2 months exactly

Today marks 2 months exactly since kevin dumped me. I have been feeling rather crappy the last few days and i know it is because i still have not accepted the fact that my relationship is completely over. I still have trouble facing the reality that kevin is not like me, and that he doesn't view situations like me and as much as i want him, he just doesn't want me. This is such a hard pill to swallow, and there are times when i can feel it might be going down and others where i can feel it lodged in my throat just stuck for good.

Anyway, all of these emotions coupled with the deteriorating weather have made me feel somewhat moody towards the negative. I haven't really done much with my life these past few days and have been searching for something to truly connect with. All my activities and my conversations have become excruciatingly mundane and lacking interest. I listen to my sister talk about the house and how she needs to change this and that, I call my other sister and she talks about how busy she is with her kids' school, I call my brother and he talks about how his job is depressing, I call my best friend and he talks about how he is tired of the rat race. Overall i cannot find anybody right now who will have meaningful conversation with me beyond the 'what is' in their world. It all seems so inconsequential at this point to me....so dull and so meaningless.... and i somewhat feel a little disheartened that i cannot connect with anybody that I truly hold dear to me within my personal circle of support.

I know it is all as a result of how i view myself at present and how i view the world right now through the eyes of shattered emotions seeking some value to it all. I don't blame my family or friends for their present preoccupations in life, and i also shouldn't rely on anybody but myself to sustain my interests. However, it does make me feel lonely within the world. I find myself retreating back into my own mind and not choosing to let anybody in or seek anybody out.

How i feel now, reminds me of how i felt when my father died years ago. I went through a tough time after his death, thinking "why is everybody so superficial?". I went through a period where i would have violent fantasies and dreams - fantasies of crashing my car into walls just to see how it felt, or hitting someone across the head with a bat to crush a mans skull just to see how it felt, or getting so high on drugs that i would overdose just to see how it felt. It was almost as if the regular life was not enough to quench my desire to feel something. It was like I was so numb that I needed an extreme to truly experience a sensation.

I never fulfilled any of my violent fantasies though, mostly because my rational mind has a strong presence of logic that keeps me safe and sane. However, that time changed me in my life, and temporarily no matter where i looked, i could find nobody to relate to aside from my siblings who felt the same about their peers. Eventually over time, those fantasies faded and i began to find more things in common with my friends, and i reverted somewhat back to 'myself', or should i say a slightly different version of myself.

The truth is, presently i feel similar. I dont have such violent a fantasies as I did then, but i feel almost as though I need to take situations to an extreme in order to feel anything significant. Once again I also feel like i cannot find anybody to relate to and this time not even my siblings. I cannot find the connection with anybody who really can satisfy my desire of stimulating exchange. I am constantly online or reading books for something that will mean something to me.

I feel like doing drastic things that are somewhat harmful to myself - not like killing myself - but something that will give me an extreme experience, because I believe the extreme experience is the only type of sensation that I can actually feel. Everything else seems very dull and numb. I feel like taking dangerous risks, but I know I wont actually do anything dangerous because it is not really my personality and once again my rational mind plays the logic on my shoulder. I also know this is a phase that will pass and in time i will once again be just like everybody else wound up in the 'what is' of my world.

The funny thing is, I have gone through this feeling in the past with the death of my father, and I did learn so much about myself then, but i also was not aware of what was happening to me. This time, i guess because i am older, with all my feelings, i can recognize and identify the stages. Maybe this puts me at an advantage somewhat, because now I am equipped with the tools of experience.
I know that the process i am going through presently will inevitably bring to me some growth in self and will take me to another level of understanding myself without much effort. It is just the nature of the process.
However, is it possible to take advantage of this time and force myself to grow more than i normally would?

Perhaps in this case, having gone through it before, I can abuse this as a opportunity to learn something more and more and more, rather than just allowing it to pass as a phase and take what I get.
I want to be better than I was but not just on a minuscule level, but more on a macro level. I dont just want to grow a little.... i want to grow a lot!
I want to be a better person. However, when I say better, I dont just mean better on the level of the 'what is'-ness of the world, but better on a deeper level. A deep level that hinges on quality of experience and quality of meaning.
Can I really force or teach myself to grow more in this stage and become better? if so, how?

Who knows if I will ever reach this stage of where I want to be. I have no idea where this all leads or if I will ever achieve my desires, but I guess, I can only hope for improvement on some level. With this hope, it is the only way I can believe my present state of disconnection will be be the birth of something new....

An Atrophy of Being

I have been avoiding posting a blog because i wanted to have something substantial to write. However, my delay in writing brought no revelation or any story that i could tell. In fact, the past few days have been horrible, almost as if the breakup were yesterday. The insomnia, the dreams, the anxiety - all were back again in my mind. I felt almost like i made no progress at all. Being here in Canada is hard for me, I am extremely grateful to have my family close by, but at the same time i have no friends and true alliances that would take me out to drink and distract myself with some good old crazy fun. Most of my time is spent in isolation, reading, writing and just over all searching for answers to life's mysteries.

These past 3 weeks, i have been getting advice on the numerous trials and tribulations of marriage and kids. Both my sister and her husband have discussed with me the lows and highs of marriage. They have been married for over 10 years now and been together several years before that, so they do have some mileage and experience under their belts. I have to admit though, none of their talks have made me feel any better about losing kevin. They both have told me that marriage is difficult, and with the wrong person it could be detrimental. This is usually followed up by the assumption that perhaps kevin was the wrong person for me. However, i just dont believe that. Maybe i should change my beliefs and change my mindset to "kevin is wrong for me" rather than the opposite. It all is just so difficult to work through in my mind when my heart truly doesn't believe what my mind says.

I had a discussion with my sister today about marriage and kids. I said naively "If I'm not to be with kevin, maybe i should just forget about the man altogether and go to the sperm bank to have my kids". I later on then told my brother in law my desire for cutting out the man completely from my life. I think this must have jarred him a bit because he later came to me with his thoughts on the subject.

Now Roger (my brother in law) is a very worldly man, and he waited until very late to get married to my sister. He is now in his mid 50s and is more than 12 years older than my sister, they have two young kids 9 and 6 years old. So Roger has been around the block more than a few times, and experienced full the joys of bachelorhood. He came to me in his very open minded sort of gentle approach and he spoke about the ups and downs of marriage and kids. He understood the joys of being a one man show, and he understood the joys of being a family man. In summary he said, the trouble of marriage and kids is worth the joys it brings and he would never go back to being solo. He must have been really worried that I would completely never seek out man to get married because of my expression of hopelessness at present, so he may have felt he needed to offer some advice on the matter.

The truth is, as much as I have these feelings of hopelessness, i truly do want to get married and have children with a man I love genuinely. I do want the whole marriage and kids and stress and shit that goes along with it. I do want it, I want all of it. So i didnt need much convincing. I had these hopes to be with kevin, but i have to change my mindset a little now as much as it pains me to do so.

There was one thing that Roger mentioned that did resonate with me. He mentioned that these pains, and hurts, and stresses, and despairs, and traumas that we encounter along the way is what allows us to truly grow in our being. He said we need the pains that we face through the relationships that we build and the relationships that we lose in life because it is what makes us grow. Without them there will be an "atrophy of being".

An atrophy of being is a great way to describe it. I don't think i can put it any more eloquently myself. As the days go by, and my pain gets less and more at the same time. As my emotions go up and down at the same time. As my heart breaks and beats at the same time -  I can only hope that this is a way to exercise my being, to keep it from failing and completely stagnating into atrophy.

Missing

The photoshoot managed to go off very well. I got through the day without crying and I also managed to smile a few times. However, every minute of the day the knife in my heart was twisted with every interaction I had with Roger. By the end of the day I was exhausted, not from the work of the day, but from the emotional turmoil. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed as I went to sleep. How did I get myself into this mess?

I had dreams of Kevin all night and I woke up feeling once again like the breakup was fresh in my mind. One step forward five steps back I think to myself. Will this ever end?

I managed to get through most of today without crying, but every minute was a challenge. I went to a street fair and drum festival for a while because it was a beautiful sunny day. Whereas normally I would have enjoyed all of that, my mood was not one of open acceptance, and everything I saw, I couldnt let it in, I wanted to share it with kevin. I had moments where i fell asleep today, and not even these were relaxing, but more torturous than anything really.

In the dreams i have of him now, i go visit him and we are broken up, but in the dreams i manage to kiss him and ask him if we could get another chance. In the dreams he says no, but we still kiss and i usually wake up around that time.

It is clear that I am lonely, that i crave the attention of a man. I wonder if finding a new man will help me. Probably not, a new man will only create more problems for me because I am emotionally wounded. To be honest, the thought of a new man makes me want to vomit. But I am so lonely that I just want the attention and affection of a man in my life. I miss the kissing, the touching, the closeness and making love with kevin. I just miss it like there is a void in my heart and in my life. The truth is, how i look now, no man will even look at me, far less be attracted to me. I look pathetic, weak, anorexic, unhealthy and desperate. So there is no chance of finding a man even on a temporary basis to numb the pain even if i was willing to take that route.
I am sure it is the opposite for kevin. That he has found countless women to fill his time and stroke his cock. That is how easy it is for men.

I lie in bed right now, feeling like i dont know what comes next. Feeling rather hopeless and doomed. Feeling like I will never get past this stage of my life. Feeling like i will always be less than what I was.
Not only do I miss him, but I miss my life, I miss myself and I miss it all.