OMG I Have Ten Days Off at Christmas

The past two years, I haven't really enjoyed Christmas.  As the junior staff member, I've been on call over the holidays, meaning that I've never quite been able to relax, lest I get paged away in the middle of the gift opening or family dinner.  It also means I haven't been able to drink, which is a bad thing given the specialness that is my family.

When putting in my call requests for this year, I asked to have the full week off in return for taking Christmas two years in a row, and I was successful!  M and I celebrated when the call schedule came out, envisioning leisurely days spent sleeping in and playing games and eating all the Christmas baking.  It was going to be wonderful.

Somehow, it didn't occur to me until today that my Christmas plans have changed.

I mean...I knew intellectually that I wasn't going to be spending Christmas with M and her family.  I am actually in touch with what is going on in my life.  But somehow, in the moments when I would look ahead to Christmas, I still pictured an abundantly full holiday, packed with all of the activities I've done since I met M.

Which isn't what's going to happen.  There will be no family puzzle or Christmas morning cheese tray or days spent at M's parents' house in pjs.  There will be one Christmas Eve dinner at my brother's, followed by the opening of a few presents the next day, and that will be it.  And then there will be eight days on my own, when my friends are busy with their families or traveling to other cities.  Me, the cats, and my apartment.  For eight days.

When I suddenly realized what was ahead of me, I panicked.  I actually thought about booking some clinics that week so as to not have to face such an abundance of alone time.  Or maybe flying away somewhere, so that at least I could be distracted from my aloneness by the sites of a new city.  Anything to not spend the holidays drinking wine and singing sad love songs a la Bridget Jones.

But, I probably won't do any of those things.  People are notoriously bad for not coming to clinics during the Christmas holidays, which would mean I'd be miserable and lonely while wearing work clothes instead of sweat pants.  And given that I just came back from Quebec City and am planning a trip to France, I don't feel like I can justify any more travel for a while.  So I will be here.

And now I am planning.  I'm messaging any friends who might be around to say "Please entertain me".  I'm booking a massage.  I'm writing a list of things that I can do to keep myself from spending what should be 10 wonderful days off wallowing in a sea of self pity.  Or (God forbid) from trying to online date over the holidays, which is really one of the saddest things a person can do.

Any suggestions of things to add to my list?

When Things Are Just Hard

My ex-girlfriend came over this evening to drop off a suitcase she had borrowed* and to pick up some things she had left behind.  It was emotional and awful, even though two and a half months have already passed.  I wanted to say or do something that would make it better, but there isn't anything to say or do.  This is just hard.

Like many things in life are hard.  Sometimes there is no fixing separation and loneliness and illness and death.  And all you can do is give someone the biggest hug possible and cry.

*Brilliantly, she forgot the suitcase.

NaBloPoMo Will Not Defeat Me (The 30 Minutes or Less Post)

For the past few years, Wednesday nights have been trivia nights.  My (now ex-) girlfriend and I would meet at a pub with whomever we could drag out (friends, parents, co-workers, friends of friends) for terrible but cheap chicken wings and PubStumpers trivia.  We were never any good, but it appealed to my competitive side and to my I-love-deep-fried-animal-fat-drenched-in-sauce side, so I made it a priority to go almost every week. 

The last time I went was the night before the breakup.  My ex was the one who had gotten us involved with trivia, so until now I've kind of stepped aside and let her continue to go without me being there.  But now that two months have passed, it feels like time to go back.  (Also, she is out of town for the long weekend.  But it's also time.)  So I've gathered four friends, a table is reserved, and to trivia we go.

No matter how shitty the breakup, life does eventually continue.

Je Marche Seule

Of all of the unhelpful things I've believed in my life, the most unhelpful is probably the belief that a relationship is what makes a person happy.  I'm not sure when I acquired this belief, but I know it was there by the time I was 12 years old and starting junior high.  That was the age at which I decided that I would be willing to have sex with a guy if he would be willing to be my boyfriend.  Fortunately I was nerdy and unpopular, so I never in a position to make that exchange, but at 12 years old I was willing.

The belief followed me through many lonely adolescent years and into my twenties, when I finally started dating.  My first boyfriend was someone who could best be described as a Darth Vader boyfriend, but I was so caught up in the idea that he would make me happy that I couldn't acknowledge that he didn't.  It took me four years to get out of that toxic relationship, and 13 years later I still wake up in a panic from nightmares that I have gone back to him.  As I was purging my memory box last week, I came across a photo of him, and I felt physically ill looking at it.  I decided to leave it in the box as a reminder that some things are worse than being single.

As the years went on, I found myself feeling not quite happy in a series of not quite right relationships.  After each one ended, I dutifully returned to online dating, hoping that the next one would fit just a little bit better.  But at some point in time, I heard or read somewhere (or perhaps many somewheres) that the best way to find a relationship is to make yourself happy without one.  And so I did that.  I started investing in friendships and cultivating my own interests and even occasionally hopping on a plane and travelling all on my own.

And at some point, it actually worked.  I found myself single and, although still looking, no longer feeling a sense of desperation to get into another relationship.  Any relationship.  I found myself feeling happy as I starfished across my double bed and wandered alone through museums and used Saran Wrap without being accused of destroying the whole planet.  It took me over 30 years, but by simply testing the theory that relationship = happiness, I was able to prove it false.

Empiricism for the win.

Towards the end of my most recent relationship, when it was becoming clear that we had entered the final disaster spiral from which nothing good ever escapes, my partner told me that she didn't think I would be happy without her.  She acknowledged that I was unhappy with her, because it was impossible not to, but she also told me that she thought I was just an inherently unhappy person and that my unhappiness had nothing to do with the relationship.  And for a moment I almost believed her.  But then I would find myself daydreaming of being alone, and in these daydreams I could imagine myself being happy again.

So I left.

And now here I am, in a new city in which it never stops raining and the sidewalks are buried under soggy yellow maple leaves.  I spend my mornings trying to pry French words out of my very English brain and my afternoons wandering the dripping streets alone, and it feels like magic.

There is no one here with me, but in this moment I have everything I could possibly want.

Packing my Minimalist Suitcase

My ex-partner was the antithesis of a minimalist.  Any time I would clear out a space, it would almost instantaneously be filled with something of hers.  Living with her was like the principle of nature abhors a vacuum manifested hoarder-style.

Since she moved out, I have been slowly returning to my preferred state of being a semi-minimalist.  I've taken four large bags of books to my Little Free Library; I've thrown out the three-year-old bottles of condiments that we never used; and I've even gone through my memory box and gotten rid of the awards and report cards that dated back to elementary school.  In this new stage of life, I am focusing on being lighter.

In the spirit of minimalism, when I started packing for my current trip, I decided to limit myself to one carry on bag and one camera bag (which has some extra space for books/a jacket/a water bottle).  I didn't need to do this, as I could have easily brought one of my larger suitcases, but I wanted to see whether I could fit my life into a small space for a week.

It was a lot easier than I thought.  My suitcase easily held two pairs of jeans, a warm sweater, two pairs of pajamas, and more than enough socks, underwear, and t-shirts.  There was room for five books, my french workbooks*, and a notebook.  My computer, my cell phone, and my camera with an extra lens.  Everything I will need.

But the constraints of space did force me to leave a few things behind, like my ex's long-sleeved t-shirt.  The cozy one that I bought her while at a conference in Boston, which was always a favourite of mine, and which she returned to me after the breakup.  The one I've been putting on every evening when I arrive home from work.  The most tangible reminder I have of what we were, and what was lost.  I am not usually one to assign emotions to physical things, but somehow lately it has felt as if all of my grief is contained within this piece of cotton.

So I left it at home. 

*I'm going to Quebec to practice my French for a week!  Je pense que ce sera plus dur que je pensais.

Things that are Hard After a Breakup

Being one person in a bed meant for two*.
Discovering she took the popcorn after you plug in the popcorn maker.
Paying fees to change the plane tickets for a trip you were planning together.
Losing custody of your Wednesday night trivia team.
Running into her friends and not knowing whether they know.
Running into her friends and knowing that they know.
Leaving the carrots out of your soup because she took the peeler.
Becoming solely responsible for the emotional needs of your cats.
Changing the beneficiary on your investments.
To your mother.

*Also awesome.

Post Mortem

I keep opening this post, typing a few sentences, deleting them, and closing the post again without publishing anything.  I alternate between wanting to write a few lines to get it over with and wanting to pour everything in my heart out, consequences be damned.  I suspect in the end I'll do something in between, although it's hard to know, because whereas I usually have some idea of what a post will look like before I write it, this time I'm improvising.

I've heard it said that life keeps giving you the same lesson, over and over again, until you learn it.  For me, the lesson that I seem to be unable to learn is to let a relationship go the first time it ends.  In every long-term relationship I've ever been in, after the relationship has fallen apart, I've always gone back to see if the pieces could be reassembled.  Instead of just dealing with the loss and moving on from it, I've let myself be stuck in the process of the relationship ending, asking over and over again, "Can I make this work?"

The answer, of course, is no.  With rare exception, a relationship that has truly ended - in a furniture-moved-out, shared-possessions-divided-up kind of way - can't be made to work.  And that is the long and the short of what happened with M and I.  Our relationship ended over a year ago when I called it quits, but thanks to optimism and poor judgement and the ability of good memories to block out the bad ones, I invested a whole other year into making absolutely certain that it was over.

It hasn't all been bad.  In the past year, we've eaten chicken wings at trivia night and picked strawberries at the U-pick and camped under multiple starry skies.  We traveled to Europe in the Spring, eating currywurst in Berlin and waffles in Brussels.  There has been a lot of struggle and a lot of unhappiness, but there has also been life, in all of its beautiful imperfection.  And while I wish we hadn't been so unhappy, I don't wish away our last year together.

ZebraNRP at Mothers in Medicine wrote a beautiful post recently about the end of her marriage, and I have gone back to it multiple times over the past few months, while I've been witnessing the last days of my own relationship.  I love her idea that something isn't a failure just because it ends.  I also love the poem that someone included in one of the comments, and it seems like a fitting way to end this post.

          Failing and Flying
          Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012

          Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
          It’s the same when love comes to an end,
          or the marriage fails and people say
          they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
          said it would never work. That she was
          old enough to know better. But anything
          worth doing is worth doing badly.
          Like being there by that summer ocean
          on the other side of the island while
          love was fading out of her, the stars
          burning so extravagantly those nights that
          anyone could tell you they would never last.
          Every morning she was asleep in my bed
          like a visitation, the gentleness in her
          like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
          Each afternoon I watched her coming back
          through the hot stony field after swimming,
          the sea light behind her and the huge sky
          on the other side of that. Listened to her
          while we ate lunch. How can they say
          the marriage failed? Like the people who
          came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
          and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
          I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
          but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Radio Silence

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.

M and I have separated.

Again.

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.

Enjoy some David Gray!

So Many Things

You know how something happens and you think "I should blog about this", but then you don't have make the time to do it, and then something else happens that you want to blog about, but you can't because you still have to blog about the first thing, and then it happens over and over again until you have ten things you want to write about and you haven't blogged in almost a month?

Yeah.  That. 

So...because I can't decide which of the major life events I want to leave out of my blog post, and because no one wants to read a brief autobiography disguised as a blog post, here is the last month of my life in bullet points:

1. I got back together with my (no longer) ex-girlfriend.  After the breakup, I don't think I went more than four or five days without seeing M*, and I definitely didn't go that long without talking to her.  I missed her.  We started out doing the "we're spending all our time together but not dating" thing over a month ago, and we declared ourselves dating again a few weeks ago, and so far it seems to be going well.  We're doing our best not to repeat some of the mistakes we've made in the past, and it definitely makes for a healthier relationship.  We shall see where this goes...
2. My grandmother died.  My grandmother was 94, slightly senile, and diabetic, and yet I was convinced that she would live forever.  A few weeks ago, I got the call that she had had a heart attack and been made palliative, so I headed out to her small community as prepared as one ever is to say goodbye.  When I arrived at the hospital, she was asleep in her bed, but she quickly roused and demanded to be taken home.  By the time we got her back to the PCH, she was back to her usual feisty self, showing no signs of what had happened.  Unfortunately, a week later she fell and broke her hip (for the third time), and that was the beginning of a very rapid end.  My grandmother was the most resilient of the resilient Depression era farm women, and so it's still amazing to me that she's gone.  I still have moments when I feel guilty for not visiting her, so I don't think it's quite sunk in yet.
3. I decided what to do with my budget.  The comments on my previous blog post were fascinating to me!  It's interesting how everyone has their own unique way of being financially responsible, many of which are different from my own.  In the end, I realized that my current method of budgeting is actually working pretty well for me, except for the fact that the amount of money I was allowing myself didn't fit with the amount of income I was bringing in.  So, I threw $500 at the budget to get myself out of the black, and I increased the regular amount in my budget by 1/3.  Since the change, I have bought Threadless t-shirts and Happy Socks, taken a thankfully not sick cat for a very expensive vet visit, and booked a luxurious spa day for the long weekend.  So I'm over budget again.  But enjoying spending some of my hard earned money instead of just hoarding it in the event of future catastrophe.
4. I started counselling.  I wrote before about how I had seen a psychiatrist through a service at work, but what I've never written about was how abysmal the whole experience was.  I went in looking for some coping strategies and maybe some cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety, but what I got was someone who wanted to put me on medication and explore all of the supposedly traumatic events from my childhood (um, no thanks).  It was a terrible match.  I put off looking for someone else until M and I got back together, and then I decided that I needed someone external to help me navigate the waters of rekindling an old relationship.  I've met with the counsellor once, and it seems like a better fit so far, so I'm hoping that something good will come out of it.
5. I started exercising again.  It has become abundantly obvious to me that everything is better when I exercise.  Not in a future oriented "I won't have a heart attack when I'm 50" kind of way, but in an "I'm less of a psycho hose beast when I exercise" kind of way.  Exercise is definitely good for my stress, my energy level, my sleep, and my all round happiness.  My goal for September, in fact, is to restart the habit of exercising three times a week.  It will likely consist of me running on the treadmill on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, as I have no clinics those mornings, and then doing something else on Saturdays or Sundays.  I may alternatively do an exercise class at work on Thursday afternoons, as there's one that starts after my work day ends.  This week I'm planning to go to yoga on Saturday morning, as my sciatic pain has flared up from the running**, but I may be more creative in the future.
6. I signed up for a meditation class.  This terrifies me.  I've been reading books about how wonderful meditation is (like 10% Happier and Full Catastrophe Living), and I'm fully convinced that it can make me a happier and more productive person, but I absolutely hate the idea of having to actually do it.  Sitting with nothing but my thoughts?  Breathing exercises?  Walking meditations?  All of that sounds terrible.  And yet, starting October 5 I will be doing it every Wednesday evening.  

And that is my life.  How is everyone else doing?

*I'm giving her an initial, because it's far too tedious to keep typing "the girlfriend" or "the ex-girlfriend" depending on my current relationship status.  Also my hands are sore from typing chart notes.

**When did I turn 80?

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.

In the Gloaming

Given the recent end of my long-term relationship, you probably won't be too surprised to hear that my emotional state has been a bit volatile as of late.  One moment I'm feeling excited by the freedom and possibility that being single brings; the next moment I'm overwhelmed by sadness at everything that has been lost.  While I have still managed to do all of the things that I need to, getting through the days hasn't always felt great.

Tonight though, things were momentarily really good.  I had to bring my bike home from my ex-girlfriend's parents' house, where I had stored it over the winter, and I just happened to do so right at dusk.  The temperature was warm enough to be comfortable but cool enough that I didn't break a sweat; the air was still; and the clear sky transformed from pale blue to pink to indigo as I rode the bike home.  My out of shape muscles enjoyed being challenged, and my constantly busy mind reveled in being able to shift down a few gears.  It was as close to perfect as life ever gets.

I have gotten through the past few weeks by constantly reminding myself that things will get better.  Tonight though, if only for a brief moment, things already were.