Last week, I talked to a guy in the train because he was reading American Gods (one of my favourite book ever). We spent an amazing week together. Today, we're going to travel around Europe together - after all, it's bold moves october. All that makes me incredibly happy - it was the perfect encounter, at the right moment and the right place. From both of us, thank you for having such a great effect on the world.
Huge grin.
Saw your post about Oct being "bold moves" month. I bought purple hair dye, and told my parents I am not going to finish my business program. My certificate would not help in my life nor my career, and I can gain the knowledge elsewhere in better quality, without all the stress, expense, and exhaustion. My husband said he was proud of me. Thanks for giving me the motivation!
You are welcome, but the real thanks should go to Datebynumbers whose creation Bold Moves October is.
Yesterday, I had my in-person interview for my dream job and it went really well…I think. It was supposed to last for an hour and a half and it lasted for two and a half hours. No one grilled me. I didn’t get any of those terrible “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” questions. I think they liked me and seemed enthusiastic about my response to their questions. Someone even mentioned that she really, really liked my Beauty Queen Dreams photostory. I was nervous but not terrified.
And today, I wrote my sample writing piece they asked for, and I wrote it well given a limited amount of information and time. I did my research. I did my best.
If I don’t get this job, I’ll be terrified to look for more jobs, yes, but I’ll also know I did my best and was myself and that’s all I could do. And I will also know that I honestly put myself out there—out here, on tumblr, and told you, despite the risk of looking like a fool. I might need to be reminded of this, as I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks to hear back from dream job.
Bold Moves, y’all. Bold Moves October continues, even when the moves look nothing like I expected them to.
Bold Moves October - the closing argument
Last night I walked to the grocery at dusk. It was just chilly enough to wear a hat, but no gloves. I had an entry I was still working out in my head, so I pretended to tell the story to someone else on my phone while I walked to store, working out the kinks in the story to an audience of none. I still haven’t worked out the kinks, but on the way back from the store, I stopped on the bridge over the creek. The full moon was lined up over the water and nearby traffic was quiet. I leaned on the railing for a while, attempting to tap into some introspection. Aside from mild boy-related agitation, I felt really, really good. And let’s be serious, the mild boy-related agitation was actually kind of enjoyable. At peace, I realized the date. October was ending.
What a month. I want to thank you all for participating in Bold Moves October. In 2009, it was all about hitting on guys. In 2010, it was about changing my life. In 2011, it was about having fun and self-respect. This year, Bold Moves October for me was about faith - faith that things would work out, faith that I was strong enough, faith that if I reached for something bigger, I would get it.
And that’s when I realized it had nothing to do with faith at all.
In passing, I said something to my father about how lucky I’ve been. He cut me off immediately to correct me.
“You’re not lucky. You’re ambitious and friendly and you continually put yourself out there. Maybe luck is a small part, but most of it is just you.”
That is what Bold Moves is about - you can have all the faith and luck in the world, but unless you have goals that you are actively pursuing, you’re never gonna get any happier. It’s hard to avoid the picture that a loving relationship is what ties the knot in your last stitch, but when I set out for an entire month to ambitiously pursue nothing but my own goals, it was difficult to deny how radiantly happy I was on my own.
I’ve still got my fingers crossed for him, but I’ve also got my fingers crossed for bike racing, television writing, and a triumphantly large life because that’s the way I’m wired - I’m a dreamer, a romantic, a narrator, a lyricist, a poet. I write the way I imagine it feels and I feel it the way I imagine it, which is to say, with everything I have.
There’s a day left in Bold Moves October. There are two months left in the making of an enviable year. And then there’s every day for the rest of your life.
My Stages Of Grief Take a Different Turn
As my boldest move of October blew up in a very shitty fashion the first weekend of this month, I’ve found myself coping normal to odd ways.
The sadness was there, plus drinking, but the election results helped wash those emotions away.
There was less bargaining as a kind of negotiation phase (the results of which I think I’m doing an amazing job of not reading too much into.)
Now I’m on to the “moving on” part, and…it’s weird. I’m either having (hopefully overblown) doubts about meeting someone great anytime soon or: a powerful urge to date a woman with an accent. Preferably British, though Scottish, Irish, or Australian would work. Expat not so much preferred as just more likely.
Only: how many single, straight female British expats (who aren’t taking an undergraduate semester abroad here — that happens, right?) can there be in Atlanta? And how the fuck would I meet them?
And, because it wouldn’t be me without a little self-loathing, it’s an odd bit of shallowness isn’t it? Aurally shallow? Accentally biased? Taking Anglophilia a kilometer too far?
All this could go away if Jennifer Lawrence shows up at the Sex BBQ show tonight and we fell madly in lust.
Procrastination Meets Bold Moves October
I put it off, and put it off, and put it off some more. But when you still miss your ex even after you’ve been apart longer than you were ever actually dating, and, more importantly the main reasons you split up have changed, you have to finally tell her, right?
Well, it took me until the 25 of October, but I finally made that move. How she’ll respond I don’t know.
But I feel good about it. Best case? I get back together with a woman who I was in my best and healthiest relationship ever, with even more potential for a future together.
If I get the Taylor Swift single treatment? I won’t go out this weekend and make no moves on anyone because I was secretly hoping to get back together with my ex-.
On Break Ups
I haven’t wanted to write anything about this because I think it just further puts it out into the world and makes it really real. Not that it isn’t real or I don’t believe that it has happened because it’s real and I know it happened, I was the one to pull the trigger. It just sucks and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying little by little to stop thinking about him in the ways that I used to think about him.
Breaking up sucks. Regardless of who is doing the breaking. There is always still a huge piece of you that wants to hold on even though the rest of you knows that you can’t and knows that you did the right thing for yourself. For me, I had to take stock in my feelings and acknowledge to myself that I wasn’t happy and that I deserve to be happy and have a partner who is my emotional equal and will stand by me, support me and love me. I had to stop being the one who cared more and tried harder. I had to stop pretending that these things that were missing weren’t important to me.
Finally, I just did it. I said the words I had been trying to say for weeks but was to afraid to say because saying them meant I’d lose someone who I cared about, who was important to me and who had become my confidant over the last 2 years. But I said them and man did it hurt. I was a mess. He was fine (well as far as I could tell) and it took about two weeks of us texting about nothing and skirting around the issue of would we or wouldn’t we be together to get down to the simple fact that he just didn’t know if he wanted to be in a relationship again. Not with me but with anyone. He still cared about me but he was able to be honest and admit that he had a lot of growing to do before he could give me what he knew I deserved. But this crushed me because why didn’t he know this a year ago? Why is he talking in “ifs” and “maybes”? So I had to do it again. I had to send him a note to say that I was done with us and that I needed time to put me back together and that being friends wasn’t in the cards for us right now. I had to let him go. Then I had to hit send.
Let me tell you something, sending that email was the push I needed to put myself back together. I immediately felt lighter, as corny as that might sound, but I did. I felt an immense weight being lifted off my shoulders because I was closing the door and it was on my terms.
I keep trying to tell my friends who are in similar but not the same situations with guys that they need to be the captain on their ship and that if they are unhappy, they need to be the ones to stop. The guys won’t do it. We need to be stronger than we think we can be and know that even if the words we say cause our own hearts to shatter into a million little pieces, we will still be able to pick each of those pieces up and glue them back together. Pretty sure this is Rhianna tattoo but it is so true, especially in relationships, “never a failure, always a lesson”. It wasn’t a failure if you tried your hardest because you will know that for the next time around, you will make smarter (or slightly smarter) decisions and have a stronger grip on what it is that you want from a relationship and how you deserve to be treated.
Does he still text me? Sure, but I can now keep myself together and separate the casual from the crazy.
Am I over it completely? Not even close but that’s because we were a couple for so long that I let myself be consumed by it but I am working on it. Keeping myself busy with personal projects and social activities with my friends.
Not the end of my world, though it felt like that at times but I keep reminding myself that I wasn’t 100% happy and I deserve to be.
For this week, to start off Bold Moves October, here it is internet, it’s real, I survived and lived to tell about it. I’m sort of shocked that I feel how I feel after only a few weeks but I guess that is what happens when you are honest with yourself and put your head and your heart on the same page.
Harder Now That It's Over
Quick relationship backstory (aka, all the important bits you should know going into this story): I started dating the most recent ex-girlfriend (aka Hello Nurse, or HN from here on out) in late January of this year. We didn’t have the relationship talk until April. It had been almost five years — longer than I’ve been on Tumblr — since I’d been 100% off the market.)
We broke up in mid-June and I covered some of the reasons back then, but left out the biggest reason she gave because at the time I wasn’t sure where I stood on the issue. My draft folder even has a relic of a post idea from that time period called “What’s The Matter With Not Wanting Kids Today?” She wanted kids someday, and I didn’t, and that was a dealbreaker. Only, it’s more complicated than that.
OK, first, while my default post-relationship setting is “it was my fault it didn’t work out” (because I can control what I do, and in theory fix those mistakes/shortcomings before my next relationship), the kid discussion came semi-out of nowhere for me. We had one major talk about kids back in February (it was either the first or second time she’d stayed at my place and we weren’t exclusively dating.) She’d asked me to put a percentage on the chance I’d someday want kids, and I said “maybe 10%” because I really didn’t want kids at the time and, while I wasn’t fully aware of it, had a real problem thinking about a happier and more financially stable future that didn’t involve fantasies of winning the lottery. Also we were naked and I was distracted.
But we didn’t stop dating, and unless it came up over St. Patty’s Day weekend or the Saturday night we went out with her brother an sister-in-law (the two drunkest times for me with her) and the discussion happened when I was blackout drunk, I don’t remember it coming up again until the breakup. So when she lamented that we wound up being more honest with each other and communicating better post-breakup, I agreed. But didn’t actually bring this one point up.
Because it is nitpicking at best, right? Plus, I’d half-jokingly talked about getting a vasectomy (this predating dating her). The problem with dating someone with actual medical knowledge? They’ll point out that reversing a vasectomy is not as easy as cheap jokes on Scrubs and Seinfeld make it seem. What I wanted was some serious male contraception that wasn’t a condom, that could be safely reversed if I and the woman who decided I wasn’t a total pain-in-the-ass were ready for kids. I even looked up the cost of the procedure (naturally my shitty insurance would not cover it), and more importantly, the failure rate of reversals and decided I didn’t want to risk it. And at no point did I mention any of this to my girlfriend at the time.
Partly for no good reason, partly because being a couple was still quite new (and a big adjustment, after several years of not having to plan my Saturday nights in advance if I didn’t feel like it), and partly because some stupid voice in my head thought telling her “I do want kids someday” would result in her wanting to get pregnant and married right then and there. Even though she was already using an IUD. My fervent hope is that I don’t lose several IQ points and half my common sense every time I’m in a relationship.
The other reason for the breakup was a mutual fear that neither of us would stick around GA much longer, and I can blame myself safely there: I had serious issues really opening up to her when we were dating because while I was patting myself on the back with one hand for not doubting why a beautiful, successful, smart, and funny woman like HN would be interested in me (something I was incapable of 5-6 years ago), another part of me was convinced it’d never last almost from the get-go. She was going to take a trip to Europe for two weeks after graduation, and that was my big fear for getting seriously involved (her response: “I’m not going to Europe to fuck some foreign guys.”) Looking back, there was also a bit of an irrational basis for me being nervous about her going on a long trip: a year before, I’d met someone and hit it off who was about to take a lengthy vacation, and whatever chemistry we had was totally gone when she returned. And going from really clicking with someone to nothing with no clear reason for why it happened is quite the shitty feeling.
After that, the fear was that she’d either not find a job in the Atlanta area, or that she really did want to move to NC (no offense to Raleigh, but I do not wish to move there).
But again, the big fuck up was I didn’t raise my concern at the time.
So we broke up, and there were good reasons for it, and we kept in touch (and had a one-night backslide, as you do), and getting over her sucked, but there was always the “if things change, maybe” hanging out in the background.
And then things did change.
I spent the summer thinking about kids, which led to thinking about how I used to want kids, and then sometime around 2009-2010 I started saying “no” to the idea. Which led to asking “why did that happen?” The short answer is that it was something like depression, but trickier, because it kept itself hidden for a few years before I was fully aware of it. My mental approach to almost everything was to not get my hopes up. And sure, managing expectations and being realistic is one thing, but serious pessimism? That’s what led me to sticking around in a job I was miserable doing for years without applying to better jobs (“they just hire someone else”), caused me to put off grad school applications (“it won’t help at all in this economy”), and probably wasn’t helping my dating life any either. So the first big change was realizing just how damned pessimistic my outlook was, and taking steps to change it (including applying to grad school, so get your “you’re ignoring all our ‘don’t go to grad school’ tags!” comments in now). The second was admitting that yes, I really don’t want kids right now, but that’s almost 90% the result of knowing I’m not in a financially stable enough place to really give the kid an advantage (and also while I could 100% do my job from home if I had remote access, that is not an option when upper management thinks not forcing us to wear suits to work is being forward and progressive as a workplace) it does not mean I never want kids. I wouldn’t feel like a failure if it never happens (and given some recent studies, if it turns out that I’m stuck not finding someone to marry for several years, I’m not trying to father kids in my 40s — barring reversal of those studies, or pre-natal cures for those “diseases common to older-dude sperm-spawned kids”). But…
I think I’d be a pretty kick-ass dad. Based on my second cousins, I’ve got pretty good “dad muscles” already. I love horrible puns, which are one of the highest forms of “dad jokes.” Sandy Cohen and Red Foreman were two of my favorite TV characters of the past 15 years (and were damn good dads). The part of me that worried that a kid would mean no travel? Realized it was dead wrong because all four of my second cousins have been to Europe (with their parents) more than I have. I’m still very, very, very skeptical of ever having more than two kids (once you hit three they outnumber you, and that Buffalo Wild Wing commercial about the couple with 4 kids under let’s say 2 living in shit-stained squalor who can’t even enjoy football gives me the howling fantods) I feel really good about my odds of being a damned good dad to one or two.
They’d get raised on kick-ass music (well, once they started learning to talk there’d be a lot of instrumentals, classic rock, and classical music, so we don’t wind up having “the talk” when they’re in 1st grade.) And they’d likely rebel and blast dubstep to spite me.
Anyway, it’s something I was thinking about a lot, and HN kept popping up too. At the very least, I needed to tell her, right? But how do you say all that without it sounding like bullshit designed to get her back? If our roles were reversed, I would’ve been skeptical.
And then she did get a job in Atlanta, and was moving closer to Midtown to boot. I needed to say something, but how to say it kept holding me back. I wanted to email her before my birthday party, but the blank white space in my Gmail window mocked me each time. I thought I’d simply tell her at said party (at the bar we met in back in January) but she didn’t show. I thought I could wait until I honestly didn’t want to get back together, where it could be a legit “thank you” letter, and that maybe I’d meet someone else: that didn’t happen either (I did meet someone at the birthday party, but she either didn’t want a relationship, or was pissed off that I got too drunk to follow up on a booty-text that night). Then the excuse for September became “I’ll do it after the grad school paperwork is done.” And what happened was I did finally open up, thank her, and tell her what had changed for me…in late October.
My timing wasn’t great.
Update: Bold Moves October.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been doing Bold Moves October.
I’ve done a few scary/bold things and I thought I’d take a moment to catalog them so far (in no particular order):
- Got back on the treadmill/work out plan (I’d been slacking)
- Went to California and spent time with some of the greatest people you’ll ever meet
- Bought grown-up make-up and make an effort to wear it when I want to
- Gave out my number
- Put myself first in a difficult situation
- Told someone how I really felt about their relationships with other people
- Went on a date
- Let go of my relationship with someone close to me, trusting that when they are ready to let me in, they will
- Read my poems in front of people
- Played my ukulele in front of people (and there’s a video!)
- Stopped actively seeking any sort of relationship (friendship or otherwise) with my ex-boyfriend
- Played frisbee with a bunch of boys
- Made a conscious effort to get assignments done early, instead of stressing over them hours before they’re due
- Finally got the piercings for an industrial (something I’ve always talked about doing but never gone through with
How about them apples, life?
Bold move october day 24
Today didn’t started great, just super sad and scared and totally done with everything. Had a fight with my mom before I went to singing lessons and I was crying on my bike while cycling to the bus station.
In the train from Eindhoven to Tilburg (where I have singing lessons) I literally started crying again. A guy walked in the train and say down in front of me. First I didn’t recognized him but when he asked ‘are you okay?’ I saw he was a guy from my college. He’s not in my class but I saw him some times cause I think he’s kinda cute haha!
So we kinda started talking and it was very nice, cheered me up :)
He had to go to college in Tilburg (my college) and I had to go to singing lessons and when we got out of the train he said ‘see you around on college, and don’t be sad again okay? Cause I don’t like that and otherwise I’m gonna give you hugs! Deal?’
Yup. Great day :)
