Begining the Quest. (Being Single Pt. 2)

We last left ourselves healing and confused. Breakups are difficult, but most people manage to survive that garbage only to find a lack of direction....

Sometimes our choices are suspect.

So you're (mostly) over your ex now. A lot of people use this as a catalyst to try to change things about themselves that brought them to where they are today. Some people seek out a gym membership, or maybe a new job. I've done both and, let me tell you, not always a good idea.The regret you feel will fade, but the gym will always be filled with enormous douchebags.

He doesn't know where the G-spot is.

It's a normal impulse to want to "fix yourself", but you are an amalgam of millions of decisions and billions of organisms, and odds are you're not going to change by much, but this is still a healthy part of the process. What you are doing is separating the BEFORE from the AFTER, this creates a nice little emotional barrier and helps to create some distance for us. Sometimes this really can motivate us to make good decisions, for instance finally finding the motivation to pursue your career, but at least we're out of the house and not at home in the dark freebasing Ben and Jerry's.

This isn't a bad thing, your previous life was defined by another person, and you probably have a fuckton of time and energy to spend on something, so why not yourself? I like this phase, it's about renewal and moving onward with life. It can be difficult to get started, but change can be a good thing, you just have to make sure that it's in the right direction.

But here we have a pretty big obstacle. Our minds have evolved to recognize patterns and it is really easy to start finding reasons for things that may not have the influence over your fate that you think it does. I'm sure that for every glaring personality flaw that you think that you have, there's somebody out there with a fetish for it. I am personally attracted to outspoken and aggressive women, but I've known tons of women to complain that it's a real turn off for guys. So? Who gives a shit what those guys want, it sure as hell isn't somebody like you, find somebody without self-esteem issues. It's also easy to start to look for attributes in our respective mates, for instance being bossy and bitchy (see what I did there?) that may have assisted in the downfall of our relationships. The fault doesn't lie with them, or even our attraction to that personality trait, but in our realistic understanding of ourselves and our limitations. And for this you need the perspective that only distance can provide.

I can see my faults from here!

I don't recommend this for everybody, but I typically enjoy a long period of celibacy after my long term relationships. I've always been one of those people who transition very easily into serious relationships, apparently I make women comfortable, and the only way to keep from being one of those unfortunate serial daters locked into perpetual habits, is for me to completely abstain. This isn't even an intellectual decision; right now, and for the next several months at least, the idea of being intimate with someone kind of repulses me. Ew.

I'm entering into this phase now. I've been through enough serious breakups finally to have a pretty well constructed road map. This is probably the only time in my life where I feel comfortable showing weakness and I like to take advantage of it. I got to stop by the old house a few nights ago and, after my ex left for work, I walked around the house simply saying goodbye to things. I walked into each room, touching places that really meant something to me and just held our dogs for a while. I woke up the next morning feeling baptized, reborn even. So here I am now. What to do?

I decided to go back to one of my old loves.

There she is.

Microstory: I was an angry kid. In elementary school I used to knock over my desk and throw my books at the teacher, stuff like that. I was constantly challenging authority and getting into trouble. Idaho always dealt with this the same way, by putting me with a masculine teacher who would have me run laps around the field to "burn off my energy" instead of trying to solve the root cause of the problem. I'm pretty sure this is how a lot of inmates are made. For two years we lived in Washington state and it didn't take them very long to hook me up with a child psychologist who had me making model airplanes and talking about my relationship with my parents. This was probably facilitated by me getting kicked out of gym class and deciding to walk home when I was 9 or 10. The teacher freaked out, I vaguely remembering someone mentioning that she thought she was going to get fired for losing one of her students, but Washington state decided to find a solution to my issues and not to just agitate me. Now that I'm an adult and know that this was just a difference in policy, it still doesn't change how my inner child feels about the first society of adults who actually treated me like a real person. It's silly I know, but most of my vacations have been to the Emerald city, and I always feel at home there, so that's where I'm going. I've decided to take a few years off from this normal life thing and chase the only thing that I've ever been good at, being moderately funny on stage in front of groups of strangers.

Wish me luck.