Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-02-22 - 9:44 p.m.

Welcome to The Funhouse

Ever get yourself into a blind corner, where you know you SHOULD know which way to go, you've been there before, and you should be well-enough oriented to know the right turns and the wrong turns - but you just can't remember, and you get stuck?

I'm there tonight.

BF got a little overwhelmed by life a few weeks ago, an accumulation of personal stuff (not having anything to do with me, as far as I know) and got into a space I've become familiar with. He withdraws, starts blowing off plans and dates we have, starts communicating less and less. Becomes less accessible. He says one thing with his mouth - I miss you, I want to see you - and something different with his feet - I don't want to be around you, I want to be left alone.

Last year he did this big time, for months, complete with a bout of drinking and some very scary behavior. I took the wrong turn through the beginning of that - I chased him, feeling worried and hurt and desperate, wanting to help. Didn't help him a bit, and it sure as hell beat the crap out of me.

So now I try to detach, with love. This is his thing. It's his pattern, he runs it regularly; he's a depressive, for which I have some sympathy. He doesn't recognize it coming, he doesn't see it when he's in it, and he doesn't analyze it when it's over - but that's his choice. My choice, for my own health, is to disengage gently, to get on with my life and doing the things I want and need to do. He'll come around, or he won't; I don't control that - I don't even influence it.

I sound awfully healthy and balanced there, don't I? Yay me.

But.

I'm not as detached as I would like to be. Because now he's come back around, in the beginning of an upswing I suppose, as though nothing has happened; and of course, for him, it hasn't. He will have no recollection of the three times he didn't show up or acknowledge plans, no cognizance of the fact that we've been pretty completely out of touch for weeks, and no idea or interest in what I have been doing with myself during this time. Just not in his span of thinking.

And I think I'm pissed off.

He says, "Gee, I feel like I've done something wrong," and I say, "No, you haven't." Because that's what I want to believe in my head. That he does this thing and that he has no problem with it or desire to change it; that I have the choice to accept it or ride off into the sunset; that his behavior has been consistent in this for years. It's just the way he is; how could it then be wrong?

But I still have this feeling in my gut that says I'm not being bone honest with either one of us, because I AM hurt and I DON'T like being ignored without apology or warning and I DO wish he wouldn't do it.

Yet I also know - from experience - that if I tell him that, he WILL apologize - for things he felt no remorse for ten minutes ago - and tell me how awful and low he feels, and he will then whip himself until I intervene, wrestle the whip out of his hand, shove my forgiveness down his throat.

Well, we got to the not-so-healthy part real fast, didn't we?

Maybe the key is in the phrasing of the comment: "I feel like I've done something wrong."

No, you haven't done anything wrong. You haven't even done anything out of character. It's just that when you do this thing, this withdrawal and ignoring and forgetting, and then you come back in a few weeks as if nothing has happened, then I feel distant and pissy and overlooked, and I wonder if the benefits of our togetherness outweigh the hurt and anger I feel in these times.

That feels closer. But it isn't quite there either.

Because I can't get there yet - I don't even know if there is a there there - I am being quiet. That's not so great either, but for me right now it beats getting into the "Oh, I'm such a horrible person/ No you're not" duet.

But I have no internal quiet about it; I can argue endlessly with myself. And slam repeatedly into what looks like an opening, but is actually a pane of glass. Or a mirror.

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