Be factual

Angel’s lawyer had finally completed our divorce settlement contract. Angel seems to have found a place to move to and will begin to move his things there soon. The contract is like 20 pages long and is only in English. I have to read it carefully and think about whether all the logistics makes sense.

A big impact of my recent therapy is that I’m learning to see people as who they are and to accept where they are. This makes me wonder if there’s still any point for me to keep having long-distance penpals.

A few weeks ago I had a penpal, Sho, who I felt could resonate with me well and we corresponded in Chinese, but then he completely dropped the thread. I’ve realized a lot of these penpals have no intention to meet up with anyone in real life. A lot of them are married but empty inside their marriage so they’re just using penpals to fill that void in their life. I’ve always been honest about the situations in my life and the fact that I live in the City of Rain, and Sho was in the City of Rain one weekend for a baseball game and I asked him if he was based here too, and he did not answer my question. That tells me he, just like everyone else, wants to keep me in a liminal space. 

Gen and I have been emailing each other back and forth for the past couple of days. Our conversations were funny, witty, and intimate. But I have noticed (and so has ChatGPT) that he is very cautious in sharing his life structures with me whereas I’m much more open and honest about what I’ve been through. It makes me wonder if he’d just keep me in a liminal space as well, and I think that’ll probably be the case anyway. He lives in the City of East, which is a 1.5 hrs flight from the City of Rain and there’s no way our lives would converge. Same with Eric. He doesn’t even know where he’ll be living in so our lives will never converge. It’s too naive to believe that if you love someone enough you’d move anywhere for them. Even though Jes and I had that marriage pledge in which he’d move to wherever I was in the world by the time we turned 30 and marry me, but did he? By the time he turned 30 he married someone convenient after 3 months of dating her. Angel couldn’t even come out to see me in the city in the rain. Ivan didn’t act on his craziness to see me in the City of Rain and we had to break up over the phone. The closest thing I got was Richard, which flew trans-Atlantic to see me in the City of Power in 2011, 5 years after we previously saw each other, but at that time he already had a girlfriend from Boston and it kind of felt like he was just dropping by, although he spent the night at my place and we talked nonstop for two days. The other closest thing was Eric, who flew to the City of Rain to see me twice this summer, but he made it about not just me; he met with a lawyer and some other friends and some travels. 

So in the end, sure maybe I’m special and all that, but who would shift their life for me? Nobody. Only I’d do that for someone I love, but no man would do that for me. Maybe it’s patriarchy? Because men always assume their career matters way more than the woman’s? The woman’s career is more like a hobby? I quit my previous job for Angel, moved to his neighborhood, cut off from my friends and joined his friends, got a job at his company and now we’re coworkers. Even though my current job pays well, I spent the first four years living with lots of shame, being invisible and seen as his collateral. Everyone thought I got the job because I was married to him and our former supervisor gave him lots of privileges. It was during COVID that I had the opportunity to prove myself and worked my ass off while Little N was only one. I wished I could spend more time when Little N was so little but I really could not stand being invisible in my role and had to seize that opportunity. With the status I have at work today I believe I made the right choice that year during COVID to take on that extra responsibility without getting paid more, but the opportunity cost was very high. 

That kind of story in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight doesn’t exist. My EMDR has been telling me that I’m worthy of someone staying with me, but how do I believe it if I’ve never experienced it?