Your Best Behavior Really Is Best

PAST

(This post is a little facetious…but only a little.)

So you’re interested in somebody married. They’re interested in you. Why is it a good idea to be On Your Best Behavior? (i.e., NOT sleeping with the person, NOT dating the person, NOT taking the emotional place of their spouse in online conversations, etc. In other words, “I’m interested, but I won’t do ANYTHING with you unless/until you are no longer married.”)

1.)    You really don’t, you really don’t, you REALLY DON’T, have ANY CLUE what kind of emotional or psychological problems this person has. For instance, if he’s a sex addict, along the lines of Anthony Weiner or yesteryear’s J.R. Ewing, you will get USED and LEFT.

2.)    If you compete with the spouse, and that person finds out their husband/wife is cheating with you, you are prompting better behavior on the part of that spouse. Assuming your beloved is NOT a sex addict, serial womanizer, or just plain psychopath, they want to be with you because they are not happy at home. Now the spouse knows, and will clean up his/her act, at least until you are a memory. Let that spouse hang themselves, please. If your beloved can’t leave because every time he or she tries, the spouse becomes more loving again, finds some way to blame your beloved for all the problems, and your beloved feels guilty, don’t prompt that spouse to be loving! Let that person be their real self. 

3.)    Now the spouses go to marriage counseling. Now you’ve just prolonged the marriage. Especially in the case where it’s clear someone is experiencing out-of-this-world cruel or unusual behavior and that person really should be getting their ass out of there!

4.)    As detailed in this post, if the spouses should really stay together, you won’t win anyway. You’ve just broken your own heart, and you’ve damaged the marriage possibly forever.

5.)    If your beloved is running around cheating with you, you are asking that person for dishonest behavior and promoting poor relationship habits. If this person has problems in this area anyway, you are making them worse. But, should you win the person away from the spouse, what do you need? You need honest behavior and good relationship habits. And, for the entire period of the affair, you’ve been asking for exactly the opposite.

6.)    If your beloved is cheating, chances are that person is having a hard time being him/herself authentically in his/her life. This is a serious life problem that one day that person will have to confront and solve if ever they’re going to be happy. You are allowing that person to bleed off the pressure to do this. Why should they confront hard questions about their personal happiness, their spouse, their marriage, what they want for their life, and their own behavior? They can masquerade to friends and family that everything is fine, and then come get their intimate needs met with you. Where is the impetus for them to confront and make constructive changes in their life? You just took that away. You’re making dysfunction easy for them and enabling them to continue a pattern that hurts them, the spouse, and you.

To Be Yourself or Not to Be, That is the Question

Will the person your lover truly is please stand up?

FUTURE

It’s amazing what I’ve come to understand through having this experience. 

1.)    If a person refuses to be honest about who they really are, YOU DON’T HAVE A RELATIONSHIP with that person. It may look as if you do, it may feel as if you do, but really you don’t. (And I have to interject here: WTF?? Isn’t it the whole point of relationship to be known and loved for who you really are?)

2.)    It isn’t possible to experience happiness in your life without LIVING AS THE PERSON YOU TRULY ARE. 

3.)    I read this once in a book about ADD. I don’t think it’s only true of ADHD, it’s true in all of life. What I read was, you either have problems, or you have symptoms. If you refuse to be who you are, and opt instead to be who you have to be to please others, you have symptoms. You have the symptoms of chronic depression, lack of faith in the goodness and purpose in life, sadness, maybe boredom. (And Chi’s horoscope has these themes in spades. When I knew him, so did he.) You can get attached to some outside addiction that makes up for the joy you should feel in being who you really are and doing what you really love. But if you insist on going your own way and others aren’t happy, then you have problems…with other people in your life.

4.)    Why else would you pretend to be someone you’re not? To like things you really don’t like, to pursue a career that really doesn’t make you happy? Someone else wanted you to.

5.)    And here are the problems you will have: One, other people will be mad at you, the way my mother was mad at me if I showed ANY sign of changing my mind about this career I had settled on when I was four. A BBC show about people in this career once played on PBS when I was a little girl. My mother insisted that I watch it and got angry with me when I didn’t want to! (The problem was that the actors were all British and spoke very quickly in strongly accented English, and my eight-year-old brain couldn’t understand what they said. I lost interest because I could not follow the program. And my mother got mad at me!) Imagine the reaction I got when, years later, I did what any high schooler should and explored other careers. What am I doing today? You guessed it. The underlying message from these people is, “You’re supposed to give ME what I WANT!” Or, two, the people are upset and crying. “You want what? You’re divorcing MY MOM! You’re breaking up OUR FAMILY!”

If you have low self esteem, you will buy right into all of number 5. In the first place, you have such low self esteem you don’t believe you have any right to be who you are if someone else says you should be some other way. And you don’t believe you’re good enough for anyone to love you the way you really are.

So, the only person who says they love you threatens to withdraw love if you don’t give them what they want, thus violating your own personhood and your own freedom. 

(Thought:If they don’t love you the way you really are, they don’t really love YOU, do they? They should find someone who’s more like what they really want.)

In the second case, you’ve experienced so much pain through your own low self esteem, and been treated so badly yourself, you don’t want to make ANYBODY else feel that way, ever. Especially not, for instance, your precious children. (Even if those children are, say, in their thirties now and have homes of their own.)

BUT, you’ve lied to those precious children since they were born, about who you really are, the home they were really living in, and the healthiest and happiest way for humans to live. You did it because they were young and little and tender and still forming, and you wanted them to grow up happy and healthy. 

And they did. They did grow up wayyy healthier and happier than you did. And, yes, it’s hard for kids to give up that shining ideal of the way they thought their childhood was, that’s true. 

But if your kids could really understand, do you think they’d want you to be this unhappy? Would you recommend it for them?

                                               ***

Ah, astrology. 


Robert Hand is a famous astrologer from Maine who has written perhaps the best book on transits ever. In astrology, the chart you were born with tells you about your character and your potential in life. Transits are used together with the natal chart in order to make predictions. Your natal chart tells you what will happen; your transits tell you when. 


Looking ahead many years, Chi’s transits start, right about now, to do something very interesting. About two thirds of his transits describe a person who stays on the path he was on when we first got together. A person with lowlowlowlow self esteem, who won’t be himself in relationships, who gives himself away for other people’s approval, and ends up in so much pain he can’t stand it and has another affair. 


(In another relationship. The timing of which, unfortunately, seems to coincide with ME being cheated on.) 


The other one third of his transits describe a person who’s growing, who heals from childhood abuse, who finds his own self worth, who becomes whole and ends his life in a much, much better place. 

My transits describe, uniformly, a relationship with an unhealed codependent that pretty much ruins my life, and whom I eventually have to leave.

I am, understandably, concerned.

Robert Hand writes that each transit between two planets is describing something that’s taking place in your life, in a cycle of events. First there’s a conjunction: from your perspective, the planets are eclipsing one another in the heavens. This formation is often noted when people are starting some new endeavor. Then you get an easy transit as they move apart. A sextile. (These are the degrees in angles as the planets move apart.) 


If you started something that wasn’t a good idea at the conjunction, it will look like it’s working okay during the “easy” transits. Then you hit a difficult one—a square, that’s a ninety degree angle. It denotes a time of stress. If you made a bad decision at the conjunction, it now starts to look bad again. You have the choice: to drop it and start something new, or to try to stick with it. If you stick with it, you will get easy going again. Then comes the second time of stress: the opposition. The planets are one hundred eighty degrees apart. Down below, people are often having some challenging times again. If you didn’t ditch that bad situation when you got the square, and you tried to stick it out, now you will really be sorry. I look ahead to the times I worry about, and here is this same cycle.

If you make a good decision, you don’t have to have a horrible time when the planets square and opp. 


If you made a good decision and things are going well, the square and opp can actually push you into a period of success and further growth. But, as my life progresses and finishes, first, apparently with Chi, and then without him, I have clearly made a very bad choice somewhere along the line. 

                                    ***

Now, what could my bad decision be? 


Here coming up soon I have one transit that tells me I am getting mixed messages from someone, and I’m told that it’s not just him, it’s a problem with the interaction of both people. And when I first read that a year and a half ago, I went,


"Huh? But I love Chi! I’m offering up all the love I can. I’m treating him WAY better than Rory! Why wouldn’t he want me? What am I doing wrong??”

What AM I doing wrong, in this hypothetical timeline that, thank heavens, hasn’t happened yet?


What’s my bad decision?

Reviewing the above, it’s entirely possible that it’s this: ACCEPTING DISHONESTY INTO MY LIFE. The fundamental dishonesty of a person who just can’t accept that he really is an okay guy, and it really is okay to be who you are in your own life. 

Why do I want to make this bad decision?

Because I’m lonely, sad, and unhappy. Because Chi is gone, and because I miss him. Because he’s the only person besides Simon, who ever felt like a soul mate to me, in my entire life. 

Chi can be wonderful. WHEN HE’S BEING HONEST. WHEN HE’S APPEARING AS HIS REAL SELF. Which he did with me once, more than he ever had with anyone else in his entire life, and it was an honor. A privilege. His trust was one of the most precious things I have ever held.

But when I accept an affair because I’m afraid of never seeing him again, I foster dishonesty and unhealthy habits that need to be broken. And it may very well be that because I fostered them here, they stay around for the rest of his life, ruining his life, and ruining my life, too.

Because I was afraid to risk losing him. Because I was afraid he didn’t really love me. Because I was afraid of being alone.

BUT,

If a person lives in dishonesty in his relationships, YOU AREN’T REALLY WITH THAT PERSON ANYWAY.

You are with a picture they are holding up in front of their true face, in order for you to love them.

Codependents do that. Because they believe they are such substandard human beings that no one could ever truly love them the way they really are.

And this is a result of childhood abuse. See how important it is that society helps parents be the healthiest they can be?

The thing is, I want who Chi really is. I know that person. He showed me, back when he trusted me. And I know that person is special. That’s the person I really want.

I may enter an affair trying to reach and keep that person, but because he isn’t strong enough to believe he’s really a good person, that it’s okay to be who he really is, and that it’s okay to leave a situation where he isn’t loved for who he really is,

what I’m doing accepting him in this condition, is encouraging him to keep on hiding who he really is anyway. 
 

Because now he’s got to hide an affair. And he gets to beat up on himself for what a bad guy he is for having one (ignoring all the real reasons there’s trouble in his marriage.) 


And all the real reasons being who he really is—finally, before he dies of old age—is a good thing to do. And I can see this, in our old conversations, I really can. Lines like, when he was about to move out, "I needed to do this anyway for myself. Or I would have died inside." "I feel like I'm moving toward myself. I stand in the distance, waiting. Does that make sense?" "I think my life can only have the chance of being happy if I take charge of it."


*shivers* Yes, it does make sense. (And, no shit.)

I really don’t know if the transits coming up in all of our horoscopes are going to really happen or not. Maybe Chi and Rory made some good decisions at the time of their last conjunctions. Maybe this square works out fabulously for them.

But I did see some photos of Rory’s recent "promotion." And I do think that a picture, in this case, may really be worth a thousand words.

There are some huge transits coming up for all three of us. And the dates all match for each person. Like it or not, these three charts, mine, Chi’s, and Rory’s, are all linked. 

Pluto transits. Seven years. HUGE.

If what’s forecasted actually comes to pass, I need to understand that it’s HONESTY, or it’s NOTHING. My job is to raise the bar all the way to the top, and hold it there. People need to appear in life the way they really are, else there can be no happiness.

I’ve raised the bar for Rory. Chi told me as much the night he dumped me.

I’ve done that for myself. But there’s one person I have so far declined to do that for. 

Chi.

                                      ***

This is going to be hard to do. I love Chi. I miss him. He’s the second love of my life.

But I need to look at it this way.

1.)    What does this person do WAY TOO WELL? Lying, acting, pretending, and duplicity. Not because he's a bad person, but because he's an insecure person. Pretending to be on the outside what others want, in order to get their approval. Because he doesn’t have enough of his own. And what does an affair give you great practice at? Lying, acting, pretending, and duplicity. 


   What’s one thing that, if you conduct a secret affair, cheating on your spouse, you aren’t getting any practice at at all? APPEARING TO THE SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE, THE WAY YOU REALLY ARE. 


   Oh, and what other thing could this sweet, darling, smart, sharp man stand to be better at? Handling anger openly, honestly, and up front, instead of subverting it and getting back at someone covertly while making nicey-nice on the outside. 


   Trust me, nobody wants to be with a person who does that.

2.)    If I should accept a person who refuses to be his real self into my life, I’m alone for the rest of my life anyway! First, figuratively, because THE RELATIONSHIP IS FAKE. I’m not being shared with and trusted with who the person really is, the way I was for the four months we were together, anyhow. Then, literally, because when a person betrays their own soul to show up the way they think someone else wants them to show up, the pain of self-betrayal becomes so great that he starts resenting me, talking about me to other people, attracts another affair, and things break down so badly from there that eventually I leave him and I’m all alone anyway. At seventy-one. When nobody wants to break up.

This is why anything, anything, anything I do in the next six months that supports lying, acting, pretending, or any kind of duplicity constitutes a very serious moral and ethical violation on my part, no matter how Rory’s acting or how apparent it is to me that he really needs to get out of there. (Which was apparent to me when we first started talking, and on the night he broke up with me!) 


And, you know what?? I've actually got a transit coming up advising me of that very thing. Um, guess when that is???


Plus, in the words of astrologer Alice Portman, when she looked at both our charts for me, “These people have to do it on their own, otherwise they don’t learn anything.” Because this person, more than anything else—just as ALL PEOPLE DO—needs to start showing up in the world AS WHO HE REALLY IS.

And demanding exactly that, sticking up for only that, holding out for exactly that, and never accepting less than that for or from that person—

That’s what love is.

NOT, “I’ll love you if you give me this.”

I’ll tell you one thing, “I’ll love you if and when you give me this” wasn’t what my marriage with Simon was all about. Each person was WHO THEY WERE, and that was why we were so happy together.

If I insist on this, and it turns out that I lose Chi forever,

TOO FUCKING BAD FOR ME.

Even if I never find another place to belong, ever in my whole life. Even if I’m sad. Even if I grieve for what might have been. Even if I miss better times. Even if I’m alone for the rest of my life. Even if I never find anyone else, no other soul mate relationship, ever, ever again.



                                      ***

I might need some help with this.

I miss Chi. I have literally pined away for the man for two solid years now.

If astrological predictions come true, I may need to be held accountable. If you’re reading this blog, and a report should show up that Chi came back and we slept together, or we’re carrying on in cyberspace (again), I formally request that my readers show up in the comment box and FLOG ME TO DEATH.

You might even show up sooner than that, if I happen to post up that I've heard from him again.


It’s important.

Thank you.

Nobody's Cryin', Nobody's Lyin', and Nobody's Dyin'.

PRESENT


Oh, my God, what a WEEK. I literally feel like I've been bound in front of a firing squad and riddled with bullets.

My eldest stepson. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I've been trying to settle Simon's estate matters, and this person has treated me like a criminal since day one, and I have done NOTHING to deserve it. I have done NOTHING TO this person! Ever!

And he communicates like a goddamned Neanderthal, and then he's angry when I can't read his mind.

And the things this person takes offense at. Jesus Fucking Christ! Apparently the normal way that most people hash out agreement and disagreement is completely foreign to this person.

But then, one needs to consider the source. Mom had a diagnosis of BPD (that's borderline personality disorder, not bipolar.) And we know that BP's often pair up with very controlling people. And, from several reports, Simon was a real asshole when he was younger, with a drinking AND a gambling problem. And there were a ton of arguments and fights. None of those three boys is 100% right. I wonder if the middle one, as detailed elsewhere on this blog, may have BPD himself. 

The oldest one, from all reports, is a long-term pothead who committed welfare fraud, moved into Simon's house and never paid rent so they almost lost it, then tore it all up. We could have been married two years earlier had Simon not had to move back there to remodel it. And the youngest one, well...grumpy, surly, depressed, sarcastic, and bitter. Has he ever had a date in his whole life? God knows.

The whole thing almost ended up in a lawsuit. Fortunately, it didn't, but it's all just taught me a little more about the tenacity of the blinders a bad childhood slaps over a person's ability to perceive reality, and to get their mind around the truth about another person's communication, no matter how desperately they're trying to get it across. And how easy it is to fall into a damnable repeating pattern; even though I had just been told (finally!) what upset the other person, I went right back and did the same thing anyway.

And I know who else had a bad childhood, and how tenacious those problems are, and that is really sobering.

Because that person hides, pretends, and lies. And ACTS, as skillfully as Robert DeNiro. If Chi doesn't want you to know something, you aren't going to know it. A relationship could wind up a long, long, LONG way down the wrong road before I ever had a clue.

And that is very scary.

I've realized my horoscopes are right. I am addicted to drama. 

All when I was younger, there was some BIG drama. 

One day I was gonna be a big, flashy success (or as much as you can be as a minor author, anyway) and prove to EVERYONE I WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR that I didn't deserve how they acted toward me and how they treated me. I was gonna do well enough at something I loved so I didn't have to stay stuck in something I just wasn't good enough at and was unhappy and terrified doing. 

Then when I realized how unrealistic that was, at least I could marry the guy who was that good.

Then I realized how unrealistic that was.

But Simon was such a great guy to be with, that didn't matter. Then--surprise!--I was battling brain cancer with the best guy in the world. 

Then I was battling Rory and childhood demons with the other best guy in the world.

Then I got DUMPED. (Being brokenhearted sure is miserable, but it's also very dramatic.)

Now all I'm battling is Number One Stepson. And I TRULY hope we've seen the last of that...but I doubt it. Something tells me he's going to hate something in the new book contract, jeopardize the sale of the book, and we'll be at each other's throats all over again.

Drama, it turns out, is not all, "Wheee! I'm not going to have a boring, everyday life!" 

That was how I was as a kid and as a young person.

But actually, most times, drama is BAD. And most of the time, drama makes you feel TERRIBLE.

                                                     ***

Soon, there will be nothing particularly happy or exciting going on in my life, at all. Nobody I'm happy to come home to, or just thrilled to stay home and cook Sunday breakfast with. Nobody to swap writing pages with and dream. No belief that anything exciting is going to happen with my writing, or Simon's. Or mine and my writing partner's. Realistically, most books that are published don't sell shit. You have to sell at least 5,000 copies for a publisher to consider you as having done anything worthy of another book contract.

No more Battling To Save My Man. (In any sense of the phrase.)

And, please God, no more battling with Number One Stepson.

It's entirely possible that I'm going to spend the next thirty to forty years just going along and doing my work, and that will be it.

                                                      ***

You just have to live what life gives you. 

You're not going to be the "best" at anything, and even if you do, you're just going to die and it won't matter in the great cosmic scheme of things, anyhow. It's just not that important. Nothing is, when you think about it.

Two years and six days ago, Chi called me and left me. And I've had this sensation ever since then that I was in a race against time, struggling and struggling to grasp a number of things about it before a deadline, before something else that was going to happen.

And now I feel like I've gotten there. I've achieved all the knowledge from it that I was supposed to. 

I can poke around it some more, sure, and the astrology is fascinating, but there's no more feeling of urgency about it any more, like there's something I really need to know and I haven't found it yet. 

I'm done shoveling shit, I'm a very different person than I was when I started, and now it's just time to relax. To just go along doing my work, and that will be it.

I won't have a dramatic life any more, or even have anything much happen to me at all--except for getting old and dying.

                                                      ***

And I remind myself that there are VERY good things about that. 

I have a new saying about my new, getting old, getting bald, getting fat, solitary, little-old-lady, almost-fifty life: 

"Nobody's cryin', nobody's lyin', and nobody's dyin'."

All my young life, my mother was whinin' and cryin'. "So-and-so did this to me, and So-and-so did that to me."

"Oh, you poor baby," was the only way she knew to feel self-worth.

If somebody done her wrong, and you were telling her they were wrong and she was right, that was a safe way, and the only way she knew how, to feel the validation she needed. Always from other people, because she was abused as a child and still all tied up in it, 

and she still felt worthless.

I don't have that in my life any more. I had to cut that influence out a long, long time ago due to some unbelievable behavior. 

(I haven't missed that behavior one little bit.)


And Chi. Sweet, handsome, smart, sharp, funny, incredible Chi.

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM. NOTHING!

He is, always was, and forever and ever will be, a lovely, lovely person.


But, he was an abused child, 

and he still feels worthless.

And the only way he doesn't feel worthless is if he's making everybody else happy all the time.

And if that isn't making him happy, he stays all walled-off and fortressed-up, shutting everyone out of his reality, not letting anyone see the real Chi, unwilling to BE the real Chi, resentful and self-denigrating and telling himself he's unlovable, repulsive, and that Fate has it in for him (those, sadly, aren't my words)...

while hanging a beautiful mural outside the walls of his lonely little fortress so no one knows anything is wrong.
This is known as "smiling depression," by the way.

And "smiling depression" is one big lie. One big lie to the world about who you really are, and one big lie in your relationship about what's really true within it.

And if I'm with Chi, and I love him the way he really is, and his trust is the most precious thing I have...

He basically just shuts you out. Quietly, with no notice, and acting flawlessly as if nothing's changed. 

If you are Chi's relationship partner, one day, you are no longer his best friend. 

And he JUST DOESN'T TELL YOU.

You won't find out about it for TEN YEARS.  At LEAST!

And the whole point of my relationship with Simon, and my relationship with Chi, was that we were best friends, and we trusted each other, and I knew their real hearts. 

Simon would never have done this to me!

If Chi and I ever really were together, and he walled himself off and stopped sharing, and he basically just cut me out of his life and went on living in the same house with me and pretended like nothing was at all wrong...

I'D WANT TO DIE.

I really, really would. 

I'm not Rory. I'm no wicked witch with an attitude problem, to hide away from in the Fortress.

It's one thing if every time you stick your nose out of the Fortress, there's a wicked witch out there throwing lightning bolts at you. That would scare anybody back in. But I am not that wicked witch, and if I am hurling lightning bolts, it may be that there is something seriously wrong with me, or going on in my life. Maybe I need the support of the person I am with, not to be walled out and left while he's still living in the same house, giving an Oscar-worthy performance that nothing is wrong.

I don't know how I'd ever be with Chi, and not be absolutely terrified that he was walling me out like that--and turning in such a good acting performance that I'd think everything was okay, and never, ever know until ten years later when he wanted me to know.

That would be much, much too late.

My whole world would just shatter into pieces.

Simon would never have done that to me. He knew that I'm a good woman, and he trusted me.

That is one scary scenario. ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING.

Who wants that to happen to her? Especially after fifty.

At least if I'm alone from now on, I don't have to be afraid of that.

And brain cancer, well...

Life is peaceful now. Nobody's cryin', nobody's lyin', and nobody's dyin'.

There are good things about being alone.

                                                    ***

I just have to keep reminding myself of that, I suppose.