If I try to imagine myself back into that night surrounded by Barbies and dollhouses in the dark room, with my heart screaming in agony at being forcibly and CRUELLY separated from my boyfriend who was just downstairs<\/i>, I know that I was afraid of leaving my dream-world of being in a show out of town behind. Going back to Chicago meant facing the music of life without the baby boomer, and I was terrified of that. The thing with the baby boomer had ended a mere week or so before I left town, and so I had always felt like my time away had been more like a criminal getaway than a professional opportunity. Going back, I suddenly knew that all of that would be waiting for me. I hadn’t escaped. Or, I had momentarily, but it was a respite. Not a new beginning. It was just a breather before going back into the real shit. It’s so long ago that the emotions are not at my fingertips, but I do remember lying in that stupid single bed and everything around my heart just burned<\/i>. It literally burned<\/i>. But I don’t think I knew who I was sad about. Baby Boomer? Gen X-er downstairs? My empty life I would be returning to?<\/p>\n
It was probably a mix but in that dark moment in that little girl’s room, with the leaf shadows trembling on the wall, crouched against the wall, being encroached upon by dolls and teddy bears, all I was aware of was how far away Michael was downstairs, and how much I wanted to be with him. I ached! I burned for him! I yearned to get out of Ebola quarantine. I was out of my mind!! It seemed so unfair, globally unfair, like THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ME<\/i> that we couldn’t be alone with each other on our last night, I couldn’t get over it, I burned, I ached, I was out of my mind! I wanted to be held so badly it was like a primitive imperative. Biological in nature. The fact that I was lying in the bed of a little girl just added to the sensation.<\/p>\n
There’s a funny moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/i> when Jim Carrey has suddenly become himself as a four year old. He stands in the oversized kitchen in his jammies and he says, “I want to be held!” Then, to himself, a flash of his old adult consciousness, “It’s amazing how strong that need is!!”<\/p>\n
For some of us, that need remains palpably strong, trembling on the surface of our interactions with each other. Others are better able to sublimate. Or, you know, they actually find a real person to hold them, and they share their bed with that person for many years, and so the yawning need is not so apparent. Because it’s been fulfilled. Whatever. But for me, the need is, at times, unbearable. Obviously I BEAR it but that does not change the fact.<\/p>\n
This is probably scarcity talking.<\/p>\n
It’s embarrassing to admit to it. It’s embarrassing to admit to it, in general, and it’s REALLY embarrassing to admit to it to a boyfriend (of the new variety). You might seem insane. Too “needy”. Codependent. (The next time I hear the word “codependent”, I’m taking out my crossbow. I’ve had it with that effing label. It is just a smokescreen for those who fear intimacy, a convenient label to put on people who have the balls to say the words, “You know what, I need this from you …” You are under no obligation to fulfill that need, by the way, so YOU are the one who are “codependent”. You are perfectly free to say, “I can’t fulfill that need right now …” but the mere act of ASKING for something is not codependent. Seriously, I’m taking out my crossbow right now thinking about how this word is over-used by those who are not qualified to understand basically anything.) But the thing about it is, I have internalized that anxiety. I fear being seen to be needy. Or “too much”. I have been told openly I am “too much”. Now, granted, not by the people who really matter. My friends, the men who have really gotten me … I’m never “too much” for them. But it can’t be denied that I am aware of my own “intensity” (kind term), and I have, on occasion, been punished for it. Meaning, rejected. I don’t take rejection lightly. It hurts like a motherfucker. Of course. I am not alone in that. I fear abandonment. When it comes, when I am abandoned, the response is primal.<\/p>\n
And that was what was going on in that dark room, with Michael downstairs. Michael was not abandoning me. But he might as well have been. That is what that separation felt like to me. The tide pulling back, inevitable, nothing will stop it, all I could see was the wreckage and lost hopes and dreams (wrapped up in the Baby Boomer), and now my dream-world was ending, and I was going to lose Michael, and I felt abandoned.<\/p>\n
This is the stuff I never share. I protect everyone<\/i> from this side of myself. It’s too bleak, it makes people too worried, and nobody knows what to do. The cat is out of the bag right now, and this is where I LIVE now, it can’t be hidden … but at the time, in my night in quarantine, I struggled mightily with my own needs, which were so strong that the repression of those needs caused the burning in my chest area. That is what was happening. I just needed to be held. I wanted comfort. I wanted something to take the edge off. The edge would be waiting for me, make no mistake, I am not a dreamer, not really, and I understand that reality is rough. But sometimes, when things are really hard, it’s nice to just have someone hold you and say, “It’s going to be okay.” Or just get in bed with you to fuck the bad feelings away. No small thing. A healing gift. <\/p>\n
To me, this is the primary thing that relationships (good ones) can give. I have just been through a ruthless year. I have tons of support from family and friends, a posse of people circling the wagons, but that one-on-one thing, of coming home after a rough day, with a long night ahead of you, and having someone to, oh, watch TV with, go out to dinner with, get naked and comfort one another, or even have a snippy argument about car payments … I have not had. Scarcity makes all of this even more stark.<\/p>\n
I was a young woman when I was in Ithaca, burning with need and abandonment in that little girl’s room. But I understood the rough road ahead. If I didn’t understand it with my brain, my soul knew. Its worst fears have come true. It knew back then. It knew.<\/p>\n
All I wanted to do was go downstairs and be with Michael. There was nothing else in my mind. Why was that so difficult? Our relationship was still relatively new, I had only known him a couple of months at that point. But our time in Ithaca had been a condensed and intimate affair. We saw each other every day, every night, we were together 24\/7. We had nothing else to do, no other lives. We did the show at night, we made out all night, we went out to breakfast, we read in the park, we went to get ice cream, we went on hikes – there was no one else to hang out with, no distractions, we had no day jobs, no other obligations. It was surprisingly easy. Michael didn’t play the “hot\/cold” game. He didn’t play games, in general. He was “hot”, all the time. He wanted to be with me. He didn’t manipulate my affections or take advantage of my obvious liking of him. He didn’t act aloof, or over it, to make me crazy. Why would he do that? He liked me too. 20 year old boy but he understood that if you like someone, then, uhm, you do your best to be with them. You don’t pull the exact opposite. I felt safe. I don’t do well with games. My fear of abandonment is so acute that at the first sign of it – the first flapping of the wings of it on the horizon – I am outta there. Nope. And my instincts have rarely been wrong. I have been told, “Sheila, you are over-reacting,” or “I think you’re being premature” more times than I can count. I have been talked out of my certainty that something has happened, abandonment is coming …<\/i> and gotta say it: I have never been wrong yet. I am sensitive to shifts. Emotional shifts. I have always been so. I know when something has changed, even if nothing is said about it yet. The shoe may not have dropped yet, but it’s coming. With Michael, I never felt some ominous shoe dropping on the horizon. He was into me. So yay, I got to be into him too. We do not operate in vacuums. It’s a dance-step. I vet you, you vet me, we lay the groundwork saying, “It’s okay to come out, it’s safe …” and you test each other, you show a bit more, “Is this okay? What do you think of this side of me?”, and either the person shows up and shows you it’s okay or they don’t. You need to keep your bearings. I am very good at that. I am terrible at the aftermath, but I am very good at keeping my bearings during those opening salvos. So with Michael, I felt safe, and I got to dote on him, and take care of him, I got to roll around in the grass with him, I got to fight with him, and I got to lie in bed with him curled up in a pigpile until we went to sleep. It was awesome.<\/p>\n
I didn’t know why I couldn’t just go downstairs. What was holding me back? I wanted to be with him. I was so sad. Monumentally sad. I had Ebola and I was being separated from those I love forever.<\/p>\n
It is insane how sad I was, in looking back I can see that I was having a meltdown obviously but sometimes human beings melt down, where is the shame in that? I’m not a headcase, in general, but in that moment I was. I needed help. I needed a little bit of comfort. I needed a committed friend to hold me and say, “Hey, shhhh, it’s going to be okay.” I fear my own humanness is basically what this is all about. And for good reason, at times, I might add. I have been rejected. I have been brushed off, put aside, rejected – for the very qualities that I am treasured for by others. This is hurtful. Like I said, we do not operate in a vacuum. Or, NORMAL people don’t anyway. Those who walk around always knowing that they “deserve” things, they “deserve” the best, their self-esteem is unshakably high about what they “deserve” are, in general, socially inept d-bags. A little self-doubt is sometimes not just good for relationships, but also accurate<\/i>. It is the ability to look at oneself accurately<\/i>, and that is the most attractive quality of all. We’ve all had the experience of talking to someone who truly believes that he or she is the funniest person on the planet. And they are not. (Like Mitchell says about those people, “Leave the comedy to the professionals, mkay?”) Or those who feel that reciting South Park<\/i> episodes mean that they themselves are HILARIOUS. I am not exempting myself from these foibles, we all have them, we do not always know who we are, we under- or over-estimate our abilities, etc., but when it becomes endemic to a personality, when the entire artifice of a personality is constructed to hide the truth about the person from himself … that’s when things get scary. Again, this is just an instinct with me. Maybe it’s like being a human metal detector, only I can sense sociopaths and d-bags. Not sure. It’s a sensitivity to lying. Not lying like, “I’m 35” when you actually are 62. Those are lies we all can understand. But lying like, “I am THIS kind of person – can we all just agree that I am THIS kind of person?” when it is so obvious that you are NOT that kind of person, not in the slightest. To me, that kind of lying (while understandable – we all want to be loved and successful and perceived to be terrific well-liked people) is the toxic kind. Perhaps because I feel like I could “go there” myself.<\/p>\n
So of course I would love to be “the kind of person” who doesn’t ache to be hugged from time to time, and coddled, and told “everything is going to be okay”. I would also love, by the way, to be the kind of person who doesn’t feel that those very human needs are neurotic and must be hidden from others. That is really what I would love and that was the battle going on with me in my quarantine.<\/p>\n
Finally, though, I crossed some rubicon (I was sobbing openly by this point, mortifying!), and decided, “this is so stupid. I need to go be with Michael right fucking now.” And I did. My major breakthrough was not “getting myself together” before I went downstairs. This may seem pathetic to some people – those who have a tendency to call displays of emotion of any kind “whining” – but I live in a different world, thankfully, where emotion has its place. This also may seem like a version of “arrested development” to others, who could find it confusing that I was so embarrassed by my own emotions. It’s a valid point. I am not incredibly mature. I have a lot of neurotic notions about things, and also, I operate from scarcity. It does something to you. Makes you a bit ka-ka. Cray-cray. My desire now is to be KIND to that part of myself, as opposed to brutal. To give her some goddamn room to BREATHE.<\/p>\n
Like my cousin Mike said to me recently, “Stop calling yourself crazy. You are not crazy. You love deeply, you care deeply, that is not crazy.”<\/p>\n
It is, on the contrary, the best part of myself. To abandon that part of myself, to demonize it, to believe in my heart the judgment of the world that I am “too much” would be a tragedy.<\/p>\n
I staggered down the stairs, in my T-shirt and boxer shorts, glasses on, tears streaming down my face. I was a spectre from the black lagoon of grief upstairs, infiltrating Michael’s quiet space downstairs. He lay on the couch, with a light on, and he was deeply engrossed in the Peter Manso biography of Brando. He heard me coming, glanced up, saw me, and in an instant, the book was down, he was off the couch, and taking me in my arms. Baffled, yes – because we were not in the same place. We had been in the same place for our relationship – but on that last night, we actually DID separate. Again, my instinct about this was not wrong. He was ready to move on, to go back to ‘real life’ – I was not. But instead of judging me for holding onto it, instead of judging me for feeling the loss, he had nothing but sympathy and love for me. I have not had much kindness in those moments. I have from friends, but not from the man in question. He has already moved on. Faucet on, faucet now off. He is not the one I can go to anymore, and yeah, there’s something right about that, that is why one has a posse, but it is still hard. This moment with Michael stands alone in my experience, and he – a 20 year old kid – was up to the task. He brought me over to the couch, and held me as I cried, and he was saying things to me like, “What is it? What is it?? Can you talk about it?” I couldn’t. Then he said, “You don’t want to go home, do you?”<\/p>\n
I had already been crying but at his words, I became like this:<\/p>\n
\n![\"cryingjag2.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/cryingjag2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nInstead of withdrawing, or judging, or all of the other things I have experienced in such moments (and again, I’m not a neurotic headcase, but when I get sad, I go there, man) – Michael coddled me and upped the tenderness. When I burst into a higher level of sobbing, he almost started laughing – the way you do when a little kid freaks the fuck OUT because he dropped his popsicle on the ground – you recognize the reality of the intense GRIEF being expressed, but on some level, you know: Okay, okay, this is kind of funny, because she is flipping OUT. The laughter was warm and soft in my ears, as he held me tighter, sympathetic but also somehow distant, and he said, “I know … I know you don’t want to go home …” He did not give me platitudes, like: “I want to stay here, too” (because I knew and he knew that that was not true). He did not reassure me inappropriately, ie: “We’ll still be together when we get back to Chicago”, because we both knew we probably wouldn’t. He just heard me, did not belittle me, held me tight, and said, “I know. I know you don’t want to go home. It’s okay, Sheila. You’re going to be okay.”<\/p>\n
I was pretty much at the “boo-hoo” stage of my crying jag. I think I was actually making actual “boo hoo” noises. Michael laughed to himself (but kindly, always kindly), and lay me back on the couch with him – the two of us struggling to fit there together. Half of my body was falling off into midair, but he held onto me, putting my head on his chest, and let me boo-hoo about my own life – much of which did not have to do with him – deep into the night. Half the time I was crying about another man! Good Lord! Michael knew about the “baby boomer” (as a matter of fact, he was the one who christened him “the baby boomer”, and his voice always dripped with the contempt of the Gen X-er when he said it). Remember: I’m Gen X too. I mean, look at our outfits. <\/p>\n
\n \nWe were Gen X poster children and we didn’t even know it. We didn’t talk much about the baby boomer, or our pasts in general, I didn’t go around talking to my new boyfriend about my old love – we were too taken up with getting Ben & Jerry’s and having ridiculous fights about how I crossed the street<\/a> and how crazy that made him – and doing our show, and making out all over town. We were in the present.<\/p>\n That “boo-hoo” moment on the couch was also me being in the present. It was not me holding onto the past, not really. It was me moving into another present. It was a letting go. It is hard for me to let go. I wanted to stay in Ithaca forever.<\/p>\n Words cannot express the damage that has been done to me when I have experienced contempt or coldness during such times. It makes you shrivel back into yourself, recoil completely. It is an over-correction, which I have talked about before<\/a>. You feel horror at what you have revealed, you feel horror that it is now being judged and you are seen as somehow lacking, or weak, or codependent – you are “that girl” that everyone rolls their eyes at – and so the doors clamp shut, you over-correct in your next relationship, and it is sometimes years before all that shit is untangled. The damage done by the over-correction is often way worse than the original hurt.<\/p>\n But I was not damaged in that moment with Michael. I went to him in my sadness, and he comforted me. Not just like a friend should, but like a man should. He is a real man. He was an underage kid at that point, but he knew how to be a man. We both had our times of “checking out” during our relationship – he had some insane freakouts which are amusing to me in retrospect, although they were tremendously serious at the time. I made the enormous error of getting into a huge conversation with another cast member, a guy, about Henry Miller – and Michael, who loves Henry Miller, freaked OUT on me later. He could not BELIEVE that I would share with ANOTHER PERSON my thoughts on Henry Miller without even ACKNOWLEDGING that MICHAEL LOVED HIM TOO. Michael was screaming at me<\/i> on the sidewalk at 2 in the morning. “You KNOW I love Henry Miller – you didn’t even fucking LOOK at me when you were talking to Pat about him – it’s like you just wiped me out – like I don’t even count!” I blustered around, trying to protest my innocence – “I didn’t realize – Henry Miller just came up – I didn’t think – ” and Michael was having none of it – and we both just spiralled down into this huge fight and I finally felt so attacked that I shouted back, “FINE. FINE. I wanted to talk to HIM about it, not YOU – is that what you want to hear? What – you OWN Henry Miller? Do you OWN HENRY MILLER, MICHAEL?” I am laughing out loud as I type this. Finally, I got it. I understood what was happening. Michael felt rejected, abandoned in that moment, and it pissed him off. He just wanted to be included. Oh. Okay. And I hadn’t included him. Whoops. Once I “got it”, I was able to apologize – and appropriately. I totally knew where he was coming from, and it was okay that he flipped out on me. Of course he did.<\/p>\n In a funny way, him flipping out like that made me feel safe. I hated it when he flipped out, it made us both insane, but at the same time – it showed me: this guy gives a shit. Try to be sensitive to that, Sheila. You are not alone in this.<\/p>\n That’s what I mean when I say Michael was “hot”, all the time. It was high-maintenance, I had never been used to a man who could just openly admit he was jealous – I found it thrilling, but that was kind of unfair because jealousy was a torture to Michael. Anyway, my point is: we had both had times when we “checked out”, and freaked out. That last night was my time.<\/p>\n I was suffering. For all kinds of reasons. Some had to do with him, others not. There was much going on with me that I had not shared. He knew that.<\/p>\n But when I remember him glancing up to see me approaching down the stairs, when I remember him putting the book down immediatley and standing up in one fell swoop, when I remember him dragging me into his arms and holding me, until I fell asleep, what I am grateful for is his kindness.<\/p>\n Kindness like that is not a small thing.<\/p>\n Perhaps the scarcity from which I operate is a sort of blessing, although I am not ready yet to say “thank you” for it. But it does help clarify things. Everything is so stripped away, so scarce, that needs and wants and desires become acutely apparent. And the best part of all (although again, it is a mixed blessing) is that one does not forget.<\/p>\n Operating from scarcity gives you a long long memory. You need it. That drop of water you received from the oasis 300 miles away has to last.<\/p>\n And it does.<\/p>\n It also helps to be able to write about it.<\/p>\n Memory, in and of itself, is a sort of oasis. A place where abundance can be stored, measured out, given back, doled out.<\/p>\n There are many reasons why Michael and I are still such good friends. It remains “hot”, not as in romantic – but like all my friendships – it is still engaged, still in process, still at work<\/a>. We are not done. We knew what we were doing back then. We recognized a kindred spirit in one another. We were not wrong.<\/p>\n I fell asleep that night with my head on his chest. At some point during the night, he took my glasses off for me. He told me later that he read all night, holding the book up in the air, with me sleeping on his chest.<\/p>\n The next day, we all woke up and piled into our caravan of cars and drove back to Chicago.<\/p>\n All of my fears about returning were soon realized, and I was catapulted into a ruthless wilderness which eventually ended with me picking up and moving to New York. That was the end result. I no longer could bear it, Chicago itself became too much for me, and I had to leave. It was about a year later that I made the move, but the bad-ness really began for me when I got back to Chi-town.<\/p>\n But as the years have passed, my memory of Michael’s kindness to me that night have remained, and, to be honest, it’s a small moment. Right? Other people who may have had tons of experience with dating and many many boyfriends and even husbands may not hold onto such moments, or even remember them at all. Things become diluted, it is easy to forget the poignancy of those moments of connection. But not when you have so little. When you have so little, things remain clear. Awfully so, at times, I wish for less clarity, a little softness and forgetfulness, but that seems to be a hopeless wish. At least for someone such as myself.<\/p>\n I was never in love with Michael, and he never broke my heart. Our bond remains unclassifiable and outside of normal explanations and it was operating at full level that night I had Ebola. We knew each other, what, 7 weeks at that point? But the entelechy of it was already there. It was there from the beginning, and in my experience that is so rare as to be almost unheard of.<\/p>\n That memory matters to me. I call upon it. It reminds me of softness, of gentleness, of being understood and cared for when you are weak and worn down, of not just the possibility of kindness, but its actuality.<\/p>\n I think of him reading his book over my sleeping head. I think of him gently removing my glasses so that I wouldn’t wake up. I wasn’t “there” in those moments, I was asleep, but it makes me think of my favorite passage from LM Montgomery’s Emily’s Quest<\/i>:<\/p>\n And even though he knew it not, surely such love would hover around him all his life like an invisible benediction, not understood but dimly felt, guarding him from ill and keeping from him all things of harm and evil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When I think of that night, that’s what comes to mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t really remember why I was so upset. It all seems pretty Gothic to me now. Like, wow, Sheila, I get that you are sad, but is that any reason to turn yourself into a weeping dybbuk? It had … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/sc000593b4.jpg\" "\\"sc000593b4\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n