Expectations

My thoughts feel jumbled... more often than not I have something swirling in my head for a bit before I have the need to write, but occasionally I just can't seem to land on any of the things going on in there to actually work through them and I have found sitting down to write helps me to process and just work through it, so here I am. I've spent a lot of time with my twin the last few days moving him to Philly. I've been so worried about him for the last few years honestly, but more so recently. He has started being more honest about his state of mind, but has also started pulling away again. It was difficult to not be close and to feel a little bit helpless when wanting to help him, to make things just a little bit easier. We talked a lot the last few days about how different our lives have turned out to be and conversations about how he was treated differently for being a boy, but also for being a sensitive effeminate boy. What I gathered over the last few days is that my twin has spent most of his life being told to dislike who he is because it didn't conform, and lo behold he's now a grown ass adult who doesn't like himself and it impacts his ability to be a functioning adult capable of making decisions because he doesn't trust his own judgement. Even little, inconsequential decisions can cause him to freeze up.  I'm so hopeful this move will be the clean slate he deserves to start this new decade on a positive note, to let go of all his limiting beliefs about himself and the prospects for his life and that it could be so much more. It's become apparent he has been so very close to giving up entirely on so many occasions across this last decade and right now I just feel grateful he fucking made it to 30. I feel grateful that maybe I have the chance to help get him to a place of truly wanting to be here, and to be here as him, fully functioning him, not dulled out self medicated on whatever the fuck him.

It's taken the last five years for us to recognize that circumstances of our childhood, and then being at such different places along the "typical life path" after college, resulted in us losing the closeness we once shared, but that it never truly was something either of us wanted. Even though unlike identical twins, it's very fucking obvious we're different people, we definitely still experienced being treated like a packaged deal. In some cases, it didn't really have a negative impact... but in other times it definitely high lighted things. I loved playing baseball, it was easier to only have one activity for both of us to do, but it was also my first experience realizing being a girl would sometimes limit me from doing something I wanted to do. There were a decent number of other little girls the first two years, then it really dwindled, and my last year in the league, I was the only girl. I started off being third base cause I had an arm, to eventually being moved to Left, which when you're a kid, not too many people are hitting out there... but at least if they did, it was going there, then eventually I was put in Right. It's not like the little boys treated me any differently, I honestly have zero recollection of ever being teased or not talked to or included by any of my teammates, it was the male coaches that little by little decided I shouldn't be there. In sixth grade I switched to softball but hated it because you couldn't steal bases and for the most part to me that meant stealing away half the fun.  This was also the same time that kids started making their own lists for their birthday parties, and while my twin and I were definitely still close friends with each other, we didn't share the same friends at school, and while typically a kid wouldn't always be able to know they weren't invited to a party, my brother lived with me, a social outgoing chatterbox that got invited to everything. I know my mom thought what she was doing was protecting my brother from hurt feelings, but making a rule that I wasn't allowed to go to boy girl parties if he wasn't invited just created a situation that pitted us against each other and made him feel pitied when kids invited him after the fact so I could go. So he wouldn't accept, and in the end neither of us got to go, until I started lying so that I could...I sincerely believe overly strict parents just create sneaky kids that hide their lives from you.  Like it has never made sense to me adults that automatically expect respect, even though they don't give it...

In the end I think my thoughts have been zeroing in on this acknowledgment that somewhere along the line, my brother didn't learn how to regulate his emotions the same way that my sister and I did and I can't help but wonder how much of that has purely to do with the fact that he's a boy. So many of the things I've been reading and researching the last year or two have been about emotions, and what they really are in our bodies. Like I found it fascinating to learn that all emotions are linked to hormones, either a specific one, or a combo of them, and your body releases these hormones after receiving certain external and internal cues like quickened heart rate or perceived threats, and if all of a sudden you have too much of that hormone in your system, it literally tries to clear it by making you cry. Obviously as a woman, I learned early on just how impactful hormones can be to your emotions and your clarity, I am very susceptible to PMS, and it's something wild to watch yourself over react to something while inside you is like "damn why you getting all upset?", and then the relief when a few days later the biological aspect happens and you get this nice confirmation of "Oh thank god, I'm not that crazy". Like guys never get that experience, that utterly true acknowledgement that we are not our emotions or our thoughts, that they're literally just responses to external input that are heavily impacted by the chemistry happening inside us. And that chemistry is fickle as fuck, and lots of things can force it out of whack that both men and women experience on the daily. Lack of sleep, poor eating habits, stress from work or family or financial woes, all this shit impacts your internal chemistry. I'm not saying that our thoughts and emotions aren't real, they 100% are and ALWAYS deserve to be acknowledged, I'm just saying that they are not always reliable or accurately reflect the reality of a situation. Which is why I think it's super important to try your best to hold out on discussing a conflict with anyone in your life until after the initial emotional reaction runs its course. Obviously this is much easier said than done, but gets easier with practice, and I definitely know I still really struggle with this right before my period but I'm getting better at acknowledging it and apologizing after the fact if I need to.

Right now I feel like I do owe someone an apology for getting swept up in my anger and judging their decisions about their life because they didn't choose what I hoped they would. In such a back and forth situation, I don't think my anger was unfounded, but my judgement wasn't fair. Sometimes I think we have to remember that we can have ideas about what we think would be good for someone we love, but at the end of the day you have to trust that they know what's best for them. I don't think this applies to abusive situations, but for the most part, if someone seems genuinely happy even though things are different from what you had personally hoped for them, well then you just gotta try your best to be happy for them. In a romantic situation, I think it's really hard to not then run through your memories and wonder if any of it was real when someone doesn't choose you back. I think it's really hard to not begin to believe that just a few months ago when they told you that they loved you too, that they must have been lying. I think the real challenge is realizing that while we want the past to mean something in the present, it often doesn't, but that doesn't erase the past, it doesn't mean they didn't mean what they said when they said it, it just might mean that unfortunately you have different definitions of love. And again I keep circling back to that phrase, "Expectations are the blueprints for disappointment". Being in love with a version of someone from the past, or in love with a potential, isn't the same as being in love with who they currently are...So does that mean the love you feel isn't real? I'm not sure, I think it's definitely still love in a sense, but I'm not sure it means it's anything that should be impacting the choices you make for your own life. Love doesn't have an on/off switch unfortunately, and there are parts of me that genuinely believe that once you let someone into your heart, they're there for life, but you certainly can choose to stop feeding that love, and eventually the amount of space that person takes up in there will dwindle, and you'll have figured out how to make room for someone who wants to be there.

Lately I keep wavering between being so excited about my life and the future and then suddenly almost without warning feeling like I'm right back where I was, devastated over losing someone. Someone I had a genuine friendship with and I thought understood me and the things I had been through and sincerely wanted  and loved me back. However the fact that these "sad sads" are starting to feel more annoying than anything else feels like a really good sign. I think what remains hard is when I get the urge to know what he thinks about something, like the latest season of Black Mirror or whatever other stupid shit I've somehow connected to him in my brain. When you've been talking to the same person everyday for a couple of months and then it just stops, I think it will just always be hard to stop that internal moment where you have the desire to share the good and bad with them.  I really do think time is the only true answer to that one, cuz just finding someone else when you're not quite over it, will never be anything more than a distraction, and will never be fair to that other person. I think perhaps what has kept me in the loop of this never gonna be a happy ending situation is that the longest stretch of constant communication was 5 months, and I wasn't even local at the time...I guess to me it will probably always feel like we never really tried. However I think I have to admit to myself that the opportunity to try has come and gone and he didn't take it, and that should be my answer.

Shortly after I left my ex-husband I wrote this, and I still believe this and I'm trying my hardest to believe something like this is still waiting for me.

"When you decide you want to spend your life with someone you're saying that's the face I want to wake up to everyday, those are the eyes I want to lose myself in, that is the smile I want to make my heart swell, those are the hands I want to comfort me, that is the laugh I want to hear when I need it most, that is the mind I want to try my best to understand, that is the soul I want to create new life with. You are picking someone to share the burdens and joys with. You have to adore them so that when they eventually annoy you, all they have to do is smile and the annoyance is gone. You have to be able to have fun with them or else the hardships of life will become what's front and center. You have to be able to be unapologetically yourself when you're with them because across a lifetime together, it's impossible to always be what you think they want. "