Tale

I really honestly believed in fairy tale ideas of true love.  I still believe in that kind of love, but I used to believe it was something I could have, and now I wonder if . . . I wonder if . . . maybe if its not possible for me, maybe it doesn't exsist for anyone?  But that's awfully mean thinking isn't it?

I choose to still believe in fairy tale true love.

I have prayed for true love.   You know what I got?   A whole bunch of very nice men interested in me.  That is encouraging, except I don't know if I am interested in any of them.  It's like when I was young all over again.  Men interested in me, but my interest was stuck on the one and only person who it felt like a miracle when we found each other. 

I've liked lots of men.  Lots of men would be very nice to live with.  But only one felt like a miracle.  That was First Love.   I had such a hard time getting over him.  I never felt that sense of miracle again.   I was always grateful that my husband married me.  I was always grateful to him and we had some fine times.   It kind of felt like a miracle that we got married, but what was different?   I didn't feel it was a miracle that we found each other, even though our meeting was much more unlikely if I told you the circumstances:  My ex-husband lived in another country and grew up in a different culture.  My First Love grew up in my home town, nothing remarkable about that at all.  The miracle was that I never expected to find anyone who would "get me" in my home town.  I always felt like an odd ball.  For my ex-husband to like me made more sense to me, because I never felt at home in my hometown anyway.   It isn't logical, my silly ideas of love and myself.

Anyway, Mom was right.  She didn't like first love and he did hurt me, twice.   So I don't know what to think about anything now.   My judgement bad.  Mom's judgement good.   If I can't trust myself then I'm totally lost, right?

Well ideas of true love, of people who are meant for each other, or choose each other above all others, while that might have been true of me towards him, it obviously wasn't true of him towards me so that bursts that balloon.  

So now I have to make do.

I don't know how.  How to start over?.  I have to be able to make some kind of decision.

Different men, all nice in different ways, but all selfish too, no one who is that "into me" anyway, maybe I'm oversensative since the divorce but I see all these men as not into me enough.  I actually had a man tell me that he didn't want to jeopardize his daughter's inheiratence so he was not interested in marrying, only in sex.  !!!  This from a man who is morbidly obese and crippled with arthritis among other health complaints. Even if he was a young and healthy Cary Grant, I mean that is so shocking to me.   I mean obviously that is just too selfish to even respond to.    For that matter, First Love was selfish too.  That's the truth.  So maybe I need to pray for someone new.  Be specific about who I'm looking for, his qualities.  Maybe I better get that straight in my head first, and then pray. 

Oh well, my marriage was nice for a while, it was comfortable and fun.  I just needed to learn how to influence him to be less selfish.  I never accomplished that, so instead ended it.

I really need to remind myself that First Love was really a stupid jerk to me.   Sometimes I plead "Go Away!" but then I retract it and say "I don't really mean it."  You did betray me First Love, twice.  It's more than I can get my head around sometiems.  I don't know why it's so hard to let it go.  It's not that hard to let go of anyone else.  Why is that one relationship, that relatively short relationship so important to me?  It irritates me, how I won't let it go.  I'm sorry First Love for not being able to let go, when you obviously want me to.  Right?  You are a bad-breaker upper though.  You give no emotional closure just a slam in the face with a great big question mark "Why?"

Face

I'm going to start having super expensive facials once a month again. 

I used to get monthly facials when I lived in another city.  It was my way of dealing with acne while working as a salesperson so needing to look my best.  I had fake nails for a while too but that didn't work out very well, so stopped that after a couple months.  Facials, on the other hand, were wonderful and worth every penny.  I thought I looked like a movie star when I had facials.  Plump and moist;  my skin looked beautiful.

When I look at myself I am starting to feel older and so I really need to get better skintone back.  

So hopefully as I improve my facial skintone, and as I start to finally lose fat, perhaps I'll start to relax and feel less distracted, and sleep better.   Fingers crossed.

Update:  Decided not to do this afterall.  Just too hard to find an aethstitician.  oh well.

Clouds

When you learn meditation it teaches you to see your emotions and thoughts as clouds passing over a landscape.  While clouds are part of a landscape, they are not the landscape.  So please understand that when I say I'm angry, pleased, anxious or thankful, that I'm experiencing an emotion that is passing through me, it started and it will end, and it does not define me.  Likewise when I have thoughts that trigger certain emotions I've learned I can change my thoughts to change my emotions too.

So when I say I'm angry and full of regret right now at myself for some decisions I made this past year, its indicating to me that I want to find some way of coming to peace with those decisions.  I am looking for peace from that anger and regret.

Choosing to go to school in September 2012-June 2013 was the worst mistake I've made in a very long time.  I was reeling in pain from losing First Love a second time, I was frustrated from a too long 2+ years long divorce, and I was taking advice from people who helped me in the past, and rebelling against someone who was helping me more than anyone else has ever helped me but who I resented because I relied on her so much.

It was a horrible choice for many reasons including 1. it was too expensive, 2. it took too much of my time, 3. it was physically too demanding.  It resulted in 1. wasting about half of my annual income on something I did not need and will not use, 2. causing health crisis in myself and my family due to putting off health checks, stopped exercising, stopped preparing fresh food, and becoming ill, 3. gaining weight due to not being able to manage my time to include exercise and eating carefully, 4. damaging my rotator cuff so that now the chronic pain also interrupts my sleep and being injured has reduced my overall strength and wellness, 5. also it only pushed back the time that I now also have to deal with the tumbling of emotions that I was avoiding by starting school.

I hate my decision to go to school, and worse to stay in school when everything started falling apart, and therefore exasperating the injury to my shoulder, and weight control efforts.  I'm just so angry at myself for all of this.  Angry, angry, angry.   I want to be thin again, I want to be able to hook my bra again without pain.   Angry, angry, angry.

Church

It turns out that I know some women who go to the church I was brought up in.  I stopped going to that church when I was in grade school but some of my family still attend.  I also know one person who attended my church, but who changed religion when she married, and now divorced she is searching for a new church; she would not go back to our childhood church either.

What I'm noticing with the women who do attend, is that 1. they prosthelytize, 2. they are weirdly dedicated to their church, to the point where it takes precedence over their family of parents and siblings.  In fact the church has come between them and their family of parents and siblings in different ways.  The church emphasizes how people should structure their allegiances, putting god (ie. the church) as the central focus of the home, with men as head of the household, and women should seperate themselves from the family they grew up in to dedicate and find their happiness with their husband and children.

All the women who attend, I've observed that their behavior is similar to how I would describe the sexual game of Male Dominant & female submissive, which is sort of a subcategory of the power division in BDSM.  For years I've noticed how the women I know seem titillated and thrilled by being submissive to their husbands in everyday terms, from small things such as letting their husband choose whether they go out to dinner, and where they go out to dinner, to larger things like letting their husband decide to move away from their family of parents and siblings.  This also means that these women take their husbands sides in conflicts between their parents and siblings.

It seems like a simple-minded, and to those women it is perhaps sexually gratifying, way to live your life but at a terrible cost of alienating kin,  thus putting those women in the situation of having more need to, more likely to, cleave closely to the church for social support.

I don't like it. I think its wrong.  It clarifies why I never liked that church, but further more, maybe it clarifies what I did wrong when I was married.  I can't go into it anymore than this, but I needed to write this down so I can think about it more.

I think if a woman wants to take charge of her sexuality by consciously choosing to be an Anastasia to her Mr Grey that's one thing, but to do so under the guise of following the church is an ugly distortion of religion as a way of abusively controlling people.

Counsel

Last summer after First Love rejected me a second time, I felt desperate and sought the help of a therapist.  She is someone who believes in new age stuff, and she doesn't have the authority to prescribe drugs so I felt safe with her.

I think she helped me.  I'm not sure though.   In some ways talking with her exacerbated my feelings because I was stirring things up and looking at them, rather than ignoring them.  So it's hard to say whether she helped or hurt. I know that I acted more impetuously and dramatically than any other time in my life; as if she validated my feelings and that gave me the confidence to act on those feelings. I can't decide if that was good or bad, but it was embarrassing. In any case, I decided to try seeing her again.  I hope it will be helpful because now that school is done all the stuff I've been avoiding  is flooding back into consciousness.

I'd been talking to the only other person on earth who understands, has an inkling of, what it was like with the man I was married to.   There were two clear and distinct times when I earnestly worried that he was coldly trying to figure out how he could kill me and get away with it.  My strong suspicions led to me fleeing from him in those two situations that month.  I don't know if I told anyone.  Even if I did, people tend to forget things like that, brush me off as if I was over-reacting.

I know it sounds paranoid, especially considering that an earlier time I wondered if he was slowly poisoning me.  I don't believe i told anyone that, because it was too hard for me to believe. I just remember noticing that I'd be dizzy a lot when he was home, and fine when he was working out of town.  I came to the conclusion that I must hyperventilate out of nervousness when he was around, which must have been the cause of my dizziness.   It happened for about a year, him home 3-4 months, gone 3-4 months working, home  3-4 months, etc.  Around that same time I found an oddly small size, almost child size, of bikini underpants in our laundry.  They did not belong to me.  I never found out where they came from but I reasoned they might have been my best friend's who was a recent house guest, even thought I knew she wore the same size large panties I wear.  We had been roommates and friends for for many years and often did our laundry together.

In the past I went to psychics for help, but they left a sour taste in my mouth.  It's too imprecise and has the danger of inciting real harm.   I mean to say, if they predict good positive things it might be comforting but wrong and then I feel disappointed, and if they predict negative things I might make them come true just due to the suggestion -- like in MacBeth or Hamlet: witches predictions, ghosts pleas for vengence.  If you believe in the supernatural you know that the nature of reality is difficult to pin down.  Who is to say that all familiar spirits are not deceitful demons anyway?  That shadowy world is just all too confusing, and more confusion in the midst of confusion isn't helpful.

So yes, I'll be seeing a counselor again. I was married to someone who likely is mentally ill and I would like help seeing things more clearly and with more balance.  I hope it will be helpful.  Fingers crossed.

Turn

I may have finally turned the corner, to be on a new more optimistic path than when I was still primarily missing First Love.   His betrayal of me that I never got over, my husband's betrayal of me, and First Love's second betrayal,  it's not what I expected from life.  I really believed that my life would be like the fairytales, to fall in love and get married and stay married forever after.  I'm not sure how to make sense of my life.  No different from other people I'm sure, bad judgement or bad luck led to a calamity that I had a hard time getting over.  I kept trying to get past that hurdle but it stymied me, for whatever reason.  Anyway my hope is that now that I have a real resolution from losing First Love, maybe now I am free to find what I was looking for in the first place. 

Maybe now I'm on a new path towards real, steady, steadfast, dedicated, true love.

I hope so.

I really like my new boyfriend even if he does live too far away.  Even if this, that, and the other thing. There will always be problems to deal with.  That's the whole journey of life.

For now I love life the way it is.  I'll try to stop fretting about where it is going, and rest in god's arms, that god will lead me in the place god wants me to be.   It's an easier way to live.  We'll see what the future brings.

I hope the future brings love and marriage - the real, true tender mutual caring of a loving marriage.

We'll see.

 

Flowers

I've taken to buying fresh flowers for myself, kept on my desk at work.

One of the first things I put into my shopping bag at the grocery store is a bunch of pretty flowers.   They are very satisfying to look at, nourishing in a way.  Then I walk around and get the fresh fruit and vegetables, lastly any cooled foods, like aloe juice and almond milk.

The flowers are very calming to look at while at work and make me feel as though I'm treating myself like a rock star, someone special.

Nevertheless this week, I am full of anxiety and even though I feel very full, my appetite has been nagging, unceasing.  I think I may just need more nutrients so I'm taking vitamins and lots of iron everyday again.

This past weekend I visited my long distance boyfriend.  It was the first time I traveled the long distance to see him and his home.  I enjoyed myself, I miss him now too, but to imagine myself living with him so far away from my family . . . maybe that is the source of my anxiety.  Anyway its too early to think about that.  He is nice, I like him a lot.  He's sexy to me, even though when I was younger I might not have thought he was as sexy as I do now.  He's not rock ' roll sexy.  He's calm, trustworthy, responsible sexy. 

Anyway to get myself back on track, to stop overeating as I have this week so far, I'm going to start weighing myself everyday again and post it here on this site.  Maybe I'll start taking my measurements too.  Just need to reign myself in a little and focus more on my goals.

p.s. It's a new moon last night and tonight.  Time for new moon prayers.

8/7 - homescale 182 lbs.

8/12 - homescale 180.5 lbs.

8/14 - homescale 182 lbs. :(

8/15 - homescale 183 lbs.  ARRRGH!!!!