knowing your worth

Leveling Up

~ Solo Chick Traveler ~ Leave a comment
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. A movie that makes personal growth into a video game

I just got rid of someone I thought I already had from my life—my ex. I’d broken up with him years ago, but we still maintained a loose friends-with-benefits kind of thing. Because we’ve got chemistry, and good chemistry is a great thing! It’s a personal pastime of mine, carving out and trying to hold onto what worked between a guy and me without all that stuff that didn’t.  As if my men were something to dissect like frogs in Biology class. 

It never works, of course. You can’t just have the passion without the other parts coming along. Painful parts. All the reasons I can’t be with them are still there, and those reasons sneak in and spoil things. 

Mel Robbins did a reel on Instagram about compatibility versus chemistry. Getting with someone who matches your energy is the key to a sustainable partnership. Sometimes someone you don’t even know can call you out and make it impossible for you to hide from yourself in the same way. To do the same things. 

As my ex raises his voice, overrules my emotions, and insults my processing of the rainstorm upon us, I realize Mel was talking about me. Her reel replays and gets ready to say, ‘I present to you, Exhibit A.’ 

That’s how growth works. We hear or learn something that resonates on some level. It sort of festers and infects us, in a good way, and slowly but surely, we rise to the occasion this revelation offers us. 

We can try to forget things we hear, but we cannot unhear them. I could not go back to acting as if someone hadn’t just summed up my post-breakup M.O. in a two-minute video on Instagram. Something in me rose up and said, I’m done. Really done. 

“You can’t act that way and be in my life,” I hear myself say. “You can’t hijack my emotions and use my perspective against me.”

And if I keep letting him in, I’m telling him just the opposite. Louder than my words are my actions. What good are boundaries if you don’t enforce them?

That goes for my inner boundaries, which I have between me and me. I can’t say I deserve better and keep hanging out with someone who treats me like I don’t.

All hope that he’ll change, extinguished. We must accept that some people can’t, or won’t, change. Behavior rewarded is behavior continued. So is behavior justified. If someone gives you all the reasons why they do something—tired, angry, hungry, jealous, frustrated, drunk, stressed—what they are saying is, ‘When this condition returns, so will my behavior.’ 

We may see their potential, but potential is not something to fall in love with. 

Loss is painful, but fear of pain is not a good enough reason to stay. Change always feels weird at first. And exciting. There’s an opening in my world—I can’t wait to see what happens in it.

Promises don’t make change. Begging and pleading doesn’t either. Nor does fighting, demanding, or ultimatums you can’t follow through on. And repeated apologies without any behavioral modifications are manipulations designed to buy time—until the next time. 

The only thing that sparks change is a personal decision, and it usually sounds like, “I didn’t know my actions were having that effect. I’ll handle it differently next time.” And then, they do. 

People tell you who they are every day, all day. Better to believe what you see than your fantasy. 

Another thing I’ve learned (later than I would’ve liked), them not wanting to be without you is different than doing what it takes to be with you. Don’t get it twisted. 

I won’t take the former as adequate substitution for the latter ever again. 

Flip or Flop

~ Solo Chick Traveler ~ 2 Comments

Some things are best mended by a break. ~Edith Wharton

I know I promised last Throwback Thursday to write about the three things that led to my gypsy life on the road. But there was one big thing that cleared the way for them–I’d better talk about that first.

I bought a house (this probably sounds like a move in the opposite direction, but stay with me). A broken house bought with a man I was in a broken relationship with. Perhaps I thought I could fix them both.

The house was a foreclosure, the deep neglect of it assaulting my nostrils with a stench of mold so strong I thought it must’ve opened the door itself, to escape. A small pond had gathered in the basement, black mold climbing the walls like velvet wallpaper. Wires and plumbing hung from the rafters where the furnace and hot water heater had been ripped out. If a house could be raped, this one was. Plugging my nose and holding my breath, I couldn’t see any potential through my watering eyes as I ran back out to the motorcycle waiting for our ride to resume. 

But M could. He convinced me we could flip it, make a profit.  

A few months later, when the lease was up on my apartment, I moved into this work in progress–everything I owned in the garage, an air mattress on the floor where spackle would fall all around but thankfully never on. I hung drop cloths for curtains and aligned my transformation with the house’s–knowing when it sold it would send me somehow…somewhere. I’d been escaping winter more and more and for longer and longer, leading to the realization: the world was too big and beautiful to keep living in one place. With each trip, my grip around the only place I’d ever called home loosened. 

I was living on a launchpad.

Searching through paint samples prompted the searching of my mind–I was looking for what spoke to me on both fronts. “Caribbean Aqua Blue” and moving to an island. “Afterglow” and afterthoughts; all the things I’d miss, leaving all my friends. Could I do it? Would I be miserable? I painted walls and contemplated possibilities, altering us both. Designing the bathroom while searching new designs for my life. Out west? I loved the Zen feel of Sedona and her hundreds of hikes. Farther? The part of California where some of my dad’s family lived had a chic vibe with laid back surfer towns a quick drive away.

Into this reverie and renovation came an invitation to attend the wedding of M’s cousin in New Zealand. 

Our feet were dangling from the chuppah where a freshly minted marriage had vowed “til death do us part,” but my relationship was dead on arrival. No, nothing had happened. There hadn’t been a fight, none of the usual drama. Just an insight breaking across my heart, as soft as the mist beginning to fall–that’s how I knew it was true. We’re not going to make it. This will never be us.

An inconvenient truth only three days into a trip on the other side of the world. The timing was weird, ditto the location. Our vintage dress and the black and white photos would show us having a great time, our inner demons distracted for a while. But there was no mistaking it. A chasm was opening between us. M was sitting and talking right next to me, but he felt farther away. 

The mist turned to a soft rain, drops hitting my skin like punctuation marks. Okay, I get it. To make sure, it rained harder–in exclamation points. We ran into the big tent and joined in celebrating the newlyweds’ love with a night of drinking, dancing and laughing. Everyone was happy. We were happy. I pushed the chuppah revelation away, back to the inkling it typically was.

But the next day, it started to develop, like a photo appearing in the darkroom. Faint at first, then becomes more defined with time. Finally, as we traveled to the tip of the north island–officially named the Far, Far North–I could see it clearly and had to call it.  

Each linoleum square on the kitchen floor represented the intermittent intimacy in our six year on-again-off-again relationship. Both had fallen out of fashion. Both took time, strength and deep determination to rip up, my motivation rewarded by what I was uncovering. The original design. Hardwood floors and a heart ready to shine.

I learned mistakes could be corrected, sanded out, painted over, re-measured and re-cut–no one was going to look at my results as closely as I did. We took chances on a lavender accent wall in the living room. The belief everything was always getting better carried me and a trust in the outcome–for the house and for the new direction of my life–gave me inner peace (and power). There was a divine designer in charge. 

PS I like to sleep on everything I write, editing it the next day before posting. I’m on my way home and quickly pop into a Mexican restaurant for some guacamole to go. Without knowing why, I decided to dine-in instead. Amidst chips and salsa, a song M used to sing while strumming guitar comes on. It’s old and obscure, I’d never even heard of it before him. And it’s no mistake it’s playing now, in the hang time of this piece being published. Now I know why I felt pulled to stay, and I’m glad I did. M and I may not have been good romantic partners, but we’d been great business partners. And the house venture is what opened the way for me living on an island in January.