We Need a New Word for Exes
morning anxiety, impending doom, choices
Oh, you guys.
I’ve been waking up with a lot of anxiety each morning. It may have to do with the fact that in the last month I have slept in my bed 5 times. Or maybe because I’m not quite content with my life, though I am undoubtedly lucky and okay. I have recently felt that my life is in the wrong time or that I teetered off into a different (wrong?) timeline of events. I have hit the age where things don’t go forward as much because there are so many things that have happened in the past. And it’s all flowing into now. This is how I explain it in my head.
I am sitting in a coffee shop in DC waiting for my ex partner to fly home while listening to Songbird by Eva Cassidy. One year ago my ex partner and I spent thanksgiving together in Ashland, Oregon but we barely talked because we were barely friends. Fifteen years ago my mother and father played the song Songbird in the kitchen on a random Sunday morning.
Time time time. The passing of it might be the scariest thing on earth. And there are so many ways to go from here. Even the walk back to my ex partners mom’s house… many ways to go and enter and carry on.
When there’s choices that splitters and splats into two versions of yourself it’s hard not to feel anxious. I am working on taking myself less seriously as I do the work of listening. Here’s some random things (for the sake of tossing my anxiety in a leg and arm and dancing it out):
I was in a bakery in Yachat’s and the day olds were called Yester-pies. There were also snail shaped desserts.
There’s a man at the coffee shop who keeps shaking his legs. But maybe this is how he dances.
The baby turkeys I raised this summer are going to be put on a plate this Thursday. Does that matter? Probably. My ex and I raised them together.
The world pins exes as bad people. But they’re not always bad. Very few people are completely bad. And if exes were bad, that would make everyone who has been an ex a bad person. I’m guessing there are a lot of us. I am one! I am not bad.
I am not saying you should all spend Thanksgiving with your ex and their family. I am just lucky.
The song Easy on Me by Adele
This past weekend my best friend’s mom made quiche and it healed me of something—though I’m not quite sure what. I’ll figure it out one day.
A tip: surround yourself with people who make you feel extroverted even if you’re not. For example, I am introverted but there are some people who make me want to stay up until very late and dance in the kitchen and put on virtual reality goggles and just f*cking laugh.
I’m going to spend the day finding some things to laugh at. There is a lot to cry about, and I did that last night. Juniper knows that when I am genuinely laughing I will cry. She tries to make me laugh-cry by telling 3-year-old jokes (they go like this: Juniper says knock knock and I say who is there and she says nO say knock knock and she says knock knock and I say knock knock and this continues forever), but she always gets me when she’s not trying.
One day things will feel right. I get closer each time I make a choice honoring myself.
Love,
Jo
