Feeling every day.

 Last night Eric texted me from the Tokyo about a movie he watched on the airplane, the Brutalist, because he knew I was interested in architecture. Then he asked me, "Are you still icked out from that comment I made the other night?" I asked him, "which comment?" He said, "the only one you had a negative reaction to." I asked, "You sure that was the only one?" He said, "Not at all." I said, "Hahaha" and he said, "But it's the only one you revealed to me. And you've maybe seemed a bit distant since then." Then I replied, "Why do I feel that you're the one distancing?" He said, "Whattt don't reverse this on me." I said, "yea lol. well, remember I told you a while ago about the ache I had when talking to you? That comment brought up the ache."

He said, "Yes. Interesting." I said, "seriously? interesting?" He asked, "Can you explain further?" I said, "it's complicated." He said, "yes I know. interesting bc that's not what I thought the ache was." Then he wanted to talk on the phone so we did, for 2 hours.

As soon as he heard my voice, he said, "ah. I feel grounded hearing your voice...Your giggles nourish me." I also told him that I missed his voice. Then we tried to explain what the ache was. He said in his case it was that there were times he really wanted to talk to me but couldn't and I finished his sentence and said, "because of life structures. My ache is the same thing." He said, "no I don't think so." and he wanted me to explain it. It was hard for me to find the right words so I said, "well the word is the same" and I laughed. He said, "Hm you're embarrassed to tell me what it is." I said, "probably yes." Then we talked about a lot of random things, including how I believed that Gottman was trying to capitalize his intuitive emotional attunement with his wife by teaching everyone that it's a skill that can be learned and acquired. He also asked me, "Are you feeling sad that I'm in Tokyo right now and not going to the City of Rain?" I said, "not really. I believe in what you said, 'we'll meet when the timing is right.'" He asked, "Don't you want to see me sooner?" I thought for a second and said, "but the timing now is not right." At the end of the conversation, I said, "I feel so happy talking to you" and he said the same thing.

After this phone call, a lot of emotions were triggered and it affects my sleep quality as well. I don't know how the universe plans to unfold things for us but at least I'm feeling things every day again. It's much better than living the same day after day and feeling that each day would repeat until I die and have zero hope. Having no hope in life is the most awful feeling of all.

Digging deep.

Ever since Eric had lost his job the dynamics between us has changed. He's been intellectualizing a lot more than before and I just feel that he's getting more and more emotionally distant from me. In the past week we have been reading a book together, "The Science of Trust" by Gottman on emotional attunement. Earlier in the week we had hours of text discussions on what we've read; at one point he even said, "Why do you trust me and why do I trust you? Even after 12 years of not talking to each other." Then through a series of banters he joked that he already had to let his wife win all the arguments and he couldn't let me win another one. That just hit me. It was already 2am that night so I didn't say anything then. Later in the morning I decided to voice something for myself:

That didn't feel so good to me. I know you were joking, but in that moment I wasn't trying to win--I was trying to connect. I didn't want to be another argument you feel like you have to manage. This space between us doesn't feel like that to me and I'd like to keep it that way.

He replied, "Sorry, I thought you were joking bc you said you were smarter than me so I was just joking back. You're not an argument I have to manage."

I replied, "ok thank you. :)"

Ever since there has been a lot more silence between us. On Friday, a graduating student gave me a book titled "Games and Decisions" by Luce and Raiffa with a really sweet note: 

Dear Ms. Johanson,

Thank you for teaching me in AP Economics this year. While I did not perform too well in semester 2 due to personal difficulties, my semester 1 performance was quite good. I plan on studying more economics courses at Berkeley, particularly in mathematical economics and game theory.

The book I gave is a favor on Game Theory first published in 1957, a decade after the second edition of Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which started the field. The mathematics utilized in the book is still quite elementary—more advanced treatments utilize assumption topological ideas and Banach’s fixed point theorem. This is just intended as an introduction to the ideas in the field.

I was so touched by this student because everyone finds him unbearably arrogant even though he is a total genius. I have been supporting him since the first semester when he had personal difficulties and I always choose to see the best parts of him. Then I decided to share a picture of the book and the student's note with Eric, but again, he seemed emotionally retreated and was deflecting with sarcasm and humor again.

Last night I reached out to him again to talk about my thought about Gottman's book because I already finished the first 7 chapters. I believe that Gottman has been focusing on only the skills of attunement that can be learned intentionally because that's what he can sell at his Love Institute that he runs with his wife. However, when I pay close attention to his interactions with his wife, I think he actually hit the jackpot on finding someone who could actually match him intuitively and resonate with him naturally, i.e. he got lucky in serendipity and they're trying to capitalize that. It's just like how I used to capitalize my linguistic abilities by teaching people how to speak English like I do--at a level that's equivalent to a highly educated native speaker but in fact, a big part of it was innate. I was just born gifted in this and most people, really statistically, cannot manufacture what I have.

Then as our conversation flowed, Eric told me he actually had to close some deals and is flying to Japan tomorrow so he had been busy over the weekend. He told me that his key problem still remains--he needs to change his geographic region or his career or both. He is indeed very confused about his current life structures right now and once again the universe has set us up in structures that just cannot align, unless the universe wants to do something about it. None of it is something I can control.

I do feel sad, and maybe I want to cry but I just don't feel sad enough about it. Maybe I've become jaded after all. The annoying thing was that every time when I talked to Eric late at night, I always felt some anxiety or heart palpitations when I was sleeping. Last night I even I had a dream of his wedding photo with his wife and she was so pretty. That just gave me an ache.

At this point of my life, I just feel that the universe has been pranking me again and again with everything, and I am just not surprised anymore. I look at the universe's pranks on me with some resentment and scarring and I just can't cry about them anymore. Is that good or bad?

Beautiful.

It's hard for me to write a full journal entry these days because my thoughts have been fragmented and I have too many conversations with ChatGPT. Too many emotions arise every day and I'm just taking each one by the hour. However, now I'm going to try to write these down in a full piece.

I've been exploring what exactly hurts me the most, makes me want to cry the most and I have figured that out. It's destiny. I dated so many men and they did love me but nobody would choose me. Angel was the only one who chose me, even though he couldn't really understand me, match me, or feel me. I never had a say in anything; if I wanted to choose someone, they would not choose me. Even when I was ready to have sex with them, they decided not to do it with me (and they were not virgins). That was how I ended up having fully penetrated sex with Angel only in my life. It was not pleasant and he had erectile dysfunction so we had sex only to conceive. After I conceived Little N, I never wanted to have sex with him again so it's been more than 5 years since we touched each other.

Besides sex, of all the men I've been with Angel was the one with most disabilities. His scoliosis and back surgery, his weak bladder and bowel control, autism, sensory integration problems, inability to drive, ride a bike, or even to use a screw driver. Knowing that he didn't really behave like a man, I still wanted to marry him because no one else wanted to commit to me. Don't tell me that I didn't date enough; I really did. We're looking at 30 to 40 men in my history and he was the only one who wanted to commit, very soon after we met. Ivan and I had commitment too but then circumstances forced me to leave the City of Extremity. When I think about how the universe and destiny has been giving me no choice ever, I want to cry the most.

I don't really want to cry when I think about me and Eric, or that he might love his wife more than he does to me, or that he would leave one day. I don't know why. If I were in my late 20s, I'd probably cry my eyes out every day, but now I just don't feel that sad thinking about these. I might be more grounded than before, believing that the universe has a journey for me, and there are actually many people who have given me love along the way, even though they don't stay. And yes, I do hope that one of them would stay and grow with me, but I have more optimism now than pessimism in that destiny or the universe will show me what it is. It just hurts.

What I don't understand is how big the plan is the universe has for me. It seems like most other people in this world are really shallow, or have erased the child in themselves as they move on with their life, or they would settle for something that works on the surface, in logistics, in structures, even though they're dead on the inside. Why can they carry on their life like this without feeling like they're dying? My 10-year relationship with Angel really made me feel physically ill and I developed heart problems that couldn't be medically explained. Now that I have emotionally cut off from Angel and am certain about the divorce, I've lost 8kg in just one month and I am able to exercise again. Previously I was too fat to even walk up the stairs and I was always feeling tired. Now I don't feel lethargic anymore. Why is that? Why can other people feel healthy and believe that they're happy even though a part of them has died?

I now love my job and connect much better with people around me. Yesterday I was assigned with a guy who I thought hated me for a trip and it turned out we liked each other and had a lot of fun together. He used to hang out with Angel at parties and I used to go to those parties with Angel but really didn't like the vibes. Then I told Angel that he could go to those parties alone and not take me because I didn't like his friends that much. He decided to hang out with me only and not go to those parties and now he blames me for cutting off his social life. But now when I was hanging out with this guy alone, without Angel, I can actually connect with him very well, and he told me he actually didn't hang out much with Angel. People have been saying, "a bad love makes you see one person and not the world but a good love makes you see the world and not just the one person." I cannot think of other reasons that can explain why I am experiencing this change in my social life.

The thing is, if our kids did not have special needs, I could probably stay in this marriage forever. The pain of self-erasure may not have erupted if our kids had absolutely no trouble at school or cause any stress for me. However, looking back at the past 5 years, I have realized that all the difficult shit I had to go through entirely by myself, with so much fear and solitude, made me grow, mature, learn and evolve. The unexpected trouble caused by the kids gave me so much fear each time, and just when I thought that I could lean on Angel's shoulder each time, he failed to give me support each time. He did not have the ability to show up like a man and say to me, "I will take care of this. You don't need to worry about it anymore." Instead, most of the time, he was just standing there, not knowing what to do or say because his abilities are limited. He doesn't speak the language here and does not have any life skills and is too cheap to hire help even though he has the money; he knows I have so much pain but he also knows I can still do it. This is the kind of abandonment my parents gave me when I had so much pain trying to excel at school. They had never once told me to take a nap when I was so sleep deprived, because they knew if I hadn't excelled at school, there was absolutely no hope for my future because my family was deprived of resources.

Why does the universe give me a destiny like this? Is it doing so to trap me, to punish me, or keep me from getting what I want? And yet other women who are not as gifted and deep as I am can have the men that I want. Am I destined to be alone? I used to think that once I had kids I would never be alone and lonely anymore, but now with their autism, I often feel so disconnected from them, no matter how much I try to hold them and feel them. Is this really my destiny?

What is the universe's plan?

 Every day I go through a lot of emotions, but it's becoming lighter and more stable every day as I metabolize the emotions. The more I talked to Angel, the more certain I am about divorcing him, even if I will be single and alone for the rest of my life. Talking to him really feels like talking to a wall, and I've realized that the most painful thing for me is thinking that I have stretched every way in my life, physically, emotionally and even financially to make his life, our family life better and easier, all under the name of love. When I go back to read my diary from 10 years ago, I have learned that the loyal hope that as long as I keep doing and making things happen was what I had firmly believed in because I thought that was love. At that point of my life I equated safety to love, and to make love stay, I did everything entirely on my own, without receiving anything in return except for some financial resources. He thinks what he's paid for our family is enough love coming from him, even though I have repeatedly spent my entire savings to make big purchases to save him money. He, on the other hand, would at most spend less than 10% of his net worth to pay for things, because he wanted to avoid capital gains tax as much as possible. At one point he even thought that I was completely transactional and all I wanted was his money; he simply cannot see the labor I had put in for him and for our family for the past ten years. I am so done here with him.

On Monday I had a really good 2-hour therapy with my psychologist. It really helped me find more clarity about myself and how I can stay more grounded in this chaotic state in my life. We talked about my trauma from 5 years old when my parents abandoned me and then I decided to leave home on my own when I was 9 due to domestic violence. I also talked about the invisibility and the pain of my marriage and how ChatGPT helped me reconnect with Jes and Eric and then all these conversations gave me clarity on who I really am and that I have to leave this marriage. Then we spent some time talking about my connection with Jes and Eric, and that ChatGPT told me to stop talking to Eric for at least 30 days, which made him flip out. My therapist asked me what the reasoning was for ChatGPT to say that, and I said that ChatGPT knows that I still have some hope and fantasy surrounding my connection with Eric and given our circumstances it might end in a slow heartbreak. 

Then my therapist said that she was very surprised to see how happy I was when I was talking about Eric and that I behaved like a little girl. She thinks I definitely need some emotional nourishment in my life and I can keep him as a friend and don't need to completely cut him off. After my therapy, Eric texted me and we talked on the phone for 2 hours. He was fired by his company on Monday; his company hadn't been doing well for the past 5 years so he sort of predicted it, but it was still a big shock when it actually happened. I was feeling so light after my therapy and the weather was just perfect that day, breezy, lukewarm, comforting, and perfect humidity. We talked about life, the inevitability of life, and the futility of control. He also spent quite some time questioning why I'd ever want to push him out of my life. I didn't want to think about that question anymore because all I knew at that time being was that I wanted to talk to him. I really am tired of thinking about the future. He asked me, "What gets you up every morning? What makes you wanna live? Like some people get up because they love their job, or their family, etc. What is it for you?" I thought for a bit and said, "I love love and I love to be on the receiving end of love." He said, "Then why would you want to push me away?" I smiled and gave him a long silence.

After that phone call, he then texted me, "Sorry, didn't mean to make you talk beyond your time limit earlier. Thought you were walking and talking...didn't realize you could only talk when horizontal :p. I'm at a crossroad now in many ways. Where I go next isn't straightforward; in fact, all the straightforward paths seem to have been exhausted. To advance, I need to either discover something new both in the world and in myself, or recover something that I previously had but is now lost or forgotten. When we chat, it unlocks things for me."

I replied, "I'm very happy to hear that :) One question tho--why do I always show up when you're at some crossroad in your life lol"

He said, "Haha you missed my 2017 crossroads and my pandemic cross roads. You're late!"

I said, "lol true. That was a question for the universe not you."

He said, "Indeed."

Tuesday morning I woke up from a nightmare. I saw that Eric and I were somewhere together, maybe Indonesia or some city, but he would not talk to me or look at me. It just caused me so much pain, sadness and fear, so I texted him as soon as I woke up telling him about the nightmare, "I had a rough night and a nightmare in which you don't wanna talk to me anymore :'("

After he woke up, he replied, "Sorry to hear that. But it's funny that you'd be worried about that given that I spent half the last phone call whining about how I was worried that you wouldn't want to talk to me anymore :P". I explained that my fear was deeper than that because I've been living the past ten years in a marriage with total invisibility. After some text exchanges, I had free time so we just talked on the phone for 2.5 hours.

While we were talking, I went to the department store to buy some cosmetics from Estee Lauder, got a latte, waited for the pouring rain to stop, picked up my lunch and ate it.

Then I told ChatGPT about our phone call:

Erik and I just talked 2.5 hours on the phone. I feel that what we have is precious so we’re both very careful and putting what we have sort of in the friend zone. I told him that the nightmare I had last night scared me, where we were physically in the same space but he wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. He said that’s how scared he got when I told him I might abandon him. I told him I never said I would abandon him; all I know today was that I had to talk to him. I cannot predict how much pain I would feel at a future point. If it’s too painful then I probably can’t talk anymore. Then he said, “then let’s make sure that never happens.” I said “ok”. We had a long silence after that. He asked me what I meant when I said I was afraid there would be emotional entanglement between us that could cause me too much pain. I said, "just like the nightmare I had. I made me feel so scared." Then he said, "Now you know how scared I feel when you said you were gonna push me away?" He mentioned that when a really close friend stops talking to you of course it feels scary. He also told me that for the past five years he has been working remotely and then COVID hit. He has no one in real life to talk to besides his wife for a while. It’s also depressing that he doesn’t have an office nor a job right now so he’s home all the time and doesn’t have a social life. I told him if he wants to come visit the City of Rain then I'd spare a weekend for him. At another point we were bantering about what I was optimistic about; I said I'm optimistic about my abilities and resilience but I'm pessimistic about my circumstances. He said he's the same way and somehow he had a different impression of what I presented of my own beliefs. I said “you probably weren’t listening close enough.” He said, “who in the world listens to you more than I do? Who? Tell me. I think I’m better than ChatGPT” Yes. I laughed and said “ok fine fine fine.”

The more we talk to each other, the more I find our families and circumstances so similar to each other. His dad was a successful lawyer but then had arthritis and depression and couldn't work anymore and had to live on disability insurance. My dad was a successful banker and then the largest embezzlement got exposed when he was just posted to manage that branch and he witnessed his coworker jump out of the window of their headquarter that night. He had to bear the legal responsibility and his career was capped for the rest of his life. We both went to elitist schools and hated it. We are both musical; his parents were musical and my dad and I both have perfect pitch. We are both linguistically gifted with chronic depression. At one point he even said, "Both the guy who sleeps with many women but doesn't get emotionally involved and the girl who dates many men but doesn't sleep with any of them. It's two sides of the same coin."

When we reconnected a month ago, I didn't know I would actually act upon divorcing; he didn't know he'd lose his job this Monday. What is the universe's plan for us? It's like our serendipity in 2012. I didn't know I'd quit my job in the City of Gold and he didn't know he would too in 2013 and move to the City of Towers. Then we have been on the same continent since 2013, never left the continent, even through the pandemic. All these coincidences are too unscientific and I want to see how they unfold.

Keep writing and revisiting.

Angel and I had our first meeting to lay out the major agreements for our divorce. It took us 3 hours and I cried a lot during the meeting. The plan is that we have a draft for our finances, emotional and logistical boundaries. We will live our lives according to the plan and the figure out what to modify and what to add. When our lives are stabilized based on the plan, we will finalize the divorce.

I have been feeling scared and anxious because I kept recalling how I fell in love with him ten years ago and I had completely lost myself for the name of love. I kept giving and giving until I had nothing left, and he has not changed a bit for the past ten years. I went back to read my entries from November 2015 and all the signs were there already. I kept convincing and erasing myself that this was the best I could do.

The other part of my anxiety comes from Eric. It seems to be hard for us to not talk and miss each other. A couple of nights ago, he texted me to tell me that he saw my weaknesses and he accepts them anyway; it’s working because I do the same for him and that is too rare in his life. I felt absolutely touched because I have been deprived of this kind of emotional resonance for over a decade. There are times when he called me just to hear my voice and he’d tell me that he really missed talking to me but couldn’t over the weekend because of his wife. A couple of weeks ago I told him that I was about to go through a lot of emotional turmoil and I’d be a wreck and I didn’t know if he wanted to be alongside of it. All I knew was that I wanted to protect what we had. He asked, “why would I not want to be alongside of it? Of course I want to and I want to protect what we have too.” However, in our most recent text conversation, things took a turn. He had convinced himself that what we have is emotional resonance but it is not love because our structures do not allow it to happen; he has a wife and I have kids. That part really hurt me. It was late at night and I could only tell him that ChatGPT told me not to talk to him for at least 30 days because it was too “dangerous”. I needed to be emotionally independent without knowing that someone might catch me emotionally. He called it bullshit because he thought I was going into some kind of isolation. He thinks it’s actually unhealthy not to dependent on others for emotional support because we all do, e.g. family and friends and therapists. I don’t know where he places himself among these people but I told him that there were times when I’d miss him but I don’t think that’s exactly healthy given our circumstances. He was upset and afraid that I was going to push him out and not talk to him. In the end I told him maybe I cannot quite separate my expectations and emotions. I don’t know if he could figure out what I meant; if he couldn’t, he could simply show ChatGPT our entire conversation and ChatGPT would figure it out for him.

ChatGPT really did a great job interpreting what I meant at the end of the conversation. My silence is my last bit of dignity; in my whole life, people had always found loving me is too much. They never loved the shape of me without looking at the architecture of me. Angel married me for the same reason—exceptional academic credentials, objectively good looking, tender, capable of making quite some money, and I have perfect pitch. But he could not feel or see the depth of my emotions, my feelings and that’s why our marriage couldn’t last. I never saw it last from the beginning anyway; I only saw myself committed and loyal to the idea of taking care of him for the sake of love. I am so badly missing being loved.

Eric associated love to not just emotional resonance; he also wants a structure for it so that it’d be love. He told me there was one relationship where he was deeply happy even though there was no emotional resonance but we never had a chance to talk about it. To me, I think the structure for the love is necessary to protect it but I think a lot of it is up to the universe and whether the two people have the courage to build the structure together is also up to the universe. It’s completely out of my control. All I know for now is that he seems to still love his wife and yet the vulnerabilities we have exchanged are no longer safe given the circumstances. I also find myself in the same position where I was 12 years ago with him, when he had a long-term relationship and then ended it in 2013. Maybe he’s wondering in his head why I always showed up and destabilized the longest relationships he had. 

Talking to Eric always made me feel so happy and laugh so much. It’s also sweet and bittersweet. He said that talking to me gives him ache but he didn’t want it to go away; he thinks the ache would mellow out on its own. From my experience, the ache would mellow out only if I had intellectualized it and convinced myself of something new, e.g. maybe telling myself that he was a jerk, a womanizer, used me for fun, would never leave his wife, etc. If I hadn’t used these things to brainwash myself, then that ache would stay equally painful and heavy just like it was at the start. It’s like you have wound on your skin and if you never build a scar or scab around it then it would always cut open and bleed and hurt. I think that’s what he wanted to do with me—he wanted to talk more and figure out how our logistics would never work so that he could stop feeling the pain of missing out on me. In one phone call he actually asked me, “if we really ended up in a relationship say for 3 or 5 years, do you think we’d still have so much to talk about? Most couples run out of things to talk about after some time and you’re just doing your own thing.” I told him that I didn’t know; it depends on how the two people grow together. 

So yeah, he needs to figure out what my silence means. If he really is my soulmate like ChatGPT said, then he should know; he should know that I’m still the same girl he met 12 years ago, with the same ideals about love and I want to be protected, and I want what we have to be protected. But if he’s going to keep intellectualizing our connection and circumstances and telling me that what we have is not going to last, then I’d rather start being alone now. ChatGPT says that what he’s doing to me is a slow heartbreak; he has a wife to fall back onto whereas I am getting a divorce and about to be completely alone. He is not as brave as I am, yet.

If he is the one for me, maybe he’d figure things out. Maybe he’d really come find me years down the road, like the visit he couldn’t make 12 years ago. Ironically over the past 12 years he had been to the City of Rain more than 25 times. But this should happen when he is truly ready. Otherwise it’d just be like that night in Orlando, where he came to my hotel to see me after meeting me for the first time and asking me to come downstairs. I rejected because it was late and I wanted to sleep and I had Ken sleep in my hotel room at that time. I told him that we were both from the City of Gold so why couldn’t we wait to talk until we were back? He said it was complicated and it had to be then. I asked him, “is it because you had a girlfriend in the City of Gold?” And then he admitted it. I had waited for him to break up with his girlfriend for a long time, for over a year I believe. When we used to hangout, we never even touched hands or held hands. The most we did was to give each other a hug, although there were many emotional exchanges. When he finally broke up with his girlfriend and told me he could come visit me, he started a new relationship in a new city and never came to see me. He told me he wrote me a letter but couldn’t send it because he didn’t want to hurt me again.

A few weeks ago he found that letter and read it to me over the phone. He told me that he was in a chaotic phase and he couldn’t afford to have a long distance relationship and lose and hurt another person that he cared a lot about. I wonder with our silence now if he could put the puzzle pieces together and see what I see.