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felinejumpergiving myself lots of kudos for writing a lot this week!
I am very intensely proud of the amount of fucking feedback I have managed to take and incorporate this week, and also the amount of fucking writing. It's also, without a doubt, the most creative writing I've done...like...ever? And also, on the other hand, some of the most I-care-deeply-but-am-so-BORED.
I:
Two days ago (three?), finished the (lol technicallllyyyy important to my future) second grad app in an absolutely marathon working sprint, but...it was not bad, I think? It doesn't sear my brain to think about, and again, incorporated so much feedback and didn't even have a crisis about it!
please feel free to join in my continuing angst journey about my big queer breakup of this past six months, but also no pressure, this is just cathartic for me.
I am returning to my hometown tomorrow for the holidays; my former best friend (5 years!) and romantic fling (3 months!) is returning to the same approximate place on a flight that we were originally scheduled to be on together, after spending a month road tripping together. We did not, obviously, do either. I keep wondering if anyone else booked the seat next to them.
It feels exquisitely painful for the date and time and place to be the same, and for things to be so incredibly fucked up and painful. It's also a reminder of how different I expected my fall to be; I expected to spend a solid 75% of it moving and traveling and seeing things, and I did that, but I also literally -- I mean, I got broken up with two days before I left, so that was a pretty rapid freefall into a black pit of self-blame. I cannot express how surreal it is to show up in rural America and have a nice straight lady be like "so what's up?" and to be like "...the most intense queer relationship of my life was just ended after at least a month of emotional deception and on a broader level years, it turns out, of them being unable/unwilling to fully acknowledge my queerness....so....I'm super chill, I've got a boyfriend, don't worry about the haircut I am a Nice Straight Girl™"
There were so many days I wanted to email ████████ and be like "I went to a crazy Evangelicals meeting, you would have been so interested in their storytelling! They have a gay cheerleader nephew who works for J.Crew! I watched all of S2 of The Good Place and you were right, I loved it! I shot a skunk! I signed up for Yuletide and I'm nervous/excited/in love with fandom, you were right about that too! I accidentally found a Pride Parade in rural America and I wore that patch you gave me!" and instead I memorized parts of the T.S. Eliot poem ("I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant...")
And then it got a little bit better, less acute: I mean, I stopped crying twice a day and got it down to like...mostly not crying, actually, most of the time. I do remember sobbing on the phone to our mutual friend and saying "They don't want me to exist, so I guess I'll stop existing for them." Which: prescient of me, because a bit after that I got the brutal, brutal fucking email in October, the ending-the-friendship-one, the one that put me in a logical harm/not harm respond/don't-respond bind, the one that pared down to the simplest version is "You expressing an emotion is gaslighting me, and I'm going to act as if you don't have them ever."1
It's very weird to know how someone is processing and how they came to a particularly harsh and binary decisionbecause they can't handle complexity for shit and it makes me worried because you were their best friend for five years. Also, I'm still insulted that they had to specify we would no longer be fucking. Like. Bud. Don't worry. I got that.
And now we'll be back in the same city, and the end of the-trip-that-wasn't. And I still haven't responded to that email, and I am kind of wondering: if my metric is "respond when you no longer want to strangle them," then by the time I am ready to respond I just, obviously, won't care. And that feels...a little unfair to the relationship-that-was, to not say "I get why you did this, and I hope that it has made stuff better for you. I am not interested in a relationship where the explicit agreement is that I am a shadow of myself; if you ever want to engage with me as a full person again, I will try to leave the light on for you."
Anyway, I live in fear of seeing them, because I would inevitably cry and then beat myself up for 'gaslighting' again and question my entire self-hood and you know, I am just not interested in that this Christmas.
...anyway if you read all this, dw circle, welcome to my break-up party, where all the jokes are a little bitter and I'm obsessed with a set of emails! please hit me with all of your fic-and-media recs/jokes/playlists/that time someone acted as if they were your queer mentor and handled their assumption poorly.
1. The #1 first comment I get on that email or discussions has been "...Gaslighting is a pretty big accusation for something that you clearly didn't know was happening.*
* I'm having such an intense urge to qualify things because it's semi public but my qualification is: we both probably fucked up, but given that they violated my one single ask for the whole dating endeavour I feel ok saying they fucked up more.
2. Addn'l note: this is SO CLEARLY the SAME THING of their whole bit about "I am friends with my exes except when my exes are immature" and in fact, it is more "I will make unilateral decisions and then shake my head in disappointment when people defend themselves from those decisions in the future."
I am very intensely proud of the amount of fucking feedback I have managed to take and incorporate this week, and also the amount of fucking writing. It's also, without a doubt, the most creative writing I've done...like...ever? And also, on the other hand, some of the most I-care-deeply-but-am-so-BORED.
I:
- Finished my Yuletide fic! And uploaded it! On time, without panicking! And THEN I went onto the discord and got an actual proper beta reader! They were great and kind and gave me very good "does this hit emotional beats" feedback.
- this is additionally satisfying because their critiques were basically my critiques, which feels reassuring to my sense of self
- I then did spent half my day building out plausible back- and front- story to hit those beats better, i.e. figuring out the *actual* themes & ways to (maybe) foreground them
- this also means I am going to attempt some writerly things that I am not actually technically capable of yet but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ reaching hi!
- this is additionally satisfying because their critiques were basically my critiques, which feels reassuring to my sense of self
- feedback from person 1 was "let's reorganize this entire thing, I know it's due in 27 hours."
- person 2 made me rewrite the same sentence literrrallllyyyy five times about a specific philosophical term.
- person 3 is a fantastic (read: brutal) editor on all accounts and gave me like...four reads
please feel free to join in my continuing angst journey about my big queer breakup of this past six months, but also no pressure, this is just cathartic for me.
I am returning to my hometown tomorrow for the holidays; my former best friend (5 years!) and romantic fling (3 months!) is returning to the same approximate place on a flight that we were originally scheduled to be on together, after spending a month road tripping together. We did not, obviously, do either. I keep wondering if anyone else booked the seat next to them.
It feels exquisitely painful for the date and time and place to be the same, and for things to be so incredibly fucked up and painful. It's also a reminder of how different I expected my fall to be; I expected to spend a solid 75% of it moving and traveling and seeing things, and I did that, but I also literally -- I mean, I got broken up with two days before I left, so that was a pretty rapid freefall into a black pit of self-blame. I cannot express how surreal it is to show up in rural America and have a nice straight lady be like "so what's up?" and to be like "...the most intense queer relationship of my life was just ended after at least a month of emotional deception and on a broader level years, it turns out, of them being unable/unwilling to fully acknowledge my queerness....so....I'm super chill, I've got a boyfriend, don't worry about the haircut I am a Nice Straight Girl™"
There were so many days I wanted to email ████████ and be like "I went to a crazy Evangelicals meeting, you would have been so interested in their storytelling! They have a gay cheerleader nephew who works for J.Crew! I watched all of S2 of The Good Place and you were right, I loved it! I shot a skunk! I signed up for Yuletide and I'm nervous/excited/in love with fandom, you were right about that too! I accidentally found a Pride Parade in rural America and I wore that patch you gave me!" and instead I memorized parts of the T.S. Eliot poem ("I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant...")
And then it got a little bit better, less acute: I mean, I stopped crying twice a day and got it down to like...mostly not crying, actually, most of the time. I do remember sobbing on the phone to our mutual friend and saying "They don't want me to exist, so I guess I'll stop existing for them." Which: prescient of me, because a bit after that I got the brutal, brutal fucking email in October, the ending-the-friendship-one, the one that put me in a logical harm/not harm respond/don't-respond bind, the one that pared down to the simplest version is "You expressing an emotion is gaslighting me, and I'm going to act as if you don't have them ever."1
It's very weird to know how someone is processing and how they came to a particularly harsh and binary decision
And now we'll be back in the same city, and the end of the-trip-that-wasn't. And I still haven't responded to that email, and I am kind of wondering: if my metric is "respond when you no longer want to strangle them," then by the time I am ready to respond I just, obviously, won't care. And that feels...a little unfair to the relationship-that-was, to not say "I get why you did this, and I hope that it has made stuff better for you. I am not interested in a relationship where the explicit agreement is that I am a shadow of myself; if you ever want to engage with me as a full person again, I will try to leave the light on for you."
Anyway, I live in fear of seeing them, because I would inevitably cry and then beat myself up for 'gaslighting' again and question my entire self-hood and you know, I am just not interested in that this Christmas.
...anyway if you read all this, dw circle, welcome to my break-up party, where all the jokes are a little bitter and I'm obsessed with a set of emails! please hit me with all of your fic-and-media recs/jokes/playlists/that time someone acted as if they were your queer mentor and handled their assumption poorly.
1. The #1 first comment I get on that email or discussions has been "...Gaslighting is a pretty big accusation for something that you clearly didn't know was happening.*
* I'm having such an intense urge to qualify things because it's semi public but my qualification is: we both probably fucked up, but given that they violated my one single ask for the whole dating endeavour I feel ok saying they fucked up more.
2. Addn'l note: this is SO CLEARLY the SAME THING of their whole bit about "I am friends with my exes except when my exes are immature" and in fact, it is more "I will make unilateral decisions and then shake my head in disappointment when people defend themselves from those decisions in the future."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 06:40 am (UTC)Ugh much empathy on the whole sorting-out-the-breakup thing, though. That's rough. :-/
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 03:16 pm (UTC)Also, re: relationship shit -- that's a Feel, and I am sorry you're going through it. (the gaslighting bit is relatable and makes me want to strangle the person for you.)