August 2, 2011- Note: This post is rather personal, and is really my final say on a matter that I reflected on for a long time. As I wrote it, my inability to expound on my feelings seemed to give way to clarity. I had finally uttered what I had spent so many months trying to find words to define. When I finished, it was with enormous relief. That day I let it go. I hadn't expected it, but it came nonetheless. I leave it here as a reminder of where I was. With grace, it weighs me no more.
I love that line. In seven words, Sondheim says so much. You're constantly seeing ahead, projecting ahead, that you forget that you are already moving ahead. And in that regard, you get stuck in a strange purgatory, never fully present, but not living out a real future. Just an envisioned one.
That's a lot like some relationships, isn't it?
My last relationship saw me at probably one of the most vulnerable and unhappy times of my life. The future loomed ahead of me, and because I was touring the country, having left behind my new home and newly formed friendships in New York City, I had very little stability. That coupled with some antagonistic tourmates made life a bit of nightmare, and from which I found little escape. My only escape was my long distance relationship, which in retrospect (being 20/20) I shouldn't have started in the first place. Our relationship existed solely on the phone. No shared memories. No time spent in the others company, save the one time he was able to visit. It was like having someone to tell you the things you wanted to hear, without the actions to really back it up. And it occurred on both ends of that line; we both did that to each other. I acted like a teenager, with the attendant highs and lows. I needed a life line from touring, I grabbed it, and after it ended I have to say I was rather ashamed of, and stunned by, my behavior.
Why had I behaved this way? Why was I so volatile? I had made explicit to myself what I would and would not like in a relationship, and yet all my rational thought had simply and singly been thrown out the window. I'm fairly levelheaded when it comes to my friends and their issues and problems; I understand many different opinions and sides, and try to give them all equal weight. I understand that ambiguity. However, for myself, I became victim to the whims of my emotions, and I wanted the answers that served MY purpose. In other words, I couldn't practice what I preached, and that started me to thinking.
I'm the kind of guy to whom the phrase "Still waters run deep" applies in spades. I spent most of my teenage years in a bit of a daze. I had lost all personality, lost my own voice. Numb to most anything but this deep sense of something wrong that I couldn't articulate until my final year of college. When I finally sought help and learned to feel something, anything, it wasn't at all what I expected. Instead of the jubilant emotions that I had hoped to feel, I was left dealing with the huge sense of loss I couldn't fathom. Where had it come from? And then it came to me, like a door opening onto a vast and pitch black hall: My parents' divorce. I had never realized it before because I had buried the anger and frustration so deeply that it seemed to disappear. Of course, it hadn't. Upon reflection, it became a defining moment of my life. As a friend once told me, "It's as if all the color was sucked out of the world."
The pain had been more than I could handle, and an emotionally withdrawn armor had formed, mostly against letting myself love someone, or be loved by someone, lest I get hurt again. I wasn't antagonistic or bitter, but aloof to life and work, taking little interest in the things I used to love, and only seeking out relationships sporadically. When I felt that people were starting to get too enmeshed in my life, I'd find a new place to be or move. It seemed to manifest as the restlessness I've mentioned before, and I always justified it because of my natural need for adventure and endeavor, but on reflection, I realized it was partially running away. I liked being alone, and doing things on my own, only because it prevented people from seeing the hurt I was in, from which I was sure most of my friends would flee to avoid. Only when I would get intimately involved with someone would I have to confront my deeper turmoil, and even then I didn't have the ability to understand and articulate it. However, the end of my last relationship threw it all into high relief, and I decided to finally let myself grieve, both for the relationship and for the past. I wanted to be conscious of every emotion, every nuance of feeling that passed through me. I began to piece myself together. I began to trust myself and those I loved.
Today, the sadness, the ache has diminished and changed somewhat, but I realize it may never quite go away. However, knowing it's there, and respecting it, is much of the battle. Each disappointment feels greater because of it, and each triumph is infinitely more rich. Thankfully, I can now see it, when before, I was merely coasting through life not knowing. The process of stripping it of its negative power may take a long time, but if that's the price to pay for the freedom from, or the acceptance of, it, then that's the way this cookie has to crumble. That's the way to move on. And that's what I think Sondheim meant.
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