Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(47)
“Not that I know of,” he told me. “So, you’re not a perfectionist. You’re winging most things.”
“Some things come easily to me, but some things are much harder for me than for the average person. Silly things. Like I need very specific instructions to do anything technological.”
“Do you quit those things easily?”
“Usually once I get good at something, I lose interest. Sometimes, I lose interest in things before they even happen. I feel like I’m on a Tilt-A-Whirl.”
“Once the challenge is gone, you probably feel like you’re idling. It’s the need for motion. The need for doing.”
“Yes, I try hard in the beginning. I won’t give up. It took me over a hundred tries to get up on a wakeboard for the first time—in my thirties. Even the two guys driving the boat were exasperated with me after two hours, and tried to convince me to take a break. My body was sore from being pulled in so many different directions during every wipeout. By the time I got up on the wakeboard, I looked back at the big boat, where hours earlier all my friends had been cheering me on, and everyone had gone inside.”
We stared at each other for a short while, and then I started to laugh. “Seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Performing for people who aren’t even watching.”
“Or performing for a lot of people who are watching.”
“Performing in general,” I said.
The expression on Dan’s face I see the most is the one where he looks sad but hopeful for me—like he’s rooting for me.
“But you got up,” he said.
“Yes, I got up, and now I can water-ski and wakeboard topless. You can probably watch it on YouTube.”
* * *
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That particular morning, I felt strong. I felt strong because all of the previous sessions where I’d cried and cried had fortified me. For the first time, I felt like someone who was able to pair my strength with my newfound vulnerability. I felt strong because I was able to recognize the behavior that I had adapted as my cover and I knew I could handle unraveling more.
Dan asked me about my relationships with men.
I told him about my two serious relationships, and he commented that it was odd for someone my age who is out and about, successful, and physically presentable (and also penetrable) not to have had more long-term relationships. It was an atypical thing for Dan to say to me, because he wouldn’t normally say anything that was in the same hallway as judgment.
“Why is it odd?” I asked him.
“I think people your age have, on average, been in more than two adult relationships.”
“Isn’t that my need for constant newness? Constant stimulation?”
“Dopamine,” he told me.
Relationships without hiccups were too boring, so inevitably they had to end. Don’t get comfortable. Uncomfortable and not knowing had become my comfort zone. I was always looking for an ultimatum—a way to test someone’s commitment, to prove they would disappoint me, and if they didn’t do anything wrong, I would find a way to prove they were disappointing before they even had a chance to be.
“Yes, so my inclination has been to have casual relationships around the world with different men—so when I’m in Spain, there’s someone, when I ski, there’s someone, and then there’s someone I can travel with, although I haven’t found that person yet. I also know now that my fear of deep intimacy is because of what happened to my brother and my father—both disappearing in different ways. That the feelings I’ve clung to for so long are most likely self-preservation, believing I am all alone in this world, and all I have to depend on is me.”
“Do you feel like you have issues with intimacy?” Dan asked.
“I have a love/hate relationship with intimacy. Intimacy to me always feels like it occupies a narrow space between honesty and being horny. I don’t conflate sex with intimacy. Intimacy implies trust, and if trust is broken, then the intimacy was never real to begin with. So, in my experience, there’s false intimacy and then there’s the other one, which is the best feeling in the universe, and it’s not just about being in love with someone you’re attracted to—it’s the feeling of someone who sees you and loves you right back. The way you don’t have to wear a hat for your best friends and family.” Or the person you are paying to help detangle you.
“Do you want to be in a relationship?” Dan asked.
“Sometimes I think I do—but I don’t know for sure. Eventually, everyone ends up annoying me. Everyone ends up talking too much, being too sentimental, overstating their opinions, basically everything that annoys me about myself.”
“Have you ever had your heart broken?”
“Yeah, that’s annoying too.”
“Would you like to talk about that?”
“Not really, because now that we have gone through what my real issues are, all the male relationships in my life seem irrelevant. People I’ve given multiple chances to probably didn’t deserve them, and the people that deserved a second chance didn’t get one. I seem to have gotten my signals crossed somewhere along the line. Now I know that it’s because I’ve been in perpetual motion. I’ve been moving so fast, I can’t even see straight.”