old flames

So back after my VERY VERY bad Easter Weekend…

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the limitations one has to accept when it comes to writing characters. It isn’t that you can’t flesh them out, make them believable… etc… but rather that there will always be a face missing, some small part that wont be expressed because it would take more than a thousand novels to encompass the human being. We’re multi-faceted in the extreme.

I’ve come to the same conclusion when it comes to blogging – that there are people who know me (or think they do), and people who don’t, that will read this blog and think that it a condensed version of me. Somehow the subject matter, or the manner in which I present things, justifies their views. Puts context to their compartmental vision of me.

This carpel-tunnel world of blogging, invariably then, has its risks. What if a woman comes on here in a year’s time? What if I like said woman and she deems my outpourings to be abhorrent and vile and therefore concludes that I am unworthy of her… all these ‘what if’s will be the death of me, but lets just say that I’m right. Do I care? Yes. Can I do anything? No.

Bring it on home that whole idea of people liking me for me – if said woman came here and didn’t understand my motivations then I’ll be damned if she’s right for me – just like the last.

So this idea of me coming across as something short of myself got me thinking about everything really. As much as I’ve put things to bed.. So to speak.. I do have to say that certain elements of my character are coming together to show me as anything but an honest, caring and kind man. Not least to everyone, but mostly to myself. See, I’m such a self-deceiving creature. But you knew that.

Anyway – so getting on with life… this whole breaking away from the loss of Bath and life down there. Its taken me off facebook and taken away my one mode of constant communication with the world back there behind me. It’s a good thing too, because the old lovers were already starting to feel brazen! Old flames leaving suggestive messages on my wall, the odd filthy reply to an unassuming statement. Laura might just have put two and two together to work out when and where and with whom. So I’m glad that is all behind me. Now I can move on to new pastures with a clean slate. Chalking line after line on that board above me. Remembering.

I intend to start my education of myself by starting with history. I’ve opened up various memories and I’m taking a good look at what makes me. I have nostalgia abound. Zounds man, I might even have unleashed a realization or two.

I know that what I had in Bath was a best friend and various distractions. Not to play them down, we got closer toward the end (hence the sadness at parting) but since then I’ve more than replaced them and feel in a better place than I ever did. Lying in the sun this morning saw that I understood what was important. It was the second moment I’ve truly felt content in the here and now of here.

The funny thing is that the people I have met in the last 2 months have been better friends to me than anyone else I have ever met. They know me better too. I could have one person here in Liverpool take on a team of every person I have known for the past 4 years in Bath and they’d win a quiz on me hands down. (Save for Dom of course, who remains the only man I’ve ever confided truth in.) I’ve opened my heart to some of the loveliest people imaginable and all they’ve done is pay in kind. So I have to admit, scary as it sounds, I was wrong. (Gosh, didn’t that make you tingle inside??) I was wrong to hate my home so much. Wronger still, to think that the world ended when my little false life in Bath hit the fan.

But more, much more than this… I feel like I’ve gotten better. I’m not second guessing the old relationships like I used to. I used to lie in bed with Laura beside me and listen to songs that took me back to other women I’d known. Back to Jenny the Stalker and my inability to love her. Back to Patty and my inability to love her. Back to every woman I’d ever known and my inability to love them. But always the same feeling of regret and the need to retrace those steps. The feeling that there is a girl beside me that is beautiful, but I feel more for these old flames than I do for her. This is what brought me to wanting to leave her back in October, what had me almost there so many times. Before the idea of moving to Cardiff gave me the stupid idea that a change of scene might bring a change of heart.

I’ve known a lot of really beautiful women in my life and I treated them all, at the time, as though they were a piece in my puzzle – rather than a light to work under. They were short-term soul-mates, some of whom became habits that I stuck with until it became too difficult to keep going. One or two I got with, out of a deluded idea that I could be happy with them in time… given time I was soon proven wrong.

And that’s it for this blog post… more to follow, beg and borrow. I mean… tomorrow…

Filed under: Dom, Existence, Friends, Girls, Jenny, Love, Sex, Women, Youth, about me, hopes, much, novel, other people's lives, writing

the me of now

“Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one.”

Dr. William Menninger

Before I sign off for a very bad good friday and easter weekend in Liverpool I should point out that I’ve been very, very happy recently. I’ve been more consistently happy than I am used to and it is a wonderful thing.

I have started and progressed well with scriptfrenzy, lots of pages down, kept my antics to a reasonable level and determined what I will do with my life for the next year.

In short – I’m back to the old me – sorry to everybody that thought I’d be changed irreparably by what has happened – sorry.

I went out last weekend and ended up getting massively drunk on scotch after finding my way to a philosophy student’s party, getting lost in the rain, finding my way back again and the rest is censored. The morning I left a little note saying “Thanks guys, you’re all magic.” That’s how I feel about what is going on right now… pure magic – everyone is enjoying me being me!

I’m just Jensen, Cup, Me… I drink, I laugh, I cry, I’m a whole person and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like me – like a new friend says all the time (though not at me) “Don’t bother me!” [said in Colombian accent].

See, the thing I’ve learned from another new friend, Sarah, is that you are you as you are… tongue tied… no, I mean – you are fractured, incomplete, emotional, prone to making mistakes..etc… but that is ‘you’. Its wonderful.

Its not an excuse to fail, but it is truly a wonderful experience to come to terms with your limits.

I’ve found out that my limits are tested when I run around with masks on.

Lots of people, even those I loved most, back in Bath knew me as this creature with a thousand faces, I put on all these masks so that I could fit with one group or another.. So that I could pretend I was happy when I wasn’t.. So I could get my own way (because I was selfish)… I just tried so hard to fit in that I stuck out like a sore thumb by the end of it.. With all my weeping… no wonder there are so few that will stay in touch, they’re not used to my sadness – and because I never showed it, it took over and became much stronger than I could endure.

I only showed the true me to two people really, in all the time I was there, Jenny the Stalker (who loved me for me, but I think a little too maddeningly) and Nicola (who looked after me on the day I was taken home from Bath). Even Laura never really saw the me behind the me that I showed her – I didn’t tell her too much about my sadness, because I didn’t understand it myself… so all I said was ‘i’m sick’ but didn’t do anything about it – knowing all too well that I’d be back to pretending next week, when I have more strength… and on and on the cycle went.

The medication is wonderful and has made me not think or worry about anything back in Bath – that is the sweetest relief I have ever known – right now I’d be thinking ‘god, my ex is with someone’ or ‘my friends aren’t my friends anymore’ or ‘my life has been stolen’ and get all worked up – but really… I can see the good so much more clearly.

So I got back to Liverpool and I had but one aim.. To make friends and make myself known only as myself.. To be my honest, open, frank and energetic sense… and you know… it paid off MASSIVELY!!!

I now know a group that I can be open with, honest with and not feel judged, because – at the end of the day – I’m not that fucked up, I’m quite a normal kid, just full of insecurity and sadness from time to time. So what if I feel down one day, so do they, so does everyone. And I know that I’ve thought this a million times before… and I don’t want it to seem like I think I’ve found a cure for all this sadness that engulfs me from time to time – but it just smacks of the right kind of remedy for me. The me of now.

Everything I have heard from Bath has been about healing and returning, but really… I’d hate to go back to that world.. It was an awful game of trying to be someone that I’m not, every single fucking day! Here I have relaxed, let down the veil, embraced the true meaning of honesty.

That you don’t hurt nearly as many people being yourself, as you hurt when you pretend you are someone you are not.

(much more to say… but i have run out of time…)

Filed under: Existence, Family, Friends, Girls, Jenny, Women, about me, anxiety, hopes, much

Stalked

Stalked from the Oxfam bookshop to the canal I couldn’t help but feel special when she introduced herself. Her name was Jenny and she had seen me and needed to tell me that she liked me and wanted to get to know me. I was flattered.
She was a sweet little creature with dark brown hair and the same colour eyes as my mother. When we kissed she hardly used her tongue and it was difficult to engage her. When we had sex she wanted to be thrown about.
A week later I was happy and decided to start going out with her. Two weeks after that and I decided that it was time to finish with her.

Filed under: Jenny, Sex