consider her to be immoral based on her
relationship.
When posting photos on Facebook, she doesn’t
need to screen photos of her and her partner to make sure that they won’t
offend her conservative friends, whom she loves in spite of their ignorance and
bigotry.
When planning a wedding, she doesn’t have to
worry about whether or not she can get married in the church in which she was
raised and baptized and which she attends every week.
When inviting people to her wedding, she doesn’t
have to worry that people will refuse to come because they disagree with her
“lifestyle choice”.
By simple
virtue of being born straight, my cousin is privileged to avoid the relentless
background noise of worry that my girlfriend and I live with because we’re
queer.And we live in one of the
best countries in the world to be LGBTQ!As of July 20 this year, it will have been ten years since our government legalized same-sex marriage.I can’t fathom what it would be like to live in a country in which it
isn’t legal to be married, or worse, where one can still be imprisoned or
killed for happening to love someone of the same gender.
Ranting
aside…I have to admit that there were also a lot of positive things about my
time at my cousin’s wedding.First, she was married in the United Church, which has an established
history of performing same-sex marriages and even ordaining gay and lesbian
ministers.As we entered the church,
I noticed that there was a Pride triangle on the door, as well as a sign
indicating that the church was a safe space for gays and lesbians.During the service, the minister
replaced the usual statement that “marriage is a union between a man and a woman”*
with “marriage is a union between two people”.These were seemingly small details that none of my relatives
noticed, but as someone who has spent most of her life feeling alienated from
the church, it meant a lot to me.
Second was
my family.I don’t see this branch
of my family very often, as we’re separated by many kilometers that require
expensive plane tickets to cross, but they were still incredibly welcoming to
me.Almost every one of them asked
why my girlfriend hadn’t come (pesky job), and many of them extended an
invitation for the two of us to come and visit together in the near
future.There wasn’t a single
moment of awkwardness, except for the time when I was showing family photos on
my camera to my grandmother (who doesn’t know about the lesbianism or the
girlfriend), and we came to some photos of the girlfriend.
“Oh!Who’s that?” she asked.
*crickets*
Apparently there
are still a few awkward discussions about sexuality in my future.
*I think I
have my wording wrong here, but my Google search for the correct phrase yielded
a list of mainly Christian websites discussing the immorality of same-sex
marriage.Because I like to not be
crazy and angry while on vacation, I decided not to follow any of the links.
One year ago, the now-girlfriend and I had been messaging each other online for weeks, although we hadn't yet met in person. This was in direct violation of my personal policy to meet people early on in the dating process - before I became attached to the online version of them - but a real-life meeting was hindered by the fact that she was on a month-long road trip to the Southern States. So we had only the virtual world in which to get to know each other. And I was becoming very attached to her.
She returned to our home city the day before Valentine's Day, and I was leaving for San Francisco the day after Valentine's Day, so we had a one-day window in the middle to meet. Which we didn't do, as I, ever the pessimist, decided that I didn't want to potentially ruin Valentine's Day forever with the memory of a terrible date. Instead, I went to San Francisco with only a fantasy version of her in my mind, and I spent my days thinking about how to impress her with witty and intelligent stories of my travels.
(The Pride Flag in San Francisco's Castro District)
When I returned, and we finally met in person over a pot of Earl Gray tea (her) and a glass of Sibling Rivalry (me), she was everything and nothing that I had imagined. She was even more beautiful than she had been in her pictures, and I had to force myself to look away to keep from creepily staring at her. She was louder and more confident than I had expected, and my shy self felt unpleasantly awkward in comparison. The date was a short one - she had intentionally scheduled something immediately afterwards so that she would have an excuse to leave - but it left me wanting to know more about this intriguing creature.
And so I have. Next Sunday (the 22nd) marks our one-year anniversary, and we are both hopeful that it will be one of many. It has been a tough year in many ways, marked by my studying for and writing my licensing exam, by work crises (mine and hers), and by a cancer diagnosis for my mom*, but it has always been made better by her presence.
In the words of my Valentine: "If I had known then what I know now, I would have met you on Valentine's Day."
*Worthy of one or more separate posts, but I will say that here that she is post-surgery and apparently cancer free. Yay!
