Parts

Today i got 2 emails from people connected to kevin. The first email was an email from the friend of mine who actually introduced us. Now, even though she is not really on kevin's side nor mine and she has taken neutral ground and doesnt discuss the break up with me for fear of getting to involved, every time i hear from her, kevin comes into mind. We had a short email exchange and it was a normal friendly one, but like i said there is always a reminder of kevin. The other email today i received from kevin's gay friend who just wanted to "check up on me". Once again this guy always has ulterior motives, so i never know what to expect from him. I replied with a casual one liner as if to just give a reply. I do not want to give him too many details as my previous encounter with him a few weeks ago involved him slandering my name on  facebook.

Anyway, these 2 emails totally threw me off as I was definitely having a bad week to begin with, and now, well this. It is truly not the content of these emails that threw me off, but more of the reminder of the life i lost and wish i still had. These things can really be like a blow to the stomach because they sort of suck you back to a moment when you were wounded and suffering. I do not feel as though I have healed those wounds as yet and a blow to the stomach just rips the stitches wide open again. 

I am hoping that this round, it is a little easier to cope with the pain and sort of move forward than before. I realize that I will always love kevin, but he will never love me. It is best for me to move on. So i just force myself to smile, to say im fine, to wake up and go do something productive everyday until one day it is no longer forcing. Until i can just do it without having to mentally will myself to do it. Until it is habit. Can I "habit" myself into forgetting somebody? Is that even possible?

Maybe life is a series of habits, like coping with your problems until the coping is just habitual. I don't even know what to think of that. However, it is sad to think that I am just forcing myself to be 'fine' with something that i am not 'fine' with truly in my heart. I feel it is a disservice to my natural self. As though I am betraying the hopeless romantic part of me. But, life is not always rainbows, sunshine and happy endings, life is always uncertain and full of ups and downs. I guess betraying one part of me is somewhat accepting another part of me. It is as if I'm finding survival in leaning on the part of me that is set in hard facts and reality, and letting go of the whimsical, faith part of me for the moment. It seems as though I am giving up piece of myself for the time being. I don't really feel like if i am whole without my whimsical side. But for now the only side that allows me to heal is using the hard facts reality side.
I hope that doing this doesn't lead me astray and too far away from my whimsical side, but rather will bring me back to it in time, and I can be whole again.

This cant be all!

Somehow I always tend to write a blog on the days that I feel crappy. I don't seem to write anything on days that seem to have gone by when I am ok. Maybe this is normal, or maybe it is a good sign that I do have some better days. I don't really know. Anyway, as you can tell from this blog beginning, today wasn't such a hot day. In fact it was a down right shitty day. It started out ok, with the exception of somehow waking up to the thoughts and hopes that I wanted to get back together with Kevin. Once again, I am in the throws of delusional thinking where my thoughts convince me that "if only he would take me back, things would be different and better".
Wong! Fucking Wrong!
The truth is that it would be a complete mess, and who wants to go back into something that would be ruined when there are options of starting afresh? Nobody with an ounce of sense wants that - but today I was the idiot with no sense who wanted it. Sigh!

There is always something to learn from relationships and the experiences that you have in life.... and the truth is that I cannot figure out for the life of me what I am learning from this. Aside from the fact that I am learning lots and lots of small things... example things from the country, from being with my sister and being around her family and being around her husband and being away from NZ and being on my own and being in new classes (I signed up for a couple classes for a month) and etc. However, I am still trying to figure out what I actually learnt from kevin dumping me. Yes, I know that the surface lessons are there, example I should have been more honest with him from the get go. But the truth is, I was always planning to hand over everything and bare it all to him, but he just dumped me before I could. I just cant help but feel as though that the pain I experienced through this ordeal should be matched by an equally riveting and enlightening lesson as the return. But yet, so far, my lessons are not "ground breaking" or "life changing" or "spiritually enlightening". So far the lessons have been good and offered me self discovery, but I don't think that they are worth the trauma and pain that I am going through to get to here. All of this just keeps sending me back to the thought that it was all just a waste of time. Even though people say these things are never a waste. I honestly feel that it was a big waste for me. I feel as though I gave up everything for this man, and only to be shut down and left for nothing, left for dead. And on top of that I never even got a proper chance to sort things out, to clean up the mess I made or even make things right. I just feel over all robbed. Robbed of the life I had built previously to meeting kevin, and robbed of the life I had while I was with kevin. I feel like I am just back to square one and being a poor student having to start life from scratch again. When I am totally no longer a student nor do I want to even be categorized at that level anymore. I am fucking 31 yrs old, and I need to get my life under control for fuck's sake.

Where is the lesson in this whole thing? I mean I could have learnt so many of the things I am learning now in a different way. Why did I have to learn all these things after having gone through such a horrific trauma? I feel like this whole ordeal could have been evaded if I never moved to NZ to be with kevin to begin with. If I had never even set foot in NZ... and if I had just not met him and lived my life as it was before I met him. I cant help but feel as though I could have easily learned all these lessons somehow and sometime, without the traumatic pain that I am in now.
Today I feel like total shit, like why am I even in this mess? seriously, this cannot be all that I am learning from this whole thing? It cannot jus be all these small lessons that I could have learnt via alternative means. There must be a bigger lesson amidst it all.

Something has to be worth all the pain and agony and heartache, it cant all be a waste. Can it?

Past, Future...... Present

After being around a bit, I am now back in Montreal and have enrolled in some French classes. I am taking the opportunity now to do something new, focused and different. I was hoping that this will help me get passed my desire to still be with kevin and also use this time when I am not working to grow in a way that I would not normally be able to while being stuck in the 8 to 5 working grind. The french classes are great, except most of the people I have met in these classes are all 18, 19 and 20 years old. It is difficult to have interesting conversations with these people beyond the surface stuff of movies and music. I remember being just like them while i was at University, but i know now that I am sort of beyond those years by about a decade. So admittedly, i still feel very lonely.
However, the classes have given me a chance to find a distraction in my life and also sort of experience some of the country at a different level. I have not truly done much while i have been here aside from the usual touristy sort of things, and I could be making better use of my time. However, somehow i just am not the hugely adventurous type and I do not often find the courage to venture out on my own.

The funny thing about my classes and everything is that I did this to help distract myself from my lost relationship and create new memories with fun times. However, for some reason, I have been missing kevin even more than usual. I try to convince myself that this is best to move on and forget. However, I find this very painful. I seem to not want to leg go of it all. I dont want to let go of kevin or the idea of my New Zealand life, or the relationship I had or the past life I was in. I feel as though it somehow makes me who I am and if I were to let go of it then I will no longer be somebody I want to be.
It is a complicated mind trick that I play on myself - Everyday I tell myself it is better to find a new life than go back to the past one. However, I still have this niggling feeling inside that tells me "Dont let go because it is who you are, you can go back to it".

I find it extremely uncomfortable that i cannot just move past this. Only because I imagine that it is so easy for kevin to just move on. He is probably enjoying a new girlfriend by now and planning a wedding and kids with somebody who is not me. I feel like an idiot most days telling myself one thing and believing something else. I feel like somewhat of a 'poser' in my own life. Pretending to be experiencing life and learning a new language and travelling around the country. When in reality I havent really done anything at all and all that goes on in my mind is "I feel so lost".

My sister told me today that she feels as though she wishes she had somebody to tell her what to do with her life. She said sometimes she feels lost. This actually shocked me out of my skin - Only because I have been so envious of her life these past few weeks and seeing her is what I want for me. I guess everybody feels kind of lost in their lives from time to time. Why do we always feel lost? Does anybody ever not feel this way?
It is difficult to figure out what life really means to us and what do we want from it. I think also it means so many different things to each person and it also changes from time to time. For me, today, all i want is my life back with kevin. I want to get married and have a family of my own. For my sister, today, she already has what I want, so her desires are different now. I guess this is all part of human nature, and we will always want more than what we have. Perhaps this is what makes us a progressive species - never being satisfied with what we have at the present moment is maybe what makes the modern humans so advanced in so many ways. But yet, with all these advancements, we still feel lost and dissatisfied with what we have.

I have read a couple self help books and most of them say to "appreciate the present moments" for it is what will truly satisfy you. "Let go of the past",  "stop worrying about the future",  "just live right now" are some of the most frequent cliched advice summaries about how to find happiness.

However, the questions I keep asking myself these days about myself are difficult for me to answer - How do I feel happy in the now? How do I forget about the past and future, and only focus on what is present. Maybe if I did that I would feel happier with myself and life. Maybe I will feel less lost. I dont know how to begin to do this, because for me, it is clear with my recent 'poser' behavior  - No matter how much I try to live in the present.... my past still haunts me.... and my future still scares me.

Perception on a train

I have not written in a while because I have not had consistent internet access these past few days. I have moved around a bit. I was in Montreal with my sister and now I have taken the train to Toronto to visit my brother. I will only stay with my brother for a few days, but it is good to get around a bit. This time of staying with different members of my family has given me great perspective on what i can learn from them and how they have changed over the years.
My journey to Toronto was simple, I took a train from the train station at Montreal, it was a 6 hour journey then arrived in the city. I then had to take a smaller go train to the suburbs of where my brother lives.

It was strange taking this journey. The train ride was pretty simple, i sat near the huge window and i watched all the trees go by. It is now turning into fall, so the fields are dotted with the first sign of turning red leaves. It was interesting to watch the landscape of this country, I heard somebody in the cabin say "It's beautiful" and I thought to myself. This was nothing like what I had grown accustomed to seeing in New Zealand. New Zealand landscape is spectacular to say the least. It made me miss the country that i had run from, and i felt pangs of guilt to have left it so abruptly without saying my proper goodbyes. In the carriage about 6 seats ahead were 2 sets of older couples. Americans! They talked the entire 6 hours so loudly that even i knew the details of their journey.  They boasted about how they "traveled the world" and that they have been "everywhere", but when you listened closely to their story, they never even left the North American continent and set foot on an airplane. Listening to these old people talk, I wondered about myself and felt a slight bit of irritation for their lack of insight into other countries in the real world. After the first hour, their voices began to get highly annoying rather than interesting and I blocked them out with my music.

Once I arrived in Toronto, I further took a small transit train to the suburbs where my brother lives. This go train was packed with people commuting to and from the city center. It was close to rush hour so there were many different working class people. This time the people I was surrounded by were men in suits, and women in heels. There were iphones, blackberrys and samsungs everywhere. There were scores of men with earpieces in their ears discussing some "very important work stuff". There were endless texting and time killing games on different smartphones. There were newspapers and kindles for those who preferred to read and the corridor of the train was littered with briefcases of all sizes. I observed the people around me. I could remember a time in my life when I would look at these pretty women in heels with their office jobs and power suits and think "i would like to be like that". However, that is in the distant past and this is not what i want for myself now.
There was a moment on that train where i looked around and I unintentionally said out loud "I just don't belong here". A guy heard me and looked across briefly and the returned to his messaging on his phone.
All i could really think of was that i don't belong in a country like this. I just don't. I am not those women in heels with power jobs and I don't want to be either. I want more from life than just commuting back and forth to work on a train with my smartphone as my company. I want something simpler and more meaningful. Yes i do want to still be up to date and own a smart phone and I do want to know about the latest gadgets and how to use them. But I don't want it the way these people have it.
This was when i genuinely missed New Zealand, i missed the kids and the farms and the open paddocks and sheep. I remember when i was with kevin thinking New Zealand was too much of a "farm country" for me and I wanted something more "city", but in this moment I realized that in my heart I really dont want the city. I miss the simple lifestyle of genuine outdoors appeal. I miss the ruggedness of the kiwi culture and the beauty of their country. I miss not only the farmlands but the honesty of the lifestyle.
It was the first time I thought to myself that I would like to return to New Zealand, but this time - not for kevin, but for me.

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.