Episode 65: Nostalgia 🥀

CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT!!! Hard conversations!!! DEAD RELATIONSHIP PURGATORY!!! SHOULD WE TRY THIS AGAIN?! Forgiveness. “JUST SAY THAT” Overthinking everything!!! If it weren’t for second chances we’d all be alone. RELATIONAL TRAUMA!!! YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS TO BE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP!!! The Help Wanted Cafe. The pottery studio. & The love. All the love. All the people that I loved that I’ll probably never see again. My heart scattered like ash across this whole little universe. & a lot of really great music.

Excerpt from the show:

Alright folks, well I took a break last week because….Well, for no real reason at all except life is strange and I didn’t feel like doing the show! And, well, it’s my show and I can do that. So we’re back. And the last few weeks have been nothing short of strange, to say the least.

In the midst of doubling down on all my practices, schlepping Uhaul's worth of stuff out of my basement, reorganizing my whole life, and basically just doing my best to show up, and be present with what is. I sat down to have a conversation with my most recent Ex. Because well they had some clothes that were in what I call, “dead relationship purgatory” and they had to come pick the clothes up from my office. So we sat down and had some tea. Now anyone who has ever been broken up with I’m pretty sure will tell you that there’s always some little part of them, no matter how hard the relationship was, that wishes their former partner would just say “I’m a complete idiot, I’m so in love with you, I made a mistake, I don’t want this, can we try again?” And folks. Sitting in my beautiful studio, drinking a cup of tea on one sunny summer day last week, that’s exactly what happened. And I had no idea what to do with it. Because it isn’t often that once something is broken we decide to try to put the pieces back together.

And there is another part of you that just wants to hate that person sitting across from you with every fiber of your being and there’s also a part of you that just stopped caring the moment they walked out your door.

And suddenly this person, you know the one whose pictures you deleted, and the one who you stopped talking to, stopped giving your energy to, is telling you they made a mistake. What then?

Now granted it is quite different if a lot of time has gone by, you’ve moved on, or you’re with someone else. Everything has changed. You have changed. But if only a month has gone by? Is it salvageable? Well, that depends on what happened and why it ended in the first place.

Now I will say one thing. Before we get into something like attachment styles and responsibilities and fears and confusion. And how on earth you fix something someone else broke. But before I go into that I’ll say this. There is something beautiful, something almost covetous, or holy about being the first person someone has ever really loved. In all their life, they had never truly known what love was until they met you. Sure they had slept with people, cared for people, been in relationship even… But love, a depth of complex feeling, an indescribable thing that drives us through the night into someone’s arms… If they have never felt that, then they have never known what it is to lose that. They have never understood the rarity, the gravity of it. And they have also never gone through the fear, uncertainty, and confusion that love can be.

I have always said, about my first love, that they taught me how to love myself. They showed me that the little beautiful things I did had meaning. They taught me I was worthy, not just because of them, but for myself. They loved me into loving myself. I saw myself through their eyes and I was a better woman for having known them.

But there was also immeasurable terror. The idea that I would have to live my life without them someday, that we were simply that, temporary, young, naive.

But I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have waited all my life, into my adulthood, have written off love as something that was exaggerated in movies and fairytales, to realize that it was everything I had been told but never felt, only so much harder. With so much more work and communication involved.

And what happens when you put two overthinkers into a relationship together, they overthink and overcomplicate everything! Most of the time. I should say. But especially if most of the beginning of that relationship is spent halfway across the country from each other.

I really do believe that couplehood is about doing things together. Not about talking about doing things together. Like, how do we cook together? How do we grocery shop together? Is going thrift shopping fun? Does it feel good when we’re sitting together with family and friends. Does it feel good to have them next to me? In some of the best couples, I have ever seen or been in, we spent less time talking and more time in non-verbal communication with each other than anything else. “I folded your laundry,” meant, “I love you.” “I did the dishes,” meant I love you. Holding your hand under the table at a family dinner meant, “I got you, we got this.”

So when we spend so much time analyzing what the relationship should be, or could be, or how we are relating to each other, we forget what it’s like to just hold that other person. To close the gap between our bodies and just be present with each other.

And something that I have noticed is that sometimes (and I will only speak for myself here) things come up when we are in relation to another person that would never have even been an issue or come into our consciousness alone. When I am alone, mostly my mind is quiet, and peaceful. I am doing more than I am thinking. I am cleaning the kitchen or writing an email, I am sitting and listening to a client. I am doing, and getting out of my own way.

But in relationship, sometimes the parts of us that have relational trauma that has not been resolved start to manifest. “Are they criticizing me? Why did I just say that when I didn’t mean to? Why am I taking on this other person’s pain suddenly and not holding my own energy boundary? Why am I suddenly behaving like a codependent idiot!” And most of the time this is a two-way street, both people are equal participants in this dynamic. But how do we get out of it?

Well apparently, first we sit down and have a business meeting about our relationship…. We air out all the dirty laundry, all the things that have built up, and try to strategize about what to do when one or both of us gets stuck in a rabbit hole or a trap.

And I have to say, one of the most profound insights that came from this has been that everything has a tendency to be over complicated! And both of us just kept saying, “well I don’t know how to say, x y z without worrying you will take it like criticism, or the wrong way, or I’m just worried that it’s not the right way to say it.” And the answer always seems to be “just say that.”

Just say that. Say what you mean. We get into a lot of trouble when we try to meander around a point. We end up tripping ourselves up, and getting lost, and eventually not saying what we actually intended to say. So the answer always seems to be one of 3 things. Take a few deep breaths, or even a minute of space and then come back to the conversation or issue (Step 1). “Just say that” hey could you slow down I’m feeling overwhelmed, hey could we pick this up later I don’t have the capacity right now, I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the future “just say that.” (Step 2) And reestablish consenting physical contact, “can I hold your hand?” Can we take a break and hold each other? You feel far away, can I give you a hug? (Step 3) and those things don’t have to happen in any particular order. But most of the time, one of them at least, will cut through to the truth. The reality underneath our fear. Which, if you are with the right person, should be the love shared between the two of you.

But, if the damage is done, is it enough? That’s the question, really. Can we learn how to change the way we show up, to let someone in enough to be vulnerable enough to say what we mean and to hold each other through it? Well, I guess we will find out after this brief musical interlude because that’s just about enough of me talking for the next century. And so, because today for the first time here in the Berkshires it felt like fall, the crisp air, the way the sun meandered down a little earlier, the quiet streets in the evening, and the nostalgia creeping in around the edges. Fall to me is every love lost, every love found, and a whole lot of memories. That smell like change and apple pie. And I know there will be more warm days ahead. But today it feels like fall, and that’s the last line of a poem I wrote a long time ago. For someone I once loved with all my heart. And it ended with “but I won’t tell you these things, because I do not fall to my knees and beg, and you don’t care to hear them.” And sometimes, no matter how broken everything feels, sometimes the best thing we can do is listen. So here’s to change. The only thing that we can ever count on. And maybe to redemption. If my heart has anything left.

Here’s “Good Times” by Calder Allen

Followed by “What Would I Do Without You,” by Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors.