Pacing

I have debated getting another counselor while I've been on hiatus from seeing my doctor. Our processing has not been aggressive enough for what I need, ultimately, but I think I am going to try to talk to her about stepping it up. I really do like her. I also don't have the energy to find someone else close to where I live who shares my beliefs. I'll give it some more time. I've laid a good amount of groundwork with her, and I don't want to lose the months of effort it took to get this started.

I've been anxious for the last couple of days about my relationship with Gordon. Anxiety and fear undermine love and loving action, so I've been trying trying to banish them to the nether regions. I'm continuing to process internally, as proactively as I can, sans counseling. I'm trying to act on my own behalf.

Here's one thing I've done that is small, but the implications of which are significant, as any friend of mine who reads this blog can attest.

I deleted the three e-mails in the trail from 2 years ago in which I asked Gordon out, he summarily declined my offer with the standard "let's be friends" proviso, and my emotionless reply that I saw absolutely no problem with that.

I felt compelled yesterday to go into my archives and look at those e-mails again. I do this from time to time, usually out of a masochistic need to confirm that I am worthless and stupid, but this time my motivation was devoid of such perversion. Normally, when I read these missives, I feel the soul-crushing, paralyzing shame of having asked the question I did. And in those moments, I cannot distinguish my reaction from the actual day it all happened. I just end up being right back there.

But yesterday, when I read them, I felt that I could take what he said at face value, and it did not make me want to hide or cry to see his refusal staring at me from the monitor. In fact, I felt that those e-mails were so far removed from who we are now, and that our present connection, our evolved relationship so overshadowed those quick messages, that they seemed to not even belong to our experience (though they do. In a way, they are responsible for our present closeness).

I saw that holding on to them had been my way of defining myself as a loser, because that comforted me, and ironically, of keeping Gordon at arm's length, which also, perversely, comforted me. I let them be the sum total and final word on who we were to be to each other for so long, even though the definition they offered has had no bearing on his feelings for me for the longest time. It would have been unthinkable for me to have erased them before.

Yesterday it became unthinkable to keep them.