Reconciliation

 

I want to bring something up here, since my FB is split between people I hang out with in person and people I know online.

If I’ve said something that’s directly damaging to our connection together, ideally, I’d like to know. I realize that that implies a certain level of intimacy and familiarity that I don’t have with 100% of people here, so I allow for that. I also understand that the cultural norm is now to preserve oneself and just ghost and walk away. I’m fully, maturely aware that no one owes me a “breakup” conversation about anything. I allow for all of these realities and see and hear them.

But for those who have the spoons, I’d like to actively know how I might’ve harmed our relationship towards one another, so that I can try to make it better, or at least know for other relationships in future. Some of it is going to be socially trained stuff, like various forms of privilege, that are not immediately visible to certain people on a daily basis and that we have to work at, so I cannot make any blanket promises that I won’t continue to harm you. But I will try consciously not to keep doing the thing.

And if you’ve already given me feedback in the past, whether it be in an interaction in your space or mine or in person, I’m hugely grateful for it. That is a gift of generosity.

It’s also ok if our beliefs just don’t jive together anymore. Honestly I’ve felt that way about so many, many people this year, and it was hard. The standup comedy scene in LA is not super conducive to community-building. And I had to accept that *I’m* not a community person this year—it’s considered such a progressive value that we talk about interconnectedness all the time, but honestly a lot of my experience over my entire life has been some level of isolation or feeling aloneness, and I don’t know whether that’s ever going to evolve, so I might as well just meet myself right here, right now. And while that is a “symptom of depression” (comedic air quotes), maybe it just….exists for me. You can call me sick, and you can choose not to want that in your space, and I respect that. I’ve walked away from people when they were in that state too, except for me it’s like, permanent, I just become more attuned to it at certain times haha. And I don’t really think it makes me broken or wrong, it’s just how I turned out, I’ve spent 35 years in therapy to attempt to change it (and at least 10 years with a conscious focus on it to shift it), and it hasn’t shifted much.

Simultaneously I’ve also spent the past few years negotiating my relationship to overperforming in relationships and over-giving, and now I think the pendulum has swung towards being withdrawn. In fact R has remarked on how withdrawn I can be in social situations. Well, guess what’s a symptom of trauma!! *shimmies chest fat*

So yeah. My messages are open for a calm conversation on our relationship. This is not coming from a place of desperation, nor disempowerment. I don’t need anything from you, and have learned to live with the absence already. It would just be nice, is all.