I have been editing mostly lately. Trying to pull together another collection. With all the writings I never published over the last year or two, it could be a pretty big collection. It won’t sell, but it is a way for me to have a paperback of my writing, and I am enjoying the way I am cataloging each story this time. I won’t lie, AI is helping with that a bit.
With my brain and the way it works, I like not having a blank page, and I use AI for organizing my thoughts.
But what does that have to do with cycles? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I was reading a post today about the cult of self-healing you find online. I am fascinated with cults, and I would be hard-pressed to say no if I had a tiny house on a piece of land not anywhere in the US and I could be one of the wise women that gets to read and write and be taken care of as long as you don’t try to silver me and kill me. I want good health care, too.
It triggered a thought, though, as I am reviewing my writings, and you see how my brain jumps from here to there all the time. I was thinking about him and me and how we haven’t healed all the way. We’ve been following a cycle. There is a romanticized version of it that is a push and pull and finding each other again, but it boils down to how past experiences made both of us wary. How we pull back because we are afraid. That doesn’t discount the real issue of distance that is definitely there, but there is more going on, too.
I was thinking about how he will move on, but will he heal before grabbing onto another person? I am trying to distance myself online and in person because I am afraid of what this break has done to me, and obviously I don’t want to let go yet. I may never be fully healed from everything, and I understand that it doesn’t mean I don’t deserve love, but . . .
I received several messages from different exes of his over the past years, and they painted a picture of him that just isn’t accurate. I knew one ex, not well, but I followed her for years and I remember when she was talking to him. I have seen her words and know that her perspective cannot be trusted. It is not that the experience wasn’t similar, but her view of it was so cut-and-dried and selfish. I am in her same position now, trying to hold on to some integrity although fucking it up a bit, trying to keep the empathy I always had for him and his situation because it was way too similar to my own. It hurts to see it. I am a sufferer and martyr a lot of the time, but I don’t want that for him. I want him to find a way to break the cycle. The cycle of him hurting himself. I want him to be happy.
Lisa Gray 