Driving home the other day, I needed this poignant ballad from Jessica Simpson’s new country album to help me feel some difficult emotions that had come up in my second somatic experiencing/somatic touch therapy session. Something about letting someone cradle my head in their hands, which was scary at first, then felt kinda nice… But then something broke a little bit inside me, and the tears started flowing. We had to stop.
(And yes, that Jessica Simpson. Don’t look at me that way––she’s from Texas, y’all!! 😅)
In my first country road karaoke post, I started to explain how ever since I was a kid, I always turned to music to understand and try to feel the emotions that weren’t okay to express growing up.
And I’m well aware of how weird it is for someone like me to love country music as much as I do. I’m planning to explore the reasons for my unlikely obsession in a future post.
The final weeks of late summer were rough ones for my person and me, as we tried to navigate our nebulously-defined relationship that suddenly included sexual intimacy. And my lease on the little cabin in the woods where I was staying that summer was ending soon, and I had to decide where to live. Meanwhile, my person had already been developing a romantic interest in this other woman. (For the record, I do think some form of non-monogamy could have been workable for us, in theory… But everything was moving so much more quickly than my broken brain and healing nervous system could handle, and my person was struggling to be as open about everything as they probably wish they could have been, because they were so afraid of hurting me… Ugh, the irony.)
So much pushing and pulling, rupturing and repairing in those final weeks. I needed to feel close to them; they needed space. I wanted to move the conversation forward; they were shutting down. It was a perfect shit storm of triggers and attachment wounds.
I think they mostly knew they were fucking it up with me. I kept saying, over and over, that I would forgive them “100 billion times,” as long as I believed they didn’t mean to hurt me.
And they did apologize a few times for the choice they made that last night––staying with the other woman while I was alone at their place, struggling and scared and needing them to come home when they promised they would. But in the end, I found every one of their apologies to be some version of tepid, defensive, tone-deaf, and otherwise unsatisfactory. I just wanted them to cut the shit with their explanations of how they hadn’t “acted out of malevolence,” and show actual accountability for the hurt they caused.
But the apology that still haunts me the most is this one:
I am sorry that I can’t be what you want me to be.
In our last conversation, I told my person I wasn’t buying it. I said I thought they absolutely could be the safe, consistent, committed love I was starting to realize I needed… but they simply didn’t want to be that. And I really don’t think I was wrong. I mean, I’ve been binge-watching the videos on Jillian Turecki’s YouTube channel, and I totally get what she is saying about how you can’t make someone choose you by loving them harder. But “I can’t be what you want me to be” is not a real apology. It’s a cop-out. The subtext is that I was the one who was somehow wrong and bad and too much for having what I’m pretty fucking sure are normal, human, emotional needs. Especially for my current situation as I try to survive psych med withdrawal, for fuck’s sake.
But it is what it is.
I accept your apology I will never get…
Although if I’m being totally honest here, maybe there wasn’t really a “satisfactory” level of remorse they could have expressed that would have matched the pain I was feeling. The pain I still feel.
And maybe I should have said I was sorry, too... For being such a fucking sledgehammer with their boundaries. For ignoring all the cues that would have told me the answer was always going to be no. For letting the blame fall on them, when all along I refused to see the writing on the wall––that no matter how patient and flexible I was, no matter how fond they were or me, whatever kind of love they said they were feeling… they were just not ready for me, for my kind of love and the healing we could have done together.
And love isn’t a fucking waiting room.
You’ll become what you hate the most
Covered in thorns…
I did the right thing in saying goodbye. But the right thing reallllllly hurts…
If I keep making myself feel it––the sadness, the hurt, the grief––will I eventually get through this heartbreak?
If I keep singing, will I eventually be able to believe that I’m not hard to love?
