Which New Direction DO I Take

I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now about getting a new start on my life. I have had a desire to be a makeup artist but I just don’t know how attainable of a goal this is for me at this moment. I can get financial aid and a student loan and make it happen while I struggle with my current employment wondering how I am going to make ends meet, or I can get a permanent or temporary job and make a base salary to support myself and then everything else I make would be gravy. I am currently undecided. The one thing I do know is that I need to come up with a fabulous resume for myself that showcases my very marketable skills. On the other hand, I want to get my esthetics or cosmetology license so I can legally do makeup in NY as a freelancer or working in a salon. I went to a school to take a look at what they have to offer and I don’t know if I really want to commit to a student loan for $10,000 to cover my expenses. One thing I know is, no matter what age I am, I can always go to cosmetology school or esthetics and fulfil that dream.

I find that whenever I am with someone new, I tend to get more involved in their problems and helping them than I am worried about taking care of myself. It’s a common distraction that I have. I don’t know if it’s my way of avoiding what I need to change in myself or my way of seeing what I need to change in myself. That is something I haven’t quite figured out.  Getting a steady job would be a good thing in many ways. First of all, if I were to take a permanent position, I would have health benefits. That could open the door for so many other things that I want to get done.  I could finally make getting lapband a reality for me. I’ve talked about lapband in the past and I was kind of put off by it in 2009 when I went to a seminar at the local hospital and felt like a cattle herd rounded up so that the hospital could make a ton of money.

IN all honesty, I feel getting a full time job is the more eminent decision to make right now. I have to get myself out into my own place and get my cats settled once and for all. Make up can always come next year or several months from now. It’s not something that is going to break my heart if I don’t do it right at this moment.  My immediate need is to get myself reunited with my kitties and be secure in a place of my own. I need a full time job to help me do that. This way I can continue doing what I’m doing at night and what I earn from it is a good extra income.  That is what I have to accomplish right now.

I Spoke Too Soon

Damn it. I really got ahead of myself this time and was a little too gung ho for this to have all worked out naturally. I would have to say that by Monday of this week, Flip had started to unravel on me, again. He had been starting to say that I was neglecting him, and that he felt that I didn’t really even want to talk to him except through text messages. What he fails to acknowledge is that he doesn’t make it easy for me.  He puts me through “tests” to see if I’m going to call him.  Like seriously? How old are we?

When he and I first started talking, he told me that from 8:00pm to 11:00pm he likes to watch his shows uninterrupted without calls. Now first of all, I hadn’t been calling him during his shows, but he was used to calling his little 20 year old gal pal that he wanted to watch his shows from that time without her calling him all the time so I guess in his mind he assumed I would be up his ass looking to talk to him all the time.  This is not my personality. Fifteen years ago I was still needy like that and needing to talk to a guy I was involved with all the time. At this point in my life, I’ve got shit to do and I’m not going to sit here and try and figure out what hours are off-limits and which hours you are working, and what hours you might still be sleeping. His schedule is erratic because he works in a food service/retail environment. It’s never the same and he doesn’t communicate to me what it is. SO I am left to guess when he is out of work and when he is working.

Basically I had been relying on him calling me on his way to and from work. Apparently this has been too one-sided for him and he has taken it upon himself to say that I am now neglecting him and I will only talk to him in text. “Sigh”,  I’m going to ignore the fact that he texts me a lot when he can just pick up the phone.  He claims that all I do is yell at him and like I don’t really want to have a conversation with him. He is not someone that I can have a normal conversation with. When we actually do have a conversation it’s ALL about him, which I have told him on many occasions. When I try and talk about the things that matter to me, it’s like I’m talking to the wall. He doesn’t really want to hear it. Other topics are beyond him, and I learned that he is not someone I can talk to about things that I normally talk about. You can’t have a conversation with a person who jumps from one topic to the next, sometimes without finishing a thought or sentence.

I have taken a lot of steps in the last few years to calm myself down as a person and to become more even-toned, more balanced with my emotional levels. The last couple of times that I picked him up and he was in the car with me I was ready to kill him. Don’t get in someone’s car and assume that they don’t know how to fucking drive or don’t know where they are going, and couldn’t possibly know the best route to go from point A to point B. Especially not to a person who has been driving for twenty years compared to his fifteen years taking public transportation. I know lower Westchester County pretty damn good and I definitely know the highways better than most people and can determine the fastest most direct route if I have to go from one side of the county to the other. Anyway, that particular night ended up with me telling him to shut the fuck up while I’m driving and stop being a goddamn lunatic.

He changed his mind ten times in the course of five minutes and that can be very stressing to someone who is in the driver’s seat trying to determine where they have to go. I can’t deal with that shit. He thinks this is normal. That is not normal, I’m sorry. Nothing about acting like a fucking wackadoo is normal. He has anxiety as well, so this is a nice little neurosis to have to deal with as well. Personally I think he is bi-polar and refuses to get help for either of these things. There have been too many erratic mood shifts from high highs, to really really low lows where he has talked about how he isn’t going to live to see forty and that he’s going to die etc…

I am sorry but this is way beyond my capabilities as a person to cope with. All him being wound up like a top assaults my sense of well-being and it makes a person feel really crazy and anxious to be around him. Only to have him crash and burn days later into a downward spiral of despair.  He is someone who for a long time abused cocaine, and weed.  He claims to have given up the coke over a long period of getting himself off of it. You can’t tell me otherwise, because I feel that realistically it has definitely fucked with his brain chemistry and he needs a mood regulator. It’s at a point where I can tell when he starts talking about certain things over the course of a few days, especially things that upset him that he is getting ready to crash and he does. Then I have to deal with the darkness of his anxiety and depression swings.  It’s not that I don’t want to see him doing well, because I do. I am just not equipped to deal with this and I have to preserve my emotional and mental well being.

You can’t get into a relationship hoping that being around someone all the time is going to cure you of your depression. It doesn’t work that way and when that person can’t be there to give you that uplifting, what happens? You fall into depression again. That is not a way to live your life and it’s not fair to the other person. It’s a form of vampirism of the person’s emotions in order to sustain yourself.  I’m not saying he is doing this consciously, this is completely a subconscious activity that is going on but you can’t rob someone else of their good moods.

Needless to say, our conversation tonight did not go well, he was upset by a lot of things that I said about how things happening over the course of us being together has changed the dynamic of the relationship. Him telling me that he doesn’t have deep feelings has changed things and him saying inappropriate things has changed it. I said this last week in my last entry.  The other thing I’ve asked him time and time again is, “why me”? Why does he need to have this relationship with ME? He insists that this is my insecurity talking and when I try to tell him that it’s not, he doesn’t want to hear it. The reason I ask why me is because from my point of view, if you haven’t been pining over me for all these years and you don’t feel any deep feelings for me, then why do you need to have a relationship with ME? Because it seems to me that it could be with anyone, because there is nothing particularly special about being in a relationship with me that makes it so different from any other that he could pursue with someone completely new to him. But he is adamant about having a relationship with me.  Personally, I feel that when he saw my email he thought to himself she’s someone who was kind to me in my past, I know her and it will be easy to get into something again. It wasn’t because of me per se.

I can only hope that he seeks out counselling and medical treatment and hopefully he is diagnosed correctly and heeds the words of a medical professional.  We’ll see…

Things Have Changed

I just realized that it’s been a bit since I’ve posted. Just about a month in fact. Last time I posted I was upset with Flip for having said something incredibly stupid. We didn’t speak for a week. I had resigned to the fact that he and I were just not compatible and that he really was socially inept.  He called me and we spoke, he apologized. Things have been pretty good since then. What I have noticed is that we are sort of detached. A lot had been spoken about our feelings for each other. He was behaving in a way that was making me think that he was in love with me and that he had been pining over me. Then he tells me that’s not the case. I told him that I didn’t feel like I was in love with him either. That changed the whole program as far as I see it.

I’ve become very nonchalant about the relationship, very detached from it. My physical needs get met and having a companion to hang with from time to time is good. I really do think that naturally it has turned into a friends with benefits situation. I truly do not know if we would be compatible with each other in a committed relationship. I certainly am not factoring him into any plans that I am currently making in my head, although my plans are not all that firm. Well that is not all entirely true. I do believe that having a roommate would be beneficial for me in helping pay for the rent and I think him being around me is a more positive environment and influence than living in the depressing house that he currently lives in.

Bleh when I go there, I feel like the life is getting sucked out of me. It’s so drab, and dark, and dreary, and old. He has hardly any room in his bedroom, his clothes are all piled up on boxes and there is junk around his room. I think I would kill him if he got messy like that and we lived in the same place. From what I know of him, that’s how he has always been. I have to laugh when I think back to how he was saying how he would love to be a stay at home husband and just clean. He really loves to clean. Well clean your fucking room dude. You are such a contradiction! See, that’s what it is. He is full of contradictions, saying one thing and doing another. Hypocritical in a way.

I’m not going to concern myself with it right now. It is what it is. I am happy and my needs are getting met. It’s someplace to go when I want to get out of my nest and spread my wings for a while.  But as far as going out places and enjoying ourselves like having dinner or whatever, I don’t see that happening. He certainly is not suggesting it and well I’m not really bringing it up either.  There was all this weird jealousy too before and accusations. Now they have just stopped. What happened in the span of that week when I kicked him to the curb? I just don’t get it. It makes me think that he was just acting a role.  I just think at times people assume that I forget what’s said and done. I don’t forget haha.  It’s easy to think that because often, I don’t retain the insignificant details like what you had for dinner last night or what movie you watched. If it’s not something I’m interested in, I don’t care and it doesn’t sink in.

But the other stuff, when you say something about yourself and then I see you behaving in a contrary way, well that stuff goes noticed and it gets cataloged for later use.  For example tonight, I have access to his email account because well, when I was sending out job applications and resumes he gave me access so that I could just go in and do what I needed to do because it was too difficult for him to do anything from his phone. For shits and giggles I logged in. I just wonder if I should be irritated by the fact that his so-called “friend” from Maryland sent him a picture of herself in a piece of lingerie that she snapped in the bathroom mirror.  Yet he says that there is nothing going on like that between them, hmmm. Just another piece of information that goes into that mental file to be considered at a later date.

It’s not like I am going to confront him on it or have any kind of jealousy fit, because I’m not. I’m not in fact jealous. It’s the other way around, she’s jealous of the attention she doesn’t get from him when he is involved in me. What that information will be used for is at a later date when I decide if this is someone who is a person of their world and a person who is being true and real.

Some people I realize don’t know how to be that way. Some people think that being duplicitous is the only way that they can get through life.  He might be dead-weight that I will have to cut loose from my neck at a later date, I just do not know.  But it for sure is an insurance card that I have that lets me know that I have been upfront and honest about who I am and what I do for a living. I have shown him my photos, I added him on to my extra facebook account so that it was all transparent. I put everything out there for him to see. He couldn’t really deal with that. It was messing with his ego a little too much, which I can understand because he was coming from a very powerless place in his life. Now that he has an income and job that he really likes, he is feeling a little more self-assured. We also are not on each other’s facebook pages anymore since I unfriended him in February with that last incident. He has been weary to add me back because he is waiting for me to get mad at him again.

LOL whatever… You know the other thing was the desperation for me to get my car on the road. Well it’s finally on the road and that initial need to be free was quenched and I feel better now. But it’s like as soon as I got the wheels back, that desperation to see me was squelched and it’s like a non-issue. I already knew these things back then. I knew it was coming from a place of seeing lack and not looking at it from an optimistic and positive lens. It’s all good. Only time will tell. Perhaps he will mature and he will decide he wants to change into a better version of himself, but that has to be for him and not for me and I certainly am not asking him to do any of it. I am just plodding ahead with my own life and we’ll see where that takes me.