lowering the drawbridge

“I want a big house with a moat and dragons and a fort to keep people out!”... Victoria Beckham

i was thinking yesterday about the last (and probably only real) relationship i had. i can't tell you how long it actually lasted. i think it was about 2 years, but i was rather young and it ended so badly, i have distorted many of the facts i think.

but since it's valentines day, i thought it probably apropos for me to revisit the place where i seemed to get stuck. i have gone round this before, but i hope it will somehow shake loose some ghosts and help me undo the glue that galoofs me.

it is my hope, more than i like to admit, that i move beyond this tundra i have occupied in my heart for all these decades and find some softer and sunnier shores. the living of my recovery has brought many treasures and triumphs that i both hoped for and had no idea would appear. this is perhaps one i am a bit in the middle on. i would love nothing more than to continue to be less afraid of others and have no real clue what that would actually feel like.

you know, when i was living with peter i felt a succession of feelings i never had felt before, there was a gamut of emotions, some fantastic, some folly, and i took them all in stride. i am sure i thought myself invincible and entitled (all the things that annoy me today). but when i caught him in a compromising position with someone else (in a car outside our apartment at 2am) i was completely ripped open. i felt suddenly inadequate and became angry.

and i think it was this anger that somehow flooded my heart and froze. i don't think i have stopped reliving that humiliating and too-vulnerable feelings that i felt immediately after that night. i remember being so angry that i broke a dish and wanted to hit him. and i remember feeling so frightened that i could feel emotions at that high a level. i believe that fear of my own emotion and anger may have shifted me onto a place that was surrounded by a moat.

and there i have stayed all these years. once in awhile a drawbridge does lower, but stay down it does not. it's true place has been to secure the walls and that is what it has just always done.

so, here's to 2009. i really feel differently about life. recovery (as well as therapy and lithium) is teaching me that i can work through feelings, that i can not handle life perfectly and be okay, and that it is the actual up and down activity of the ride that makes it memorable. more thaw.. more than i know...life on life's terms. happy valentine's day.

today's sound choice is a cover version of "first cut is the deepest" by duffy. hope you love it.