Monday, January 28, 2008

Retail Therapy Success Story

I spent a splendid Sunday afternoon shopping with two absolutely wonderful women whom I am blessed to call my friends. If you've read my previous posts, you know that I was still mad at my ex upon commencement of the shopping trip. Well, after four glorious hours meandering around some of my favorite shops, succeeding in my quest for some key wardrobe items, and having a scrumptious dinner, I felt much better; by this morning I was contemplating giving up the anger.

Then, at acupuncture today something else interesting happened. I remarked that the area between my shoulder blades really hurt during the treatment, which was unusual. A deep, burning pain was radiating from the center of my body. My acupuncturist remarked that, in several Eastern religions, the heart chakra is located in that exact spot and, given the events of the past nine days, it wasn't really all that odd that I was feeling some release in there.

Huh. Bodies are so strange! It knew I was ready to let go of being mad and had already started the process. I'm not angry with him anymore.

I made my own mistakes, I know this. I overreacted, I let myself get really worked up about something so that I made no sense by the time I brought it up, and I had really poor timing in my very typically female emotional mini-breakdown. I think I also may have though it meant more than it did in his mind when he started to call me his girlfriend. We hadn't had that "status of the relationship" talk, he just started to call me his girlfriend one day and I simply accepted it under my paradigm of: Girlfriend = we have more than a casual-hey-you're-a-nice-person-let's-have-fun relationship. That paradigm comes with expectations he was not interested in meeting. He really doesn't want a girlfriend right now, which is completely fine. I wish he'd figured that out before dating me, let alone before he started calling me his girlfriend. Yet, somehow, he did start to call me his girlfriend one day and then had to deal with a real relationship, and then he ran like hell upon that stark realization. Nor was he particularly considerate of my pain or confusion as he fled.

At the end of the day, we can both be the decent yet fallible human beings we are and go our merry ways towards finding more suitable partners.

Don't I sound smug? Damn right I do.

Three good things (this is an easy one)
1. I'm not carrying around a little burning rock of anger in my heart anymore. Yahoo!!!!!
2. I learned something cool about my chakras during acupuncture - I can't wait for yoga!
3. I have some wicked-awesome new clothes as a result of my therapeutic shopping session.

2 comments:

Melissa said...

Mmm, no, I'm with you. Using the term "girlfriend" negates the need for a relationship status talk in the first place. Because that's the status. He's lame.

I'm meeting my new boy's friends tonight...going to wait to see if he introduces me as his "gf." If not, I guess we'll have the status talk...

Juliette said...

Best of luck tonight!! I hope the talk goes well, if it ends up being on the agenda :)