#49 | exhaustion
I started my new part-time job last weekend. The restaurant needed a host and was willing to hire me without any experience. It specializes in Levantine cuisine. They are understaffed and need to get more people trained up before Ramadan.
Pros: physical labor drowns out unpleasant thoughts. I'm learning a lot of new things about the world and my neighborhood and the food industry, which is a goal I've had for a long time. I get free food and extra money, which helps pay for my expensive therapist. I feel necessary and helpful to others, which satisfies a desire of mine that has gone unfulfilled in recent months.
Cons: I'm so fucking exhausted. I originally wanted to work weeknights, but they said they need me the most on weekends. I have to work 5-10 F, 5-10 Sat, and 12-8 Sun. I don't have a day where I'm completely at rest anymore.
Because this new job takes up so much of my weekend, it limits my social time a lot. But I feel neutral about that—my social battery has been pretty limited recently anyway, save for my closest friends, and I still make time to see my closest friends on weeknights. The other thing I feel neutral about is that technically this also takes away from the time I could spend doing other things that bring me joy. I don't care a ton about that because 'other things' is very vague. Exercising, writing, being with friends, watching movies, clubbing/dancing. Doing fun things. With all of these thoughts in mind, I'm going to stick with this through Ramadan and see how I feel after that. At that point, maybe I will be able to negotiate a schedule change or trying out back of house work. If it doesn't bring happiness overall, I'll stop. It's certainly a big change but I intend to see it through.
I'm still cycling through emotions like water. When anger washed over me a few weeks ago, I let it compel me to a brief state of acceptance, the gym, and starting this job. But now that the exhaustion has begun to settle in, and I got a cold last week which always makes me dissociated and depressed, I'm back to sadness. I miss her all the time; I don't think that has ever stopped.
I told my therapist that sometimes I still feel like there are limitations to how people understand what I'm going through, and on occasion I've gotten oversimplifying words about how something in our relationship was flawed or that we were incompatible; it's simply over and we weren't meant to be. A friend of mine wondered aloud if perhaps there were underlying issues that my ex just didn't voice for a long time (something he has done as an avoidant person); another friend suggested the same thing and that I reflect upon my potential contributions (or lack thereof) to the relationship that didn't make her feel comfortable sharing more of her feelings with me (the guilt of which he had to process about a prior relationship). At first, these suggestions were hurtful, but I understood that they were sharing their lived experiences with romantic love. Even then, I started to wonder if I was oblivious, ignorant, or a bad person to maintain that neither of those hypotheses were true, and perhaps my friends just don't completely understand her, our relationship, or her grief. That I loved her the way she wanted to be loved, but the death of her dad made her need to run away from intimacy. Is it denial to think that our love transcends the confines of a relationship, that I don't care if this is the state of things for a while, as long as things prevail in the end? Is it denial to not want to move on? To find happiness, but ultimately wait for her? Is it denial to think that I still know and love her best, and to believe that although her love for me is no longer romantic, the way we feel for each other will persist and endure through it all? Or are these conjectures based on evidence of how well I know us?
My therapist said that at the end of the day, I will always know what's best. I keep having to balance reality (that things as we knew it are over) with my own wishful thinking (that we get back together), and with what I actually know about us (that we care about each other so much more than I can describe). That's hard. Like I've written in the past, all I can do is chase momentary happiness and move myself forward—to what destination, I still don't know.
Almost done reading Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, which I'll have to do a whole post on when I finish because it has been so amazing.
Making my way through the Sopranos.
Did a small LNY dinner with friends.
My friends came to visit last weekend, and we went to the MoMA, ate udon, went to prospect park zoo, ice skated, and got high and ate sukiyaki. I took them on a mini food tour of Queens.
I haven't been to flushing in a while and I miss it.