Someone else needs to title this post, because it’s beyond me.

This blogging thing is sometimes still confusing, even though I’ve been doing it in one form or another since 2005. When you write about your life a lot, the question sometimes arises whether to mention things that are undeniably present, hugely present, but also private enough that you don’t really want to write about them in the depth that you write about other things. And if you do, how? Because at some point, it feels dishonest to write as if everything is the way it was. So here goes.

After a fairly amicable split, I’m flying solo again. This is both terrible and okay. I won’t be writing publicly about our relationship other than to say that it was never just one thing, never just one way. Our relationship could be many different things in a very short period of time, and this part of it is much the same. So this week I find myself being teleported without notice from emotion to emotion.  But while I won’t be writing about our relationship, or the reasons for this, I will be writing about my life right now. (Trust me, the irony of going through this at the moment I’m doing that other piece of writing is not lost on me. At all.)

I have nothing bad to say about my former partner, period. This wasn’t caused by a deficit of love — just an inability to live together in a healthy way at current levels of growth.

Here is a poorly exposed photo of a chipmunk doing something funny to lighten the mood in here.

 

I have a good therapist, and she encouraged me the other day not to make any grand pronouncements about the future. There is no need to white-knuckle a “never again,” she said. Right now you need to focus on yourself, she said, and what you need to get by, what you need to do for yourself right now. She reminded me to work on my writing, because this is grounding for me.  So here I am, focusing on this first week in October, and holding everything else in ambiguity. This moment in time is a pinprick, a tiny circle beyond which I am declining to venture too far. It reminds me of walking in the woods at night with a small lantern. My world has become condensed, my life voluntarily held, for now, in this small capsule of light.

Like Dan Fogelberg said, Love when you can, cry when you have to, be who you must, that’s a part of the plan.

“Be who you must.” Always. Within that, love when you can. And cry when you have to.