Having just watched the Olympics and being enthralled with the sprinters and basketball, and especially the amazing performances of Sha'carri Richardson & all the great female runners, I was reminded of a memory that has stayed with me for over 50 years. Junior high was a pretty awful time for me, as I'm sure it is for a lot of people, and I dealt with the horrors and rejections of that time with journalling, compulsive drawing all day in class, and with intoxicating romantic fantasies of running away from my life.
I always had a close friend or two who made life more bearable & feel really grateful for that, but I was left out of all school activities outside of the classroom. I loved the idea of being in sports, but did not have family support to be on a team (ie: driving me to practice or events) so had to be content with whatever was on offer in gym class. I always loved running, but was slow. I ended up jogging for exercise and running 10Ks in my teens and 20's, and that was very satisfying. But the sharp memory from junior high is when I was on a relay team. I remember standing in my gym suit on the track, either right before or after the event and having this feeling that was brand new to me. I felt immense pride for myself. I felt like I belonged and was a part of something bigger than myself. I felt not alone. I felt connected to a web of interconnectedness I can only think of as belonging. I felt as if I had risen out of isolation and belonged to a class of something I desperately wanted to be a part of: a tribe.
I don't remember the race, how I got on the team, or even if we won or not. I just remember standing there feeling very proud, and there were bleachers of kids and I was the one on "stage". I could see how this might seem like such a strange thing to be emblazoned in my heart to those who got to be in lots of school activities and played sports all the time, but for someone who wasn't allowed to do any activity that I couldn't get myself to on my own, I got a glimpse into what accomplishment and pride felt like. And I have spent my whole life since then making sure that I am always doing something in my life that feels like an accomplishment or stirs up feelings of personal pride.
During pandemic I watched the Last Dance (10 part Michael Jordan series on Netflix) and have been obsessed with sports documentaries ever since - partial to NBA stuff mainly. I went down the wormhole of all the great players, even watching all of their hall of fame acceptance speeches.
One of the best things to come out of the sports watching obsession is that it bonded me with my step dad in a new and delightful way. He has been a lifetime sports fan, and I had never watched a game with him, and now when I visit we watch all kinds of sports documentaries and just watched the Olympic events that we both enjoy together. I watched Sha'carri's amazing final leg of the women's 4X100 relay where she bolts up from 5th place to win the race, and obsessed with that shot of her looking over to see where the other runners are as she blazes by them to win gold. The final shot of her, rain soaked and roaring like a champion makes my inner 12 year old misty eyed & happy. You Go Girl! I know people who hate sports and poo poo it like it's for dim bulbs but I totally 100% get why people are like Swifties for NBA or whatever sport they are into. I'm one of you.
So at 63 years old the only thing I do is try and get several miles of walking in a day. I don't feel right if I dont do it, even when it is 100+ degrees outside. I also paint, write, and make beautiful knitted things, and go on a big trip to wonderful chilly countries every summer.
But the shows about personal excellence and championship resonate with me for two reasons: I have the experience of what that is like from learning how to ski at 47, and of having worked hard for my Antarctic life. The other reason is that it pulls me out of traumatic or painful realities. This past year was one of the most challenging of my adult life.
I started hanging out with someone - got a crush on them pretty hard, and then it turned into an obsession/addiction to them. Without going into too much detail, I had entered a feeling state that was brand new to me, matched only by my euphoric experiences in the Antarctic, a place I was so in love with. With this person I felt so happy and alive and for the first time in a really long time, that I had found something I wanted to commit myself to for my lifetime. The way I felt around this person was something I'm not sure I can describe, but it was something akin to feeling like I had arrived home after 60 years of trudging through a dry hot dusty desert...I had landed in the warm and loving and much needed embrace of the thing I had been searching for all of my life. Here it was: the happiness I had been chasing after. I had had many boyfriends and a husband, but this was something totally different - I felt I'd met my soulmate.
We didn't spend but a few months hanging out but it quickly became and anxious/avoidant deal where I was either euphoric during our hang outs, or in tears during his pullback which felt like extreme abandonment. I did all the things: intensive therapy, hired a new life coach, went to tons more AA meetings to work the steps on my codependency and addiction to try and keep myself sane during the relationship, but he eventually ditched me late July 2023 and I was barely able to function until we reconnected in Nov-Dec of that year, with things falling apart after a terrible time during out last hang out in December. He contacted me a few times in January of this year about a show I was having, and our last phone call was Jan 16th, the day of my one person show that he had helped me with. Hearing his voice made me fall into the swirl and want to reconnect, but he said he was going to bow out of hanging out with ANYONE, and was going to go underground to deal with his depression or whatever.
I did my show that night and he didn't come, and I decided to go off social media for a month and just paint and do major self care. A few weeks later I looked at fb during intermission at a play and saw tons of posts of him hanging out with this girl and them doing lots of fun stuff tougher and her raving about HIM and tagging him in a bunch of stuff. I fucking plotzed like hell. I went into shock and went into numb zombie mode and left he play and went home and studied their socials and ended up contacting her for a "hang" to find out info. What I nightmare I put myself through during the time I interacted with her. I was very honest with her that I had been madly in love with this person who was now her friend and not mine, and he just kept reassuring me that they were pals and there was no crush or flirty stuff on either side. It didn't matter. No amount of her soothing me about her relationship with him prevented me from knowing the cold hard fact: that he was pursuing her company and not mine. That he had replaced me with her. She wanted so much for us to be good friends and really close, and it was making me so sick to even text with her...I was still in shock and obsession while I was dealing with her, and finally decided to pull away for good and went no contact.
So here it is 6 months later, and she finally contacted me after a few months of not hearing from her. I didn't respond to her, but the timing of it was interesting as I had peeked at their socials and knew he had just gotten back from a trip and was about to be on stage with their mutual friends. I had gotten a lot of advice and decided not to write her back. I went to my parents house in Houston and on Sunday morning after the show he was in I looked at IG and there was several pics of them hanging out together having fun (an important piece of info is that the last time we spoke in May she had told me she thought he was a yucky person and wasn't going to be friends with him anymore. She said she would give him up for me (WTF) but I told her I would just go away, which I knew might reinforce their friendship as she is totally dependent on people for rides, and he loves racing to pick up a girl). She also knew that me seeing photos of them together on fb made me insane with grief, so she said she would not post them anymore. I had unfollowed but not unfriended them so I could keep track of what they were doing so I wouldn't run into them.
Back to a few days ago when I saw the pics of her at his show and them doing fun things - I grabbed my phone (the obsession was reignited) and decided to write her back and said I could not be friends with her as they were hanging out and I was not over it yet. I should have left it at that, but we got into a big knock down drag out via texting where she got very butt hurt and defensive and my butt hurtedness caused me to play the victim card. After several hours of this and us apologizing, I deleted her from my phone, and went to fb to unfriend them. She had already unfriended me (knowing she was going to be posting about them) so I unfriended him as I knew that it was really, completely over. I was closing the door on any potential relationship or contact with him.
When I hit that unfriend button, I was filled with a sense of freedom and acceptance, but underneath it was the deep realization that there was a part of me that was still holding on to hope...hope that he would miss me and contact me again, that he was looking at my page, that he was in some way still wanting to possibly see me. When I saw that he immediately wanted to see HER when he got back from his long trip, it was the final nail in the coffin for me. As a mega-scorpio, the revenge fantasies are so violent and over the top, and my jealousy so intense, that if I didn't have a spiritual program the outcome of this could have been very bad (someone dead or in jail). The love addiction literature describes this in detail, and I fit it 100%.
I didn't realize how much this situation still held a constant little stream of drama for me until I unfriended him. It was a big choice, but totally provoked by her statement that "he is my friend" that was like a twisty knife in my heart. I was like fuck this shit I am fucking DONE with the both of you.
I parsed the entire texting dialogue with a friend and she said the one thing that is still the most baffling part of it all: why, out of all the people in this giant city that she could be friends with, does she want so badly to be friends with ME?!??! Especially when I have explained in great, painful detail how much it hurts me that they are friends and he has no desire for contact with me. Well, fuck her. And fuck him too. I know that is not the spiritual way to be, but for right now it is the appropriate way for me to feel in the situation so that I cannot possibly romanticize him anymore. The obsession with him morphed into an obsession with THEM and with HER. This has been the ghastly theme of the last year and a half of my life and now I am done. It's never taken me more than a month or two at the most to get over any relationship...this was something I'd never been through before. It will be very interesting to see what beautiful thing is birthed out of it. I can only imagine that it is my own fucking freedom!
So I don't think it was an accident that I was obsessed with this young lady and her bad-assery, heart and grit and she roared across the finish line. I will ditch these two humans I let destroy my serenity and self esteem, and roar forward towards my own future, fighting the most destruction addiction that has ever enslaved me...
