This morning at work we had the usual Coffee Brigade, up to the Club Room once everyone in my office arrived, filling up on various styles of caffeine and sugar, and I see a friend from another department who recently has seemed... different.
So I said, What's up with you these days? Something is different about you. Lighter, clearer, I don't know what it is. A spring in your step, a twinkle in your eyes.
Turns out he has finally freed himself from an unsatisfying relationship. I think it was one of those things that you get drawn into and before you know it, you are deep in the mire of not only your own issues, but the sticky web of someone else's. It starts out great, then as time goes on you start to notice little things that just don't sit right with you, but you find some reason to rationalize them, excuses for why that person is like that, or why you are ok with that person acting like that.
Before you know it, you are feeling like you are betraying yourself daily, sometimes hourly. You make the break and think, great, I've done! but the break-up doesn't feel right either. It feels... too soon. Maybe you were wrong. Was it really that bad?
Then you're back in it again, with a new resolve: Now that I've left them once, I know I can do it, and I will just leave them again if I need to. And the rejoining is just like it was when you first met. Except it's different. You have the residue of the parting, the false empowerment of honoring your feelings and getting out of a bad scenario - added to that is the nagging guilt of returning to something that caused you to question yourself.
There comes another break, maybe another. And each time a little piece of you can't rejoin as fully as you did before, your heart simply isn't in it. Haven't we all had one of these?
When I first moved to Maui I had one of these. It was a relatively brief event, maybe 5 months, but it was agonizing. I remember sister saying to me on the phone: What are you DOING? This guy is a LOSER. Go to his house while he is at work, get all your stuff, and call me back when you have done that.
In the 2 weeks or so following My Big Decision, I remember feeling utterly paralyzed, lying on my little twin bed in the ohana I rented behind someone's house, it was June and sticky-hot, the air was utterly still and I was still trying to keep the huge cockroaches and centipedes confined to my bathroom area. It was futile.
All I was able to do was read The Power of Now over and over and over again, drag myself off my bed, grab my bikini and goggles, ride my bike across the highway to the Lahaina pool, and swim laps for an hour or two until I coasted home and flopped naked on my bed with my book.
There was some dim part of me that was registering this is not normal behavior and why are you acting this way and this can't be about him - he wasn't that great. I continued on in this fashion for many days, sleeping, reading, sweating, swimming, reading, sleeping, thinking, thinking, thinking and slowly, ever so slowly, starting to piece together the notion that what I was experiencing was more than just a break-up. It almost had nothing at all to do with him. This was all about me, I thought. You are ending a pattern of behavior that you have been in, in almost every relationship you have had, in varying degrees. And by reading that goddamn book over and over and over again, I stayed in that state long enough to actually process on a much deeper level, what it means to abandon yourself.
And then one day I got up. And left the house and went back to work and looked for a new place to live and a new job, found a yoga studio and continued on.
Getting back to my friend at work, he said it took him way too long to figure it out, but he is DONE! Well, congratulations, I told him. Welcome back. He was beaming.
I think we all have had a relationship that we are not proud of, and we each have felt that we maybe stayed in it a bit too long? So when I hear of people that are in that web, that can't seem to extricate themselves, intact, or at all, I understand. There is something about that experience that a lot of people seem to need to go through. Why? I'm not sure.
What I do know is that after those 5 months my highest priority was living true to myself, and if something didn't feel right, that was enough reason to walk, or perhaps run, away. No other reason or excuse was necessary. I don't believe that "things happen for a reason" but I do believe that we can find meaning in retrospect, when we see the sequence of events that plays out behind us.
There are some sticky webs out there, and some spooky spiders that cast them. And it is nice to be in a place where you can look back and have some appreciation for a painful event and in your life and the work you have done to honor your highest self.
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