Rousing Dancers from the Trees

I promise this isn't a trap to try and set up an opportunity to defend myself or to respond with worse examples of your own actions or behavior, and this message is being written and sent from a kind and calm and submissive point of view. You won't experience any negative consequences from sharing with me, by anyone's standards. I won't even respond unless it's to ask reasonable clarifying questions necessary to make sure I understand your points.

I also know there is a lot we're cooking and the cauldron is really filling up, as well as a hefty backlog along the kitchen table, some which we need to address individually, some together, some with professional guidance. All of your actions regarding the rest of that which I'm waiting on you to complete or address are on the backburner of my interest for now. My number one priority is identifying my own abusive or manipulative behavior and acknowledging it, owning up to it, addressing it, and stopping it immediately. I need your help to do this because I can only do so much on my own with only my own perspective and information to work from with Madeline. 

Please help me out with this. It doesn't have to be an exhaustive list, we can get more in detail later on at an appropriate time. But please understand that you dropped a bombshell of what you say is my own creation on me and you left me with no way to find out how to shut down the manufacturing plant.

I hope that you'll see the reason in this request and agree with my urgency enough to help get me started with something I can work on while I wait on the advancement of the other action items in your hands. I hope you'll trust that the information and observations you provide will lead to healthier exchanges and an emotionally safer situation for both of us. If you have demands or requirements to go along with whatever you provide, please know I'll make a genuinely good faith effort to follow them as best as is possible without bringing harm to myself. 

Is that something you can send me today? A short, fast and dirty list of a few examples I can reflect on and work through on my side? 

Please. More communication is always better, even if it's uncomfortable. Often especially when it's uncomfortable. This doesn't have to be an uncomfortable thing to do, I'm asking for it openly and from a place of vulnerability and trust. Send me what you can, as soon as you can, so that I can ease my own distress and get to work on something that should ease yours too.

As a final note on this request... if you feel the need to use brutal language, or violent honesty, or condemnations that you hesitate to include because you're fearful of my reaction, I can only promise you good faith and show you that good faith so much before it becomes pointlessly ineffective. If you would be willing to send it to a third party, however, so that they could use their judgement and be present with me to make certain I don't crash out or spontaneously combust or whatever else you're afraid of me doing, then please send it to Daphyne. She'll be there with me and she'll be brutally honest while providing safety that you don't believe I'm capable of providing myself. Let me know and I'll give you her contact information immediately.

Please don't let this wait too much longer. Something small to start with now is better than having nothing until the next bomb is ready to fall.

With sincere love, and gentle respect ~

🎶

I feel threatened and hurt my the power and trust you give to her to act in the capacity of a licensed professional that she doesn't hold the credentials for. I feel so hollow and alone that she doesn't even want to hear from me. It feels unfair, unjustified, cruel. And I truly believe that if I were a woman and you were a man and nothing else was different, I would be receiving so much more grace and support and space to be heard from everyone with any connection to this. All of this just hurts. 

I know you need her guidance, and I am grateful for your desire to be careful, and I know that you have told me how grateful you are for my patience so many times. But please, if that gratitude is deep and genuine, please consider how much it costs me, how much it has cost me for such a long time now, but especially how much it has cost me in the past month or so, to continue to offer you that patience. My mental and emotional faculties are in terrible disrepair, and I often have to beg or press to even get acknowledgement that you are keeping in mind things that you have set expectations to be making progress on so that you can return to me with a little bit more. 

Please try to be mindful of how much continues to stack up for me. How much bleeding I have to staunch to buy you time. It hurts. And I'm doing my best for your sake. I just want your help with learning how I can exist in a way that is less painful, less inconvenient for you.

I understand, and I'll give you as much time as I can, but I'm still bleeding. I'm buying your time with my own pain and suffering. Please show me that the time I'm buying is at least being spent making progress. 

I also don't think that these longer and longer spaces between check ins are helpful. There are a lot of things we need to discuss, and letting them stack makes it worse. Some of the things I need to talk to you about are picking up in urgency as the pain of this unpredictable and asymmetrical relationship deepens and festers. I need to talk to you about how to free you from me so that you can move on with your life without any connection to me. And every moment I have to think about that horrible, awful, senselessly painful decision, is pure torture. 

I can't handle being this monster that I've been made out to be. I can't sustain being treated like a subhuman parasite. This all hurts so much and I'm buying you as much time as I can, but it's dragged on for so long, and more and more I'm feeling that same sense of worthlessness, of disdain, of meaninglessness, of humiliation, of failure, of empty undesirability that the ever present thoughts about you and your lover always bring me. You seem to be making it increasingly clear that you don't want things to get better between us on any level, and you just want me to give up and leave you alone. Maybe that's the cold truth. Maybe it's just noise caused by the pain and lack of information and communication. Maybe it's a little bit of both. 

But when we set up this terrible thin and hideous thread of communication to begin with, the expectation that you agreed to was that you would work on things you said you would work on, that you would update me to let me know you were taking steps to make progress, and that you would check in with reasonable expectations for when I could expect certain steps to be completed. Please, please give me something to go on here. An expected date, a scheduled check in conversation, anything at all. Because it's always been an awful experience to be sentenced to sit and wait with no information and no expectation as to when or if any information would be coming and how horrible I should expect the information to be if it ever gets here 

So, please, for now, could you even just highlight a few broad examples? Would you mind just being less careful and just pour out something honest and raw? I'm not an idiot. I understand you'll need time and guidance to refine it. But you're the one feeling abused, please just tell me what I can process in the meantime so that I have a starting point for figuring out how to not make you feel abused.

Is that a kindness that you can offer me tonight? Is there any other small sympathy I can beg to buy from you with my patience? Can we just talk now and then. Sometime at all? Or could you tell me anything about the reasons not? Something deeper than the surface of "I don't want to" or "I'm not comfortable", like, could you tell me a bit about what's really underneath that? Could you ask me questions or something? Or could you make demands, or tell me some hard truth, or some decisions or any new information about anything at all? Please just, this once, could you consider thanking me with meaningful actions instead of more words to add to the pile?

Please, kindly, and with so, so much love

Yours

Thank you for letting me hear from you.

Good night. Sweet dreams.

I'm reaching out to ask you to confirm one small detail for me that has shaped some amount of my most recent emotional distress. 

I ask you to clarify if I have the right idea or if I've just come to convince myself of this because it was never specifically denied or directly addressed. 

Please, if you will: did Blakely recently tell you specifically that she was not open to talking to me at all? Even alone, about nothing to do with you? And if that's true, can you give me any context as to how specifically that came up and why she made that declaration?

With complete respect for your privacy, of course. But... I thought of her like the sister I always wished I had. She was kinder and more understanding and genuinely intelligent than any counselor I'd ever worked with, and she helped me learn how to always find opportunities to become a better man, a how to find comfort in the dark and the bleak until I could nurture a light of my own. She was a major reason things were going so incredibly well right before the bottom fell out. Her guidance helped me find an all time high of confidence and determination and strength to make the best of a life that could have completely broken me or any other good-hearted human on its own if I hadn't found her guidance. I was the happiest and most eager and energized and excited for the future that I have ever been, and she played a big role in helping me become who I needed to be to get there.

She gave me specific requirements for what I needed to do in order to speak to her again, and I did that a long time ago. I continue with therapy even though Madeline approved me for safe and stable discharge a long, long time ago. Now, this just feels like more punishment that I don't genuinely deserve. I know I'm not entitled to anyone's time or attention or business, but I think I deserve the small show of respect that comes with at least being given a reason why. She gave me requirements, and I fulfilled them, and then she joined the city of ghosts of human beings I once loved and cherished and respected with my entire heart, without a word or a goodbye. And she also knew very well how deeply my pain from a lifetime of experience with sudden abandonment was rooted in me.

I would like to talk to you about how it feels. I really, really would. But I know you don't want to hear about how I feel, so I'll go journal it somewhere instead to be burned at the end of the chapter. But I really, really, really hate not being able to talk to you. Almost as much as I hate your wanting to not talk with me. With the little information I have, it just feels mean 😞

Please just let me know if I understood you correctly about her or if the context is different.

Thank you for your time, I'm sure you're going to have a good day. I hope you were able to read this all in a kind and gentle tone and know there's nothing here for you to feel bad about in any way. And I hope it didn't annoy you. Too much. Thank you for tolerating this message.

🖤

🎵 

 

I'm asking, but I'm not pressuring. There's no threat implied or otherwise, no punishment from me for you saying no. But it's not fair to punish or judge anyone who is just doing the best they can with extremely vague and limited information. There are very, very few things that you actually tell me not to do, or hard rules that you set. Most of this framework that I'm expected to behave within is convoluted and shrouded in the ever changing and unpredictable fog of your vagueries and implications. The more stability you contribute, the easier this will be for both of us. I accept you as having most of the deciding power as a courtesy, a kindness, but in reality we're closer to equals than you usually act, closer than you make it seem Blakely encourages you to think we are. I have rights too, not just as an injured party but as a human being, as someone who trusted you with my life based on promises and commitments you let me believe you intended to keep. But I allow those rights to be dismissed to keep myself as small as possible, the best I can, just to try to be gentle with you while you're dealing with your own issues. But I deserve to have a voice. Please don't punish me or label me for standing up for myself in the smallest ways I can when I feel I have to do so. 

With soft words, and love, 

🙇

If you feel at any point that you want to retry giving book club a go, I'd be more than happy to join you and re-read it with or without other people, as strangers or otherwise, whatever structure would make you feel happy and safe and getting the most from your experience. I'm really good at finding creative ways to help things work out when people want them to. There were so many moments throughout the series that I thought of you in the best way. But even if you don't want to do anything like that, I hope you do give it a listen and I know you'll enjoy it and I'll just be happy knowing that we both got to experience it. It's fun, it's charming, it's hilarious, it's poignant and powerful and exciting and definitely an all-time favorite of mine now.

I'm sorry if this reply was too much or uninvited, I will try to go back to keeping my emails down to either direct replies to obvious invitations or just the minimum of anything I think is strictly necessary until you set a clear expectation that it's okay to go back to more casual correspondence. But I'm really happy you're feeling positive about DCC and thought you might not mind too much if I shared that with you. 

Thank you for the message! It made me happy, and I'm excited for you, let me know if I can do anything to help. I'll be here.

With good vibes and love, wishing you the best, 

🎶🫰

I appreciate the update. Hope your day has been going very well despite having to parlay with the judicial system.

🙇🫰

Sorry about that, please don't blow up at me about it 

I stg I didn't realize it was going to text you I thought it was just like, a vibe matcher and I thought oh yeah this is that person I'd invite to something like that but it was presented as though it was conceptual and I didn't realize it was literal

Sorry if this is abuse I think it's literally just me being a dumbass

Literally so sorry wish I never existed I'm embarrassed and frightened at what you'll do to punish me for this mistake 

Much love bye

Now that I know it's not an emergency though, I am curious what they actually sent you. Was it like an invitation to sign up or a text with my name in it inviting you to be a plus one or something else? If you don't mind sharing. No worries at all though, you know I just like to have information because I have a greedy gremlin brain that wants to know and understand everything but this isn't that important so I don't need or expect a reply! No hard feelings!

Thanks again for your peace 🙏

Hope you're having a good week 🎶🫰 

Does she? What kind of availability do you need? Like lunch hours or after work or just more during your WFH days? She would probably work with you to do something after hours if you really needed to or I can look and see if my calendar is different from the one you're seeing

Next Monday as in the 29th or the 6th? I can maybe hold out until after the 29th if you really, really need to, but I really need to connect with you again before the 6th. Ideally as soon as possible rather than at the last available moment. Please let me know which Monday you meant and then find and inform me of time(s) you can reserve for us to work through some of our backlog together 🙇

I was about to make a pirate joke but then I realized that the pirate thing was scurvy 

Genuinely wish I could help you because that sounds awful but I'm glad you're actually going to a doctor instead of just hoping for the best

In the meantime you could troubleshoot by trying Benadryl and calamine lotion separately and far apart to see if it's like an allergic reaction or bug related but you'll already be at the doctor so 🤷

I don't think it's going to be Adderall or vitamin related. My bet is on thrift store contamination first, bugs second. With a secret third hunch I won't mention because it would probably freak you out. Or maybe you got dusted by some pollinating trees

Medically interested in finding out how this unfolds but kindly friendly interested in you just feeling better as soon as possible

Be mean to them if they just slap a steroid taper dose pack at you and tell you to buy some Claritin

🙏❤️

You could have chosen a number of different ways to write that email. I'm very grateful for what you went with. I laughed. Thank you.

Also glad you're getting blood work, I hope you throw the board at them. It's hard to order, I'm constantly getting labs done. Mosquitoes don't even bite me anymore, probably because they can tell I'm bone dry. I was randomly thinking about your issues back in San Marcos and having to drink that insane volume of solution. Brutal. But I am happy you're determined. I'm imagining it's been a pretty alarming experience because I know how much it takes for you to want to take medicine or get help. I hope you feel better and you get comprehensive answers 🙏

Turns out I misunderstood Dr. Kuwamura about the surgical options. Fusion requires opening the belly and puncturing the back. Mine is scheduled for July 21.

🎶