Willingness.

Present.

Since the time for the predictions is rolling around, and I haven't seen hide nor hair of Chi, this is the time I'm starting to get worried. To the point of upset, to the point of obsessed.

And that isn't okay. Obsession is painful. Obsession obscures everything else that might have been good in my life. Obsession increases the chance of doing something DUMB. Obsession means I won't be happy with anything other than the outcome I wanted. And that outcome, as far as my eyes can see, isn't happening.

Astrology. What a double-edged sword. What I've discovered helped me feel better, in that I saw that stepping into this in the first place did something beneficial in this person's life--at least in terms of showing him that what he was dealing with wasn't normal and that he could actually have a relationship in which he was treated differently. I once had an hour-long panic attack because of my ethical qualms in doing this. AND I have seen, thanks to last October, that I don't have to hate myself for what is normally a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to do. He needed it. It was beneficial for him...although it did usher in a period of, um, change in their relationship. In that sense, being able to read charts has been helpful.

BUT...unfortunately for me, I could also see the best possible outcome of our relationship. And it was one that I would have been very happy with. This has been unfortunate for me, because now I want that and I'm anxious about it.

I keep going around and around about this. Right about now, Rory has some pretty big transits showing she's being borderline abusive to Chi again. (Nothing she hasn't done before, sad to say.) And this was to be the occasion of her entire next year, which I took a look at this week and found...shocking.

She has exactly one out of twenty-four transits that talks about happiness in her intimate relationship. ONE. A couple more talk about being of retirement age, and about happiness in things she's doing in the outside world. The rest, and I mean ALL the rest, are talking about great unhappiness in her intimate relationship, the fault mainly of Rory herself, and fully twelve out of twenty-four transits and progressions talk about somebody in the relationship having an affair. (Three guesses who that is.)

Correspondingly, only three of twenty-two transits and progressions he has speak of any kind of peace in his intimate relationship. ALL of the rest describe great unhappiness, and five specifically point to an affair starting.

Of mine, half are talking about being the third party in an affair, cautioning me to watch my behavior and stay out of power and control. In the other half, I'm all alone, and half of those, I'm sinking into ennui and despair about it. The other half of the alone ones show me finding a creative purpose for my life and being content with just that.

That last is, well, a happy enough ending, I guess. Things, as you can see, could be a hell of a lot worse.

But, thanks to astrology, I have our Davison, which shows me that the happiest of endings here was indeed possible (once possible?) and of course when you meet someone you are that compatible with and love this much, you want that ending. (At least, I do.)

This is the bad side of being able to read for yourself. Now I sit here and point at that happiest of endings, and go, "But how do I get there?"

Here is where I start to second-guess myself. What if I had said yes last October?? Well, if I had, I would have virtually guaranteed the affair starting right around now, because we would have been speaking regularly and in contact.

But I said no. I had the chance to say yes, and I said no. 

Does that mean I can never be with this person now, because I heard from him again and I said no?? Was that my only window, and now it's over and that's the end, because I could have said yes then and I didn't??

In that case, am I sorry I said no?

Yes, because I love and want this person and that may have been it, my last chance!

But...wait a minute...

WHY did I say no?

I said no because I saw in the astrology, and I knew from the past, that if he had me to complain to and fantasize about, he wouldn't W-O-R-K ON HIS CODEPENDENCY. He wouldn't engage with his problems. He'd simply use me as an escape and as a complaining outlet, and he wouldn't get better. Clearly, that would not be the best outcome for him, so I bit the bullet and did what I knew was right. I did what I knew would be best for him.

Besides, I knew that there would only be one reason I would have said yes to that. Because I saw that he was sniffing around again, and I was trying to tempt him away from Rory once again. In other words, an unhealthy exercise of power and control, which I am expressly advised NOT to do, and which I completely see the wisdom of. 

These two VERY good reasons were why I said no last October. AND ALSO...

Looking ahead to this year, I could see that I stood an excellent chance of getting him back again no matter what I did, so I bet big. I placed a BIG bet that if I did the right thing, I would get him back anyway...which made doing the right thing a whole lot easier. If I really believed then that if I did the right thing, I'd lose him forever...I'm not so sure I could have done the right thing.

So now I've done the right thing...and I'm doomed to lose him forever no matter HOW shitty Rory acts from here on in??

Wow. Life IS unfair.

(Again.)

So now I find myself in a tailspin. When was I supposed to see this person again, anyhow?? The last time was pretty easy to extrapolate. The markers I used last time were clearly obvious to me. I'm trying to pin down how my teachers did it, and I'm afraid I'm just not good enough to be able to pin anything down to any specific month. Some of the same kinds of things are active again, but that's over a period of time and I don't know how to pin anything down any better. All I know is, if it's March 1st and he's still gone, he's probably gone forever at that point.

And I keep doing this to myself and it's miserable. Why do I want someone who puts me through this???

I had to think long and hard about that. 

One answer, and this one I know. (Besides that, it's also clearly spelled out in the astrology.) And that is, I DO NOT HAVE CONTROL.

I've been over this before. I. HAVE. NO. CONTROL. OVER. THE. OUTCOME. OF. THIS. SITUATION.

Just like I have no control over what my mother did and whether she got well and ever treated me better or not, I have no control over Chi and whether he will ever get well and treat me better or not. As with all problematic love relationships, this one mimics, absolutely perfectly, the old childhood struggle to get my mother to act better and treat me, a tender, vulnerable young child, the way I needed and deserved for her to treat me.

(So does Chi's with Rory and Rory's with Chi, come to think of it. That's why we're in the triangle to begin with.)

I have one and only one legitimate area of control: If the relationship shows up again, look to see if it appears healthy or not. If not, say no. (That's what I did last October.)

Last year I accepted that. This year, I have to bring myself back to the fence and accept it all over again. Because I lived a childhood that taught not only that it was GOOD for me to try to control other people's decisions to heal or not heal, but that I COULD control other people's decisions to heal or not heal.

And I can't.

The only person who can decide to heal is Chi. And if Rory does, too, I lose.

(At least two of us would be happy that way. An almost acceptable outcome.)

The other problem I see is one of willingness.

In order to accept the outcome that Chi and Rory grow together and become happy again, and I never see him again, or they don't, but he just doesn't respect himself enough to leave because he still feels as if everyone else's feelings are more important than his own (this is unhealed codependency, folks), I have to be willing for that outcome to happen.

And I'm not.

I want my fairytale, goddamnit!!!

No, I don't want everyone else's lives ruined. But, I don't want to be the instrument of ruin, either. Then, I simply have to accept that the only way I get my outcome is if, A.) Rory continues to be the same old Rory--she sure was last October--and, B.) Chi gets healthy enough that leaving looks like the only option.

And I have ZERO control over either of those. Zero, zero, zero.

So I might as well stop scanning those horoscopes and overthinking last October. This has already been decided for me.

All I have to do is accept it, and be willing to live another outcome than the outcome I wanted.

Because it very well may be that next spring rolls around, and I'm still living here in the outcome I didn't want. This outcome I'm not happy in.

And there won't be any recourse then, just like there isn't any now.

How can I make myself stop hurting, and make myself willing to live the rest of my life just the way things are now?

Do I even get a consolation prize for doing the right thing? Like, do I get someone else?? Not that I can see. Not 'til I'm sixty-five, if then.

Clearly, I'm supposed to become happy without Chi, without any romantic male partnership ever, ever again. I'm supposed to be willing for that to happen, I'm supposed to learn to be happy with that.

Man.

That is a very tall order.

But it kind of looks like that's the way it's going to be.

And I'm very sad. That's just the way it is for me. I am very sad.

Because of our Davison--correct in the case of me and my husband, correct in the case of Chi and Rory--I see that we really could have been very happy together. If we BOTH were willing to do the work.

And I hope one day I won't feel this way about it anymore. I am too sad.

I have learned a lot, and I have become wise from this experience. I'm just so, so sorry I had to lose this man in order to do it. The price of wisdom is just too high, sometimes.

I would have been SO much happier the other way. Provided the guy actually got healthy enough to be in a relationship with me, and I felt solid enough in that knowledge.

But I don't control that. Chi does.

What I control is, do I get well from this or not? Can I become happy again, no matter what happens?

And HOW THE FUCK DO I DO THAT????

On Fusion.

PRESENT

I don’t know how far I was into Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends when I realized what is really wrong with me.

My entire life, I’ve been searching for a family that was actually healthy. I remember being despondent in my teens and twenties, sure I was so fat no one would ever love me, that my legs were too thick and bunchy and didn’t look “beautiful” enough, that my butt was too big. I remember substituting daydreams for love instead, and having this odd sensation: Wasn’t this actually supposed to happen to me sometime, here? Where is it??

And then I found it! I met Simon, and we dated almost four years and had a wonderful marriage.

And I was happy.

It never even so much as occurred to me that this wasn’t the natural state of man, what we all look for and what we all need to be happy. I mean, look at all this literature about relatedness and connection, and how people are unhealthy without it, and how society is the worse for it. Disconnection and people feeling unloved is the root of most social ills. Even Mother Theresa said it.

This information is all over the place! You’re nobody til somebody loves you. So many social scientists wring their hands over the problems of aloneness and disconnection in this country that there’s just got to be something really wrong with aloneness and disconnection!

I never, ever imagined that they’re actually normal. That we’re all supposed to grow strong enough in ourselves to be happy all by ourselves, with no one and nobody else. Maybe the cosmic reason our society is so disconnected and so many people are all alone is because we came into this life in order to do just that.

Relationship, relationship, relationship, relationship. It’s supposed to make the world go around.

So of course as soon as I was absolutely alone, I mourned the absence of relationship. I’d never have anybody close in my life again. I’m old, and I’m not young, sexy, or pretty anymore, so no one was going to want me! (Certainly nobody else like Simon, who was my perfect match. They broke the mold when they made him.)

What was going to happen to me, as I grew old alone? What would happen to me when I was in trouble? If I got sick or had an accident and couldn’t work? If I woke up in the middle of the night having a heart attack and I was all alone? When I got my first cancer diagnosis? No one in this entire world gives a shit about me, and I’d be left to struggle all alone.

Always I was looking back, back, back, back to when I had someone to be with all the time, and I was happy just knowing he was there to come home to. Waking up and living my days with someone as happy, optimistic, and fun as Simon made everything worthwhile, no matter what I had to give up in terms of time and my old dreams. And as his illness progressed, that turned out to be quite a lot.

If I had him, I was fine. It didn’t matter anymore that I was never going to be a real writer. Those were just silly dreams; they never happen to people anyway.

That’s what we do. When we’re in a relationship, if it’s a good one, we get so happy and comfortable there that our personalities twine all around the relationship, and—*POOF!* We’ve changed. We’re not our old selves anymore.

Maybe we’re not even who we were supposed to be anymore.

But we don’t know that. We think that all of human existence is nothing but Relationship. And we have to have at least one with somebody, or life is no good and we’re not safe.

There’s no doubt that my relationship with Simon was the happiest time of my entire life. I doubt very seriously that I will ever be that happy again. And, when you find a person and a relationship and a time like that, perhaps it’s right that your personality deforms to accommodate it. That relationship was a precious eleven years for me. It will never happen again.

But sometimes, when you deform your personality to live in relationship with someone, you do something wrong. You do something to your personality that you should not have done, and then your relationship becomes unhealthy and then it breaks up. You stopped changing. You stopped learning. You stopped growing in order to be in your relationship. Or maybe you just stopped being yourself.

Then your relationship ends, and you have this horrible, miserable transformation you have to undergo, in order to find out what your mistake was, and how you need to unkink your personality again and grow back in the direction you should have been going. You have to be alone for a long, long time in order to do that, because if you reform another relationship before you do that, it’s just unhealthy in the same way and it will break up.

The whole trick in relationship is being your real self in the relationship while accommodating to living with another person. Too much your way or too much their way, and somebody gets stifled to death and the relationship ends.

I’m thinking of Chi and Rory here. If there was ever a textbook example of someone stifling themselves to death in order to accommodate themselves to a relationship, that was it.

But I’m also thinking of myself. As happy as I was with Simon, part of the reason was that I finally felt secure. I felt secure because I finally had someone with me who was big and strong and knowledgeable and adult in the ways I wasn’t. Someone who had always done well at work and owned his own business for twenty-five years. Emotionally, I was still a child who felt “too little” to handle big things in life like buying a car or an air conditioning system or big travel arrangements or washing the windows. I had Simon for that, thank God! And I was definitely the junior partner in the relationship. The sicker Simon got, the more the awesome and frightening responsibility I had to shoulder. I definitely didn’t feel ready for any of it, and I was better at some aspects of the job than others. It was something I would never, ever have willingly taken on, and I think one of the reasons he died while I was still so young was to show me that I could do it.

There are some healthy reasons to wrap our personalities all around a relationship.

Then, there are the UNhealthy ones. Yeah…the ones I’ve spent the last four and a half miserable years learning all about.

What I’m talking about up there, accommodating ourselves too much to the relationship, is codependent and a way we try to fuse emotionally with someone else. And I got that; on some level, I understood that.

What I didn’t understand is that this is normal in childhood. I found this in this book in a way I’d never seen it spelled out anywhere else.

I mean, think about it. When we’re little, ideally, Mom and Dad are right there all the time. Are you okay, honey? How did school go today? Do you need help with your homework? Why are you crying? Oh, it’s so wonderful that you did that! I’m so proud of you! Look how big and beautiful and talented you’re growing! You can be anything you want to be! Here, let’s pop a big bowl of popcorn and cuddle in bed together and watch Harry Potter movies! I love you, honey. Maybe we can order a pizza! We’re emotionally fused with Mom and Dad, and emotionally fused into this hand-holdy, sing-songy, fluffy-warm and safe and cuddly relationship that makes us feel good inside and okay. Oh, those images of Mom making us eggs and hot chocolate before school on a cold snowy morning! (That, I never got, because my mom didn’t want to get up for us, bitched and screamed about how slow we were the entire time, put out bowls of cereal, then went, “You’re so slow I don’t want to stay up and yell at you! I’m going back to bed!”) That not-so-lovely scene in the parentheses excluded, isn’t the preceding paragraph just your warm, fuzzy picture of ideal family life?

When we’re little kids, when we’re one and two and five and seven and nine, we need this absolutely. When we don’t get it, or if we only get it if Mom wants something from us, when she threatens to withhold it or punish us if we aren’t the children she wants us to be, when she uses this warm, loving quality of time to reward us only when we act like the children she wants us to be, that’s what makes us codependent.

Little kids can’t find their own sense of warmth and safety and OK-ness. Little kids need to get that from Mom and Dad, and they need it in order to grow up healthy emotionally.

Where most of us have gotten hung up is, we think we’re supposed to have this as adults all the time, and we think we can’t live without it.

Which is one reason I’m so unhappy. After eighteen-plus years of that kind of a mother, eighteen years of rejection from cruel schoolmates, and thirty-two years of believing, truly believing, I’d never even have sex ever in my life because I was too fat and men would think me repulsive (Fuck, man. Is it any wonder Fifty Shades and Twilight are our cultural ideals of romance, when most people are raised like this?), Simon and I got together and I finally had this kind of experience of love in my life!!

And then he died. And then he was gone. And then it was over. After not even seven years of marriage.

And I stumbled into the sunlight blinking, rubbing my eyes, thinking, That was it? That’s all? It’s all over? That’s all I get?? Ever, ever again? Really??

I still need to be emotionally fused to someone in order to feel okay. But, what we’re supposed to do in this life is grow ourselves up emotionally so we’re able to feel okay whether that’s present in our lives for us or not.

Yes, it’s true that as we become elderly, we get old and frail and we aren’t able to cook and do for ourselves anymore. It’s also true that if I had a car accident tonight and I was laid up and not able to work for six weeks, I would fall behind in the bills and I would most certainly need help! The same goes if we have heart attacks or cancer.

But if none of these things are true, we’re supposed to be able to feel okay without a warm-fuzzy, hand-holdy, sing-songy relationship in our lives all the time. We really are!

The trouble is, our society does not recognize this fact. And neither the fuck did I.

And inside, I’m still six years old, missing emotional fusion in my life, looking for it, longing for it, trying to make Chi fit the bill whether he actually does or not.

I mean, look at this. Because my mother had BPD, and used me as her emotional confidante literally ALL THE TIME, I spent all my life on this planet up until Simon died emotionally fused with someone. (Up until now, I always had at least one close friend.)

I didn’t have that emotionally warm mother who got up and made hot chocolate and pancakes and eggs, but I did have a mother who was emotionally up in my business every hour of every day, asking me every single picky little detail of who I sat with in school and what I said and what they said and whatIsaidandwhattheysaidandwhatIsaidandwhattheysaid on and on and on until I wanted to run away from home. Sharing every single picky little detail of every single little problem she had with another person (and demanding I agree with her view of things), and since she had BPD her life was nothing BUT problems with other people. And, you know, come to think of it ... that was the only way we kids were important to our mom. When we were tending to her needs. So now my brother is twice divorced and whining on Facebook all the time about how nobody wants a nice guy and he's so lonely and can't find anyone.

(What went wrong in those marriages, anyway? Anyone care to take any guesses?)

I have spent my entire life emotionally fused with other people’s lives, and for the first time in forty-five years, there was nobody there. I was utterly alone.

No wonder I don’t know how to be emotionally independent of other people, and why I’m longing back, back into the past, when somebody was there all the time.

This isn’t healthy. I’ve been left alone in my life so I could grow out of this. And that’s the job I was supposed to have accomplished by now, or I’d be so desperate I’d take Chi back no matter what—and he hasn’t done any emotional health work on himself. He’s still hideously codependent, and life with someone hideously codependent guarantees you won’t be treated well.

You’ll think you are, as the other person contorts himself to please you because he believes he’s unlovable, killing himself in the process—and then it will all blow apart, when the other person can’t stand the pain anymore and cheats on you.

(Codependents are known for cheating, y’all. This is why.)

I was supposed to have grown out of this need for emotional fusion with another person by now, so I wouldn’t do this to him or me. My job is to stand my ground and insist he get well, and walk away unless and until he does.

Only I don’t know how to live without emotional fusion. I’m still looking back, back, back into the past, to that golden time when I was happy. (That ended after barely seven years.)

A fine mess, huh?

I keep falling back into that trance, of looking wistfully back to those happy times I had with Simon, and a few with Chi, thinking those were the times I was really happy and that the present moment sucks. That I’ll never be happy again. That what’s the point?

I do better when I remember that that’s a child’s way of being in the world, a child’s way of looking at life, and that I’m supposed to just be me and focus on me and focus on developing my talents. There’s nobody healthy within a one hundred mile radius, and, as the incident with Jane just demonstrated, if you dandle unhealthy people on your knee and show them endless patience while hoping they’ll finally begin to treat you better … all they do is kick you in the teeth.

I hate to say it, but currently Chi falls into this category.

Anyone who hurts themselves that much is eventually going to explode and hurt everyone else. You can’t treat other people any better than you treat yourself, because treating yourself and other people truly well always involves HONESTY, and it NEVER involves acting. Acting is NEVER kind, because THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, and the longer it takes, the more it hurts.

I’m tired of the sick people like my mother and Jane who have serious emotional problems and only want to look at others’ problems and never apply themselves to real, serious work on their own.

I don’t treat other people that way. I work hard so I don’t hurt myself and others, and that’s what love is. I need and deserve someone who will do the same for me.

Chi has one more opportunity to elect to be that person who will apply himself to the work it takes—on HIMSELF, not other people—to be healthy.

I don’t want to be so backward and so stuck in childhood that I’ll accept another Mom or another Jane. Because when it’s your husband or your significant other, being treated like that is the longest, cruelest, ugliest cut of all.

I just need to keep reminding myself: This is a child’s way of being. And I’m supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up. That means focusing on my talents, developing me, and forgetting about other people.

At the moment, there aren’t any healthy ones out there.

---

A Letter to Myself.

Present.

Probably within the next three weeks, Chi will be back and I will have to finish this job.

I really have no choice. I can't let this person back into my life and get treated the way I KNOW I will be.

I know, in general, what I have to do. Exactly how to phrase it, I don't know. I don't have that part yet. I don't know exactly where his head will be or what he'll say.

I do have some pretty good guesses.

By mid-March, this job should be over. I can't change my mind. I absolutely can't, I just can't. That way lies tragedy, and this I know.

So, by mid-March, Chi will have left my life--or I will have left his--quite possibly forever, and this will be my life. Just as it is now. I see nothing different, nothing new, nothing better, in my future. Not for many, many, many years. I'll be a senior citizen by then!

But, you know, that's the way it has to be. If I got anything wonderful and new before I learned how to accept my life the way it is, and be perfectly happy and satisfied with only what there is now, I'd just mess everything up again. Simon was the one person that wouldn't have happened with.

He was the happy childhood I deserved and should have had. Now I've moved out of the house and for the first time in my life, I am both all alone and an adult,  instead of a child.

Before, I could be happy because I had this starry-eyed belief in myself, sort of like he had. I believed in a much, much, MUCH better world than the one we actually live in. I can't do that anymore, so there's no more flying up on the wings of anticipation of being the next J.K. Rowling. I'm just going to go along doing my work, and that will be it. There's no one close to me but myself, and  no life but the one there is.

After the life I had, this isn't much of a life at all. I wake up and ask myself, What am I even doing all this for? What is the point? And, Why do I care?

Most days, I don't. I've been really sleepy all this week. I'm beginning to suspect I'm just depressed.

And no wonder. Who wants to spend the rest of their life like this?

But, it's unacceptable to run back to Chi, although I suspect I WILL have that opportunity over the next month. 

Once I was so happy because I knew I'd see him again. Now I know exactly what I'm looking at, and I've already skipped ahead emotionally to the time when I've said goodbye and now I have no life at all. I feel like Bella Swan in that horrible second Twilight movie, where all she does is mope and moon.

I need to remember that those movies were HUGE hits. And that, while J.K. Rowling was divorcing an abusive husband and ended up fired, jobless, and on welfare while alone raising a newborn baby,  feeling awful about life and herself, she did her best work.

I guess some people can do something good with a time like this. But, I sure won't be happy doing it.

I don't think, most of the time, that I will ever be happy again. My life just fell all to pieces--twice--and oh, well. 

Last time this happened, Simon asked me out within two weeks. Not gonna happen now, not with anyone emotionally well enough to be in any relationship, at least. This time, I really do have to tough it all out alone.

But that's no excuse for helping someone else perpetuate his own illness. If I do that, everyone pays, pays big, and pays bad.

In theory, if I learn my lesson, I push Chi to learn his...which, in theory, he has a decent chance of doing. If I DON'T learn my lesson, well, he has to keep teaching me my lesson, and those are painful lessons I don't want to undergo. I keep getting this transit, and he does too, that a teacher is coming into our lives that doesn't look like a teacher. 

I need to test out of that course.

Codependency 101 was bad enough.

In theory, Chi has the stuff and is capable of doing much better.

In reality...well, look at his track record. It's bad.

I have to figure out how to go on living this way for the rest of my life without being so miserable. I haven't solved that riddle.

One thing's for sure: If I don't solve that riddle, and I end up brokenhearted forever, for the rest of my life, I can at least know that I stuck up for what was right, insisted he GET THE FUCK WELL, and refused to support him in staying sick.

At least I did that.

How can I live this life and not be so sad anymore?

What I Learned From My Affair With a Married Man

Present...

I Learned About Myself:

1.) I learned what I am NOT here for. I am NOT here to do anything blazingly successful or visible in the world. I am not here to make my parents or anyone else proud. I am not here to meet external standards of any kind of success. I am not here to be the next J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins. 

2.) I am NOT here to attach myself to another person, wrapping myself around and living through their problems, trying to "save" somebody ill. I am not here to be them, I'm here to be me. I am not here to use this escape route to avoid Number Four. I am not here to use saving someone as a shortcut to self-worth or happiness. I am not here to trade saving someone for something I'm supposed to provide for myself, that I'm afraid I'm not good enough to be able to.

3.) Each person is responsible for saving themselves. I can't reach into Chi's head, or my mother's head, no matter how their pain moves me, how sorry I feel for them, how much I wish their lives could be different, what I read, what I know, what worked for me, or how much I think they should do whatever worked for me. Their salvation is their own learning, takes place in their own head, and therefore they are the ones who have to reach it. I am NOT God, and I can make no one else do ANYTHING.

4.) I am here for self-development. All I'm supposed to do on this planet is become self-supporting, self-sufficient, and self-responsible. That means that money, health, happiness, and meaning in my life come from me, all me, and only me. I'm supposed to develop my own talents and my own self-belief and self-worth, nobody else's. I'm supposed to heal myself and no one else. I'm not here to take care of other people. I am here to evolve to taking the best care of myself, and to become perfectly okay all in myself, and all by myself. I'm here to believe in myself and to learn to joyfully do what I do best. It will be whatever it is, and that's good enough. Period. 

5.) I do not need anybody else's anything. Ever. 

6.) I may never have anyone else in my life ever again. If not, then that's the way it's supposed to be. I'm primarily meant to be alone in this life, because of Number Four.

I Learned About Affairs:

7.) Attractions between people already involved in relationships and people not a part of the existing relationship are there to show us something. Therefore, simplistic moral answers, although they may be reflective of the learning that's meant to take place, aren't the answers themselves. If we concentrate only on strict moral rules, and on how bad we are for wanting to be with a "forbidden" person, instead of looking for our own answers, we might miss something important. What we should concentrate on is the spirit of why the rules are there, not their literal syntax, or the threat of spiritual punishment. 

8.) Every affair situation is different.

9.) All three people bear responsibility.

10.) An affair is always symbolic of what needs to be developed in our lives. When we look for that, we're on the right track.

11.) Psychology and astrology can be helpful shortcuts to some answers we need. Both are worth a look if you're struggling.

12.) Affairs start in childhood. All adult relationship problems do. Therefore, if you are struggling with affair-related issues, GO BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD. You could probably use professional assistance to do this.

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda...

September 26, 2017

PAST...
(written BEFORE the update on 10/22, scheduled, and left here because there are some other good insights in it.)

Chi and another good friend of mine are both atheists. Neither one of them believes in any, and I do mean ANY, underlying spiritual purpose in life that can’t be scientifically proven.

I used to be that way, too. So many horrible disappointments occurred in my life that I concluded there simply was no benevolent force in the Universe. (People want to call this God, but I do not believe it is some angry punitive Superbeing who watches us and demands that we believe this, think that, do this and don’t do that, while worshiping reverently on our knees. It has a lot more to do with US, and what WE chose to come here to experience in order to evolve. And WE chose that, NOT Someone Else.)

Some of this IS scientifically provable. Look at what psychologists know and have been able to prove about the genesis and resolution of problems in human relationship.

It’s when it starts to intersect with the astrology and the two agree and reinforce each other that things start to get a little scary. When I started to see the gifts in self-understanding that the worst things in my life have had to offer me—Simon and Chi leaving, the afteraffects of a childhood with a mentally ill mother—and the healing pattern there is in them, should we choose to take that path, that’s when I realized there really is something more after all, and we aren’t just the victims of a cruel, evil, and random universe.

When you’re an atheist, and all you believe is hard science, you can miss that. Last night, my other atheist friend brought a section into writer’s group, of the memoir she has been writing. In it, she’s writing of a time much earlier in her life when her marriage was in trouble, and she embarked on an affair with a colleague in graduate school. Here she is, marveling all these years later at the strength of her attraction to this person, and still not able to comprehend it into her seventies. At the time, she chalked it up to pheromones, and the memoir chapter devolved into a trip to the morgue where she tried to convince the M.E. to do a search for a human vomeronasal organ.

 

Good, fucking, grief.

Here I’d been rereading these blogs and telling myself, I’m crazy. Nobody reading this will ever believe me, and for good reason. I’m clearly a crazy, desperate, horribly lonely and empty person who needs to close the computer up for good, unless it’s to search for someone new on Match.com. (And that person had better look out.)

But last night, I saw that I can see why Chi and I happened, and everything the two of us, and Rory, were supposed to get from it. I see what the blocks were in my life, and what I’m really supposed to be here working on and growing in, and how Chi showed that to me. And I see what he was really supposed to have worked on and grown in these past two years, and how I showed that to him. And how both of us have shown that to Rory, and she to us. It’s in the psychology. It’s in the astrology.

And because I have the ability to know and suss out these things, and see WHY things happen, life doesn’t look like senseless pain, the way it does to Chi and my other atheist friend. It’s painful, all right, especially this week—more on that to come—but it’s no longer SENSELESS pain. And I worry about it a whole lot less. I mean, the concept that I am SUPPOSED to be alone at this point in my life—without that, I’d still be the miserable wreck I was when I started therapy two and a half years ago.

So, this shit may sound a little woo-woo, but it is FAR from useless.

It means I won’t still be sitting around a writing table at age seventy-two, sadly wondering why my life was so senselessly painful, and unable to make any meaning or peace out of it. I won’t be like elderly relatives I have known, still crying about why they were treated so badly by their parents, into their own NINETIES.

In fact, if I knew a little more about the marriage in question, and had the charts of each person, I could probably tell my friend a good deal about why it happened. The person in question even once said to her that they were old souls who knew each other in another life and planned to come together in this one—which her ultra-scientific mind immediately pooh-poohed.

You’re going to reach seeing the meaning in your life experiences really fucking slow that way. But, it’s each person’s own choice.

And right when I was feeling really stupid and silly over the whole fucking thing, that happened. Amazing. 

Painful though many events have been over the last four years, at least I don’t have to live like Chi and my other atheist friend. And I have a feeling that is turning out to be a very good thing.

By the 24^th of September, I had heard no more from Chi. Looking more closely at the relevant transit, I guess that’s to be expected. All it really says is, I’m trying to guess what’s going on with the trends in my life, and highly likely to be wrong.

The first time I saw it, I jumped to conclusions and assumed I'd be trying to figure out what was going on because I’d heard from him.

(Um, actually, when you think about it, that is exactly what happened. I did hear from him. In a very sneaky way, with lots of plausible deniability. And then I started trying to guess why!)

If there’s any more, I thought it would be this week. The reason I believe that is: The transits that talk about an ongoing resumption of a relationship start in the middle of October and go through November and on into next spring and summer. If he waits too much longer, he’s going to miss them, and effectively break our date.

But the fact is, these transits go on a long time. All I can really tell is, if it's getting on into late spring/early summer and he hasn't spoken to me, he isn't going to. But I'm not able to pinpoint when any closer than that. I had guessed mid-September, and I did hear something, but that was it.

What I need to think about is how to just build a life all alone, because either way, I will still be alone a long, long time. Maybe for the rest of my life. If the astrology is correct, I have to throw Chi a gauntlet: We both have to get well, and become emotionally well people. And emotionally well people don't try to pursue two relationships at once if they have to lie and deceive to do that.


If he lets that gauntlet lie there, I'm alone. If he never shows up again, I'm alone. When you have so many problems being alone, alone is where you NEED to be, not in a relationship. When you're perfectly happy and perfectly fine all by yourself and you don't need a relationship, that's when you can be in one. Not before.


Except, quite interestingly, for Chi. In order to accomplish some of my life objectives, so the astrology goes, I don't have to have a relationship. In fact, I will probably accomplish them more readily without any close people at all.


But Chi. He has Venus on his North Node. Relationships and learning to navigate properly within them are a major reason he's here. He can't accomplish his objectives in this life without one. So if it isn't Rory, and it isn't me, it's going to be someone else.