Personal Journal

Difficult Conversations With the Self

I wrote this a few nights ago, and I've been brooding over it since then, which I will write about tonight.
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Back in Maryland.

I haven’t made many journal entries. I find it curious when I’m not journaling – the reasons why. Usually it has to do with an internal protection mechanism. I find myself thinking about something that is problematic in my life, and I don’t journal because I don’t want to expose that process. I usually journal when I’m “done” with something. But sometimes I don’t journal because I’m busy, or there’s just too much to say.
I find myself these past weeks in all of these places. Negative: Jean. Busy: Work/travel. Too much to say: Jean, Antietam’s Angel.

For those who follow this travesty that is my journal, Antietam’s Angel deserves some mention. She’s the kitten I found on my first trip out to Antietam National Park, the Civil War battlefield. I shall have to gloss over it at this point, but she was a terribly sick kitten who wandered onto the middle of my lane of the highway. I believe in God. God must certainly have put her and me there at that place and time for me to save her, and her me. She’s back in Colorado now, minus her left eye, which was removed due to the progression of the herpes infection she had. Her, I miss terribly. There’s a lot to say about that, but again, so busy, so much to say.

Fuckin’ Jean and I fought like caged beasts again, and frankly, I do not understand why I’m not just throwing in the goddamn towel. Patterns. What’s my pattern? I have a lot of them that apply here. I have a pattern of not wanting to quit (but I usually do, though not always) when something is difficult and I find myself losing interest because of the workload involved in progressing further (I’m lazy, and I hate myself for it). So maybe I’m trying because I believe in trying. Maybe I’m trying because I think there’s something worth saving in this relationship (but listen, I’ve lost touch with what that can be, I really have).

I also have a pattern of trying to avoid breaking off relationships because I don’t like the whole host of unpleasant feelings that goes with that. I also have a pattern of not wanting to end relationships at Christmas time.

Jean and I fought over the usual thing. Her slovenliness (or my perception thereof) in the kitchen. Took me a half hour to clean out the microwave oven because she’d let such filth accumulate in it in the 38 days I was gone. So I said to her “I would expect this from a 6-year old.” Apparently that was her trigger, and my trigger was her broadening the issue to a bunch of other unrelated things to attack me with and so then I started cussing and slamming my hand on the table, and that set her farther down. She said she was leaving, and I managed to disarm the situation and convince her that that’s not what I want.

Hell, I certainly don’t want us to go away mad, so to speak. If it needs to be done, let’s do it without all the volatility. And I want to do it. (comma)(elipse)(pause)
This is why I’m not journaling.
I can say that I want it to be over.
And some part of me resigns itself to silence when I lasso the whole and set it back on the path to making amends and to trying.
I don’t want anyone to know that this is what I’m thinking and feeling and pondering and struggling with.
I can tell that I’m going to keep trying.
I just don’t know why.
I’m somewhat clear on the reasons why I can see the logic in ending our relationship. I’m not at all clear on the reasons why I will keep trying, even if I can feel no real impulse or desire to want to keep trying. I just know that I will.

At this point in my life, I don’t have a single friend that I can talk to about this who could help me with those things that I don’t understand. No one knows me intimately anymore, and of those few (two) people with whom I’ve made an effort to be open, they don’t know Jean at all.

God doesn’t give clear answers, either, not usually. So I can’t see what value there may be in talking with god. Not that this isn’t talking to god, it is in its own way.

I’m going to sleep.
Back to work tomorrow.
In Columbia.
Maryland.
Again.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn