This posting is written by me for me. Its what's my conscious thoughts became after I put my pen to paper this morning on the flight from Phoenix to Sioux Falls. It was somehow satisfying to get this out. Thinking and typing these thoughts are 50 Shades of Therapy for me.
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I read(present tense) a book titled, How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Harold H. Bloomfield, Melba Colgrove and Peter McWilliams. I say, 'I read it', because I pick the paperback book up, read some, put it down sometimes for days, then pick it up again to read pages I've already covered. So to state that I 'am reading' this book as if it were a novel is to lessen the impact that it has on me and my emotional health as I read and take away the thoughts of the writers/poet of its pages.
This book is just so me. It is my random thoughts and fears and hopes and resignation on each page and in the verses and paragraphs the authors contributed. This book is more than a reference or a text or a bible. It is inspiring, yes, and it helps direct my thoughts on a path that I can envision.
DM used to have a saying, "10 miles of bad road." He'd say 'so and so did their 10 miles of bad road and came out alright(or not) in the end." I told DM once after he'd left me for Ex and lied about his whereabouts then returned when I discovered the truth, declaring his heartfelt LOVE for me that I surely must have must have endured my own "10 miles of bad road" by now and that I'd finally reached the paved road again. Later, after rejecting me yet again, I tried to explain how this felt to me by saying to him, "You threw me onto 10 miles of bad road. I did it. But you keep adding another two miles of bad road then I round a corner and I see there are MILES of road ahead and all of it bad!" To which he gave me his sad, watery-eyed look and said, "I'm sorry." And moved back to Ex's house 'just to see if it would work out this time' after the 40 years before had failed.
So yeah, I read and re-read. I am reading and absorbing the meaning of the words in my book. There are so many appropriate topics in the chapters to take into my situation that I would tell you, dear reader, to go out and get the book yourself to understand what I'm referring to. Here is one excerpt of thousands that are profound in my thinking:
Our love affair has crash landed
I am trapped in the rubble of gossamer wings
The Wright Brothers would have been proud of our flight,
but we live in an age of moon landings and space shuttles
It was pitifully low and painfully brief
Endings make the circumstances of the beginning regrettable.
I recall so many times when I became so frustrated at the circumstances DM put me into. I asked him, "Why did you have to pick ME?" I told him he should never have called me to go out to lunch. He had no business trying to go out with any woman, let alone a recovering widow. I tried to make him understand how much of a victim I felt., But he cannot think that way because of the childhood trauma and now the embedded co-dependency he exists within. Empathy is a vocabulary word to DM, not an actual feeling he can experience.
Since I feel I had the last word to DM and Ex last week after the now 7 weeks of last words to him, I've been more intensely miserable than I've been in in a long time. This breakup has to be one of the longest I've ever heard of. So many times I have been close to texting or calling him again, I manage time after time to snuff out the urge. I craft letters to him in my mind. I rehearse one-sided conversations to him in effort to clarify how this makes me feel and and if he would just come back, stay for good, life would be wonderful again.
But I don't do do it- not this moment, not this hour, not this day.
I read my Yogi teabag tags. I read How to Survive the Loss of a Love. I read the never ending emails I get from psychologists who do help me to understand adversity and self esteem and relationship issues. And of course, I read horoscopes on the days I get the newspaper.
One can scoff at horoscopes and fortunes, but I look at them as tiny messages to me that I can ignore or not. Some wind up being true 'Aha' messages, while others make you think, 'That's a load of BS!" Right now, I'm writing this longhand on the plane having just read the Sunday paper where my eyes fell onto my horoscope.
Today's was tailor-made for me to read. I am a Taurus born on May 20 which is the cusp for Gemini, so I read that horoscope also. Never before have the two seemed to mesh so well with my present state of mind as I travel to see family and friends:
Taurus: The thing you are considering a loss may actually be a benefit. Challenge yourself to look at it differently. Conundrum: Everything you lose makes you freer!
Gemini: If your day were a song, it would be an all too familiar chorus of your discontent. Forget the melody. That tune is tired and loved ones will thank you for not playing it any more
I tore the horoscope from the paper and it is a new, ragged bookmark in my little book.
Read, read and re-read, Marsha
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