An Update, Long Overdue

It’s been over a year since I’ve written here, and a lot has happened.  I’ve moved to Oakland to live alone, spent the past nine months teaching middle school (which, in this internet age, has made me much more squirrelly about my online presence and what I say here), and continued to work on a book that feels ever more like chopped-up pieces of squirming earthworm in my hands – perhaps they can be fitted back together but every time I try to start I just want to throw up.  

Perhaps most relevant is this: last time I wrote, I mentioned a new boyfriend.  Well, he’s still around, and not so new anymore.  We celebrated a year this January and we’re planning to move in together at the end of the summer, which is simultaneously surreal and wonderful and terrifying.  The last time I lived with someone I wound up staying with him for seven years, planning the next thirty, getting engaged, and then having my heart rot from the inside out over the course of three months until it was a putrid, useless thing.  The new partner has helped me discover – after I cut away most of the dead meat with the help of a very good therapist – that there was some living flesh still in there, and he has helped me encourage regrowth.  He’s patient and kind and a truly extraordinary person.

But it’s feelings like those that paralyze me with fear; I wrote about someone else like that not so long ago.  Once upon a time, almost exactly ten years ago now, I met a different young man who made me feel safe and wanted and supported, and I fell in love with him, and I followed him to another country and wrote a book that partly exalted his love.  And then he destroyed me.  Is it any wonder that the stronger my feelings grow for this new man, the more afraid I am for my emotional safety?

The difference, of course, is that I know my strength now.  If my boyfriend were to break my heart – and I don’t believe he ever could do what my ex did, if only because he’s far too self-aware and communicative – but if he did, I know I would survive it.  I would be able to bear the pain without wishing for death, because I would know that there is life after heartbreak.  I might have understood that logically before, but now that I’ve experienced it, I believe it.  Not that knowing I’d survive makes me any less afraid of the destruction itself.

As for this blog, I’m not sure how much more I have to say about my body, despite the fact that I set this blog up for that precise purpose – I seem to have leveled out and mellowed a bit, and dating has, if nothing else, made it clear to me that there are plenty of decent, attractive men who will be disappointed if I stop them from seeing me naked.  So I may be posting less and less often, although I will likely still come here to write about emotions that feel too…raw and unpolished for my author site.  

To those of you who do still read this (and the author) blog: thank you.  It’s nice to know I still have friends out there in the ether where my most painful thoughts exist like silt at the bottom of a river, swirling madly in the current and settling only on the rarest of calm days.