Phonecall Limbo

Last week, I spent a few days trying to call her. At the start, I was leaving just one message a day, saying something like, "hey, I hope to talk to soon -- hope everything is going well." At the end, Saturday, I called her five times trying to get in touch with her. I know that sounds like way too much, a crazy and obsessive number, but there were extenuating circumstances. I would have stopped after three, which seems like a reasonable limit to me, but she called me back after my third call and left me a message. (My cellphone does not always ring through, so this telephone tag can sometimes be a frustrating inevitability.) She had also called me back that Friday night just before eleven o'clock and left a brief message, but it was too late to call her back then.

When I finally got through Saturday afternoon, I was pretty happy to finally be talking to her. Soon, it was clear to me that she did not share the same enthusiasm. She has previously said that she hates talking to me either on the phone or online because it cannot substitute for real face-to-face communication. I don't disagree with that, but her position is a bit more black and white than mine. While I feel like phone calls or online chats can be a second-best alternative, she does not. For her, it's either face-to-face or it isn't worth it. I pulled over into a parking of some nondescript tavern so I would not be on the cellphone while I was driving, but also, I wanted to give her my complete attention.

Let's back up a bit. Being brutally honest with myself, my desire to talk to her was largely based in my fear that she was moving on from me, emotionally and physically. I had a dream that she had found someone else, someone more handsome than me and way more confident, someone who made her happy in a way I never could. And it really scared me. Scared me primarily because it wasn't me. I believe dreams can be a way for your subconscious to tell you something that your consciousness refuses to see. So maybe, I thought, I was unconsciously picking up on the fact that she had a new boyfriend based on evidence that my consciousness wasn't picking up on. Now, I know this sounds less than rational, but it is also not out of the realm of possibility either. I think I know her well enough to know that if she ever did find someone else, she would not be likely to tell me unless they were getting married, or maybe not even then.

And continuing with this honesty to myself, I had to admit that all I ever seemed to have brought her is unhappiness. And the fact that there might be someone else that could bring her the happiness I couldn't inspired some intense and unfamiliar feelings of jealousy in me. When I think of her, which is often, I am mentally telling myself to "let go," rationalizing how our relationship is technically over, and that she has already given up hope of our being together. I tell myself that it is her right to choose whomever she wants to be with, and if that person isn't me, for whatever reason, I just have to accept it. Arguing with the facts as they stand is pointless.

At the same time these thoughts are going through my head, I am also thinking "Why couldn't I make her happy?" The fact remains that, in spite of all of the reasons I have to be mad at her for her unfairness in our previous relationship, for the unreasonable limits she places on our communication together, her seeming lack of empathy for me and my problems, I am still incredibly in love with her. A small part of me doesn't want to be, but a larger part of me doesn't want to ever give her up.

Back to that tavern parking lot and my telephone conversation with her, things weren't going as well as I hoped. In a weird way, our gender roles are reversed in that I am practically begging her to talk to me, and she is being uncommunicative in just about every way she can be. Sometimes, I can get her to open up to me by talking about her work and the problems she has been having there. This time, that wasn't working. She seemed pretty frustrated, and later, when I thought about our phone conversation, it seemed that she was barely disguising some of her hostility toward me. I am pretty sure she blames me almost entirely for our bad relationship. I am certain if she could ever give that blame up, our relationship would flourish in a way that she never could expect. I know I would be much happier being with her without feeling her laser beams of anger focused on me. After an unsatisfying conversation, and the phone disconnecting on us once or twice, she curtly said she had to go. Reluctantly, I said goodbye in the most upbeat way I could without sounding too desperate, and I promised that I would call her back soon. When I clicked the phone off, I was feeling more depressed than ever because I realized that she was more emotionally distant from me than ever and, without destroying my opportunities to create a stable life for myself and my future, there wasn't any way for me to fix it.

The dreams I have been having are more than upsetting. Usually, she is happy. She gushes to me about how awesome "he" is, that other guy, her boyfriend, gushing about how happy he makes her. She tries to convince me how great he is. Emotionally, she is more effusive than she ever was with me. The emotions she kept walled up behind her unrelenting guardedness is finally spilling out. And she and her new boyfriend go off together on a trip together to some beautiful and naturalistic postcard scene, like an ancient grove of paradise like trees. I feel so abandoned by her, so inordinately sad. In some, I ask her if she has a new boyfriend, and despite my pleading, she doesn't answer me. She evades answering me, and actively hides him from me. A frank and honest admission from her about her having a new boyfriend would give me a path to heal, be the one avenue out from underneathe the pain of her rejection of me. And yet, I am caught in limbo.

Two Years Later

Last Thursday was the final session with my third (or fourth) counselor. Towards the end of our last session, he promised me that he "would work on finding" me a new counselor so I could continue "treatment." Yet, I must admit that I am not sure another counselor would be any more helpful than all the previous ones.

Overall, I feel disappointed by this counselor. Another part of me feels that my lack of progress is not really his fault. For starters, he is inexperienced. He was on his student internship, a fact I had only found out when he revealed that his leaving was due to his graduation from his student program. Our last conversation seemed like it was filled with his subtle promptings to declare my progress. I felt a little pushed by it. It felt like his agenda to make himself the "good doctor" was conflicting with my reality as the depressed patient. Secondly, I have only had five or six sessions with him, and I am fairly certain he never really came to know me or my struggles in any way that was not automatically superficial. To use the cliche, we were only beginning to scratch the surface.

I am not sure I am finding these counseling sessions very helpful. It feels like I go into someone's non-descript office and pour out my litany of bi-weekly sorrow, reflecting on its roots in the failure of my romantic relationship (as partially documented in this blog), only to begin to reach a deeper level of depression than before I had started talking. I usually leave the sessions feeling worse than when I came in.

Okay. That's the background. You also need to know that, although I am no longer living with my (ex?)-girlfriend, I have been seeing her off and on since she moved out of the apartment we shared at the time. My visits to see her occur no more often than usually once a month. Sometimes, the intervals between our visits have been as long as three months. Usually on these visits I spend a day with her, and maybe, I might even stay the night. And these visits are nice because I can share with her the same emotional intimacy we had when we were together without the unreasonable expectations that she sometimes placed on me and the relationship. There is room for me to be myself. Of course, the reason she has released her unreasonable expectations is because she has given up hope of us ever being together in a committed relationship, a fact for which I am nearly positive she blames me for. She has constructed a narrative of our relationship primarily based on her misreading of my actions and motives. In her eyes, I am a inadvertent villian of self-centeredness. And this is where, for me, all of the sadness creeps back in.

And, yet. Despite the fact that she consciously and/or unconsciously blames me for our bad relationship, I cannot stop having deep feelings for her. I think about her just about every day. I want to be with her again and move back in with her. Intellectually, I know that nothing has substantially changed on the issue of her expectations, and the worst part of my depression could come roaring back the moment she expresses her frustration over things I cannot help. I can not be in that place ever again. But, I still want to be with her! How crazy is that? I objectively see this person filled with anger and blame towards me, and emotionally I want to be with her again. Is this love? It certainly feels like love to me. I love her in spite of her faults.

But then, during this last session with the counselor, I spoke about my position and how I came to be here, and it all seems to center on the disaster of our previous relationship. I lost so much personally because of it, and I am also left with serious emotional scars. Yes, I have had a tendency to depression my whole life. This is true. I saw one or two counselors even before my bad relationship began. But, I think the main reason I am still seeing counselors now is that I am trying to piece back together my life from the pain and catastrophe of that relationship.

It feels very unfair. She has a steady job and a house now. I lost my job and my graduate school career because I couldn't function under constant personal (physical, verbal, and emotional) attack. I had to move back in with my parents. I haven't found a steady job yet and am trying to get some "retraining" in a new academic field. I have spent so much time in school, my prospects for finding a well paying job capable of paying off my debts is constantly diminishing. I feel broken. It will take a few more years for me to "get back on my feet," but it will take even longer for me to get over what happened to me. Maybe the scars will never fade.

My life is dominated by mental illness (mine and others), and I hate it. I could say more about all of this here, but I think I have said enough, and frankly, it is just making me want to crawl into bed and try to go sleep as a way of forgetting (albeit very temporarily) this whole thing.