Swampwater Debutante

“So Faire season’s coming,” Dr. Dana observed. “With the advent of this, have you been thinking about…him lately?”

“Of course,” I retorted. “Bit hard not to.”

“Are you ready to encounter him if you happen to do so?” She paused with her pen over my chart. She’d been writing a lot today, mostly because I’d come in all marvelously well adjusted and cheerful, but now she was going to have to switch gears. Not uncommon, in my sessions.

I chewed on my bottom lip. “Sort of. Maybe. I think? I’m trying to determine an exit strategy.”

“An exit strategy?” One expressive eyebrow lifted in query.

“Yes. Like, if I can breathe and move, in the event that I encounter him, I’m rather considering movnig right along by. If I can manage it.”

“Breathing and moving would be helpful,” she agreed. “Why do you think you wouldn’t be able to?”

“Because…” I fiddled with the strap on my messenger bag. “Because if I even think he’s in the same store I am in, I get panicky and upset, anxious and angry. I feel like I have been punched in the stomach.”

“And why is that, do you think? Why would you feel that wound up?”

“Partly because I am somewhat afraid I will fall back into his…thrall, for lack of a better word.” I looked up at her. “I’ve worked hard the last two years to move away from being deeply suicidal. I don’t want to go through that again, I already had one fallback last year. It was horrific.”

“It was. And why else?”

I fixed my eyes firmly at the place where the wall behind her head met the ceiling. “Because I think I will see him with someone, and it will make me very angry, because he doesn’t deserve it.”

She kept her eyes on me, waiting for me to continue. “It’s not fair. It is deeply and inherently unfair that he has never once lacked companionship. He treats women like shit, he tore me to pieces. And yet here I am alone and undoubtedly he is with someone new. Again. It sucks, and I resent the hell out of it.”

“It’s an empty victory, you know.”

“Oh, how.”

She shrugged. “He’s a profoundly manipulative and chameleonic person. Think back to last year when he came back into your life. How did he manage that?”

“I was alone in Manila,” I replied, slowly, thinking back. “It was his birthday, he was lonely and I was literally half the world away. It seemed harmless enough to talk to him, but as we talked, I felt like he was refilling the hole he’d left behind when I threw him out of my life. It was a hole that hadn’t healed, it was deep and hurt terribly. I had missed him, and I was alone in a foreign country, and he came along sad and remorseful and making the awful hurt vanish.”

“There you are.” She nodded. “He came back when you were vulnerable, and said all the right things. He said what you needed to hear, and you know that’s the way he works. He does that with all the women – he’s exactly what they need him to be, until he gets tired of it. That’s why he is constantly surrounded. He goes out and flirts, and talks, and puts on this facade over the manipulative liar that he is, and since he’s frequently around large groups of people, it works. He gets attention and exploits it.”

“I go out,” I protested. “I’ve been going to the gym, and coffee shops, and going out to dinner alone, I don’t exactly sit at home, you know.”

“But you’re you. You’re not very flirty, and you don’t put on a facade. You, being exactly who you are, are not a manipulative, lying person. You do not feel the need to be. You are not that insecure and so deeply in need of being made to feel worthwhile.”

“I guess so…” I trailed off. “I am unapologetically and unabashedly me, I know that. I have, again, worked hard the last two years to firm that up. And I wouldn’t want to be a manipulator, or to put on a facade. I can’t abide dishonesty.”

“You have integrity.”

I felt my mouth twist into a rueful parody of a grin, felt my eyes roll in a northwesterly direction, and she picked up on it. “What are you thinking?”

That I have blankets that keep me warmer than integrity in my bed at night, I thought, but replied instead, “That I stand alone with my principles, while he and his lack thereof are never without companionship.”

“But who and what he is – a manipulative liar, a shallow, hollow person who feels so worthless that he has to use others in vast quantities in order to even feel remotely human – is that a cost you feel willing to pay?”

“…no.” I tightened my lips. “It’s still not fair.”

“Oh, it’s fair – I mean, he is out there doing a lot of work to constantly meet new people to prey on.” She fixed me with a direct gaze. “It is fair. In that sense, since you are not as constantly out there and open as he is, it is rather fair. But he does not deserve it, and those women do not deserve what he is going to do to them. There is a difference between something being fair and something being deserved, sometimes.”

“Well…yes. I suppose there is.”

“You need to get out and do more things. It’s not that you’re not busy, but you do a lot of things alone. I know you are very protective about having your own time and solitary activities, and that would be fine if you didn’t want companionship so much.” Now the stern expression with which I am so very familiar came down. “But you do. And you are going to have to restructure your schedule and get out there and do things around people. You’ll probably have to give up or cut back on some of your solitary activities.”

My first impulse was to protest, because I am fiercely protective of my own time. This is what happens when you’re raised as a Multi-Trick Show Pony. Once you finally wrench your own life back into your hands, you tend to grip it very, very tightly and be very, very miserly with doling out minutes and hours to other people.

Also, you tend to be completely socially inept and totally at a loss as to where the hell to go to meet these mythical other people.

“Think of…I don’t know. Taking classes. Weightlifting. Martial arts. Writers’ meetups?”

“I could look into group guitar lessons at a college, maybe,” I pondered. “I’d like some more concrete guidance there, and a group setting might be useful.”

“There you go,” she nodded. “Look into it, and I will see you back in two weeks. You can tell me how Faire went. Oh, and would you please update your OKCupid profile to be a bit less defensively hostile?”

And so here we are again. I have to find something to do. Something outside of my normal group. And I am for the most part utterly paralyzed as to how to do this. I have a few ideas, but I have to kick myself in the arse to get started on following through with them.

Sometimes I am utterly cozy with myself and with being alone. It’s nice. I am the boss of me and my time management.

But, yeah. Lonely, too. Lonely, and principled, and particular, and socially inept. It is a lethal combination, one with which I have not managed to reconcile myself. And since I can’t reconcile it, I have to face it and deal with it, and what a pain in the ass that is going to be.