[Warning: This may get intense, folks. Also may seem like it's rambling. No need for
alarm.]
I like coming to these realizations, like uncovering
shiny things in the sand at the beach.
For a long time, I regarded patience and tolerance as the
same thing. I am very open-minded as far as what humans do with themselves,
each other and what makes them feel good.
(Looking only at the positive aspects of said “good times”, of course.)
What I have realized lately is that I have to work on
patience, with those around me. Whether I am friends with them or not, I tend
to have very little patience with them when or if they are slow to act, or do
something they know is destructive, and come to their own conclusion that what
they’re doing isn’t good for them. My stock response is usually something along
the lines of, “Ok. So… stop it. Hurry up and get over it already. Fix it.”
I keep forgetting that getting to the place I have,
myself, has taken a long time and a lot of work from the time I had the same
realizations. If anyone had said to me what I say to people, I wouldn’t be very
open to advice from them anymore.
At the beginning, I was a very sullen, grumpy asshole. I
knew what I had to change, but saying what you want to change and actually
committing to completing that change are two very different things. For one
thing, it’s really easy to tell people things you’re doing. If you’re not
changing and are just telling people those things in order for them to look at
you as if you’re succeeding, it eats away at you. It destroys your own
self-confidence in ACTUALLY succeeding.
I did that for years.
YEARS.
I knew what people wanted to hear, what words to tell
them that would make them look at me in admiration for the success I was
getting, but I WASN’T SUCCEEDING IN ANYTHING., except for lying to people, and
to myself. That had to stop. It stopped in 2009.
May 22, 2009.
Dramatic Type Story that Occurred in My Life.
A girl I had been talking to online through a mutual
friend, (let’s call her B) while talking on MSN, informed me that the reason my
boyfriend (G) wasn’t at my house yet (I had been waiting for him to come over,
as he said on the phone he was heading out to “get some”) was because he was on
his way to HER house. I hadn’t even been aware that they knew each other. I can
only describe what happened next as some
sort of breakdown.
I know there was rage, crying, despair, and no small
amount of hatred towards this ‘friend’. I actually felt like dying, and drank a
large amount of liquid codeine I had been taking for a tooth abscess. If you’ve
ever had too much codeine in your system you know exactly what happened to me.
Felt sketchy, like my whole body was made out of twitching TV clips, I was itchy ALL OVER and
there was something wrong with my hands. All I had wanted to do was go to sleep
and not wake up.
I got really scared and called the Crisis Outreach and
Support Team (COAST) and told them the whole story. Why I had done it, and what
was happening, and that I really wanted help. The woman on the phone was very
good at her job, kept me from doing anything worse, and told me that I wasn’t
alone, that there were people to help me. She was sending some people out the
next day to talk to me, and I ended up going upstairs to hang out with my
sister and her boyfriend.
I found a note from them saying they were out til late to
see the late movie at the theatre, and because I was all stressed out, I called
the only person I could: my best friend at the time, Lance. We hadn’t spoken in
about 8 months, for other drama-reasons (his girlfriend was a crazy person who
hated me, more on that some other time). I called him, he answered his phone,
and I said, “It’s Shy. I need you.”
His response: “I’ll pick a fight with her and see you in
10.” That’s friendship right there folks.
Lance showed up 10 minutes later, took one look at me and
said, “Let’s go for a drive.” It was about 10pm, and we ended up driving around
for 2 hours, listening to music that just seemed to break apart all the chaos
I’d been living with for the last 4 years. I cried, and cried, and there was
blubbering and snot and all the unattractive things that accompany epiphanies:
puffy, red eyes, swollen nose, throat-clearing snot noises. Aww yea, I was
sexy.
Anyway, the night ended with us vowing not to allow SOs
to keep us from being friends anymore, and that I was done with G forever. So
many signs and portents and all the symbolism and realizations that smack you
in the face when you finally allow the scum of your relationship to leak out
and the wound to heal.
The day after, I was online, and happened to start
chatting with a buddy on World of
Warcraft. I’d met him due to the fact that he was a skilled player who also
didn’t take the game so seriously that he wasn’t above making people rage, for fun. He
had a unique way of doing it. He’d talk about himself in the third person. I
found this hilarious (after I also stopped taking the game so seriously), and we
chatted randomly at vague intervals.
He said that day that if I needed someone to talk to, he’d
be there, so we did. The conclusions I came to, after our chat, was basically
that G was selfish, and an asshole, and he’d kept me caged inside my own
insecurities for too long. I was encouraged to go outdoors, be a person, be
MYSELF, and have fun: rollerblade, Parkour, dance, sing. I did just that. I
went rollerblading. (You may remember this scenario from a previous blog.)
I stayed with G (and B thrown into the mix) for 2 weeks
after that. It was the wrong way to go about a polyamorous relationship
situation, I know, but hey, it was there, and I was still stubbornly sticking
to what I knew: him. I’d hoped he could change, since there was such a
fundamental change in myself. I was wrong. New girlfriend meant new opportunity
to impress, and he spent every cent, and every waking moment, on her.
After my birthday weekend turned into a great big floppy
donkey, I called my sister to come get me in Toronto, and stormed off. I didn’t
speak to him before I left, except to say, “She’ll spend all your money and
cause you grief.” I was right; she did.
But back to me! It happened like this: At those times you
think you can’t get through, because of the severity of the chaos surrounding
you, once you’re past it, the WHOLE WORLD is bright and shining with promise! I
felt like a 500lb weight had been lifted off my soul, and the world was new, to
do with as I saw fit!
Once I got past the chaos of being held down in my
depression and insecurity, once I realized that I DO deserve to be happy, sexy,
and well-liked, I worked hard to change myself. I met a guy through my
research of Parkour who seemed pretty cool, so I went to meet him that night.
This was the person who would (within a week) bring me to Sault Ste Marie. We
hit it off, there were sparks, there were promises, and there was romance, and
connections and… This person started life as a female. So? Who cares what the
plumbing is when feelings this strong are involved?
I know now that my life was opened up to change once I
accepted that it needed to.
I believe I was lead to Sault Ste Marie, to start my life
fresh; to leave behind me, the doubts and insecurities that created the
basement-dwelling near-soulless creature, living in blindness, that I had been.
Once I kicked myself in the ass and started to change, it
became easy to ignore and forget the long, long journey it took me to get to
where I am now. Now, I seem to have no patience, and without having gone back through
time, to remember the things I did in the past, I don’t think I’d have been
able to say that I CAN change that about myself.
There are people around me now, that remind me of who I’ve
been. Unfortunately, up until now, those people have gotten the blunt end of my
patience, and for that I apologize.
I promise, I will have more patience and compassion for
what you are going through, than I did in the past. I hope you can forgive my
brush-offs of your pain, my impatience at your suffering, and my insensitivity
at your struggle.
I will be a more caring person, more understanding of
what you must be going through, and hopefully, be the person to you that I had
from Jason, my best friend. He has a bottomless well of patience, that man, and
kept me sane through my own struggles this past 2 years.
I know you can get through your chaos, because I got
through mine. Let’s help you become who you should be, together
Yay Life!
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