Post on Emotional Dishonesty

I started mental help therapy when I was twenty-two years old. I just knew that I needed some guidance.

A bit of backstory.

I had given myself over completely to a man whom from here on out will be referred as Beatnik Man for he was so that- a man nine years my senior. I allowed myself to be his Pygmalion. I assumed that he knew best. black turtlenecks, meerschun pipe, beard, poetic. He taught me about art. He flattered me by loving my mind. He told me I was a voluptuary, and one night as we lay in bed on a hot summer night, he said that with my dark tan I looked like an Indian princess. No man had ever spoken to me that way, and I was putty in his hands.


Good things came from this union. Firstly, my meeting him got me out of marrying Sweet Guy to whom I was engaged. We were far from just engaged. Wedding dress had been purchased. Wedding inviations sat in their box ready to be sent. The Fort Harrison had been reserved for the reception.

As I walked about campus feeling that I could not get married was something I could not avoid.
I, try like many to avoid feeling the real scary stuff , but this I could not. I can only describe this experience of that there was thunder in my ears. I was so frightened. Every part of me I had to face this attraction to Beatnik Man and make a decision about my college years Sweet Guy.

I sought refuge from the free campus counseling service. I spilled my guts, and the older woman who sat on the other side of the desk said, "Well, it sounds to me as though you do not want to get married."

I needed that validation. I went to my dorm room, placed the ruby and diamond engagement ring in its box, called Sweet Guy on the phone and ended a three year romance. I arranged for him to pick-up the ring knowing that I would make certain I was not in my dormitory room when he came by. My roomate handed him a note and a box. I never saw Sweet Guy again.

Within twelve months of cohabiting with Beatnik Man, he started treating me like he probably had treated his two former wives. He started staying out later. He started finding fault with little things about me. He started making stabbing remarks towards me when I did not know the meaning of a word he used. Intellect was everything to him. He spend that first summer of our love affair putting the finishing touches on his eight hundred page novel.

The day in which he boxed up the transcript and mailed it off to a publisher was a momentous day. I believe that he really believed his book would be published. I knew it was a bad book- too verbose, ridiculously complicated piles of compound complex sentences styled so that he could show off his impressive vocabulary. The book had veritbly no plot, but he was to be the next Kerousa or so he thought.

The more rejection letters which appeared in the mailbox the more beer he drank and the more was I the target of his bitter sarcasm about all things that existed in the world at large.

One day he came home and told me he was bored with me. I panicked. I believe that I must be boring. My self-esteem took a skydive.

Fortunately, I had the sense to move-out. And for months thereafter I kept believing that it would just be a matter of time before he realized how much he missed me and would call me back to share his home.

What caused me to start mental health therapy is that there was that still powerful but very quiet voice in me telling me that I was an interesting young woman. And yes, logically I got get that, but what I could not understand is why I felt like I was now just a half of me and why in Hell did I feel that I needed him to make me complete. Intuitively I knew that a woman should not need anyone that much to the point that she feels lacking as a whole person. good God.

I wanted to stand on my own two sturdy feet and feel whole. Whole like i felt as a toddler when I remember sitting in the grass feel totally at one with the ants that were crawling from one blade of grass to another. I felt complete then. I did not think about whether I was enough of anything. I just knew that the grass, the ants, the sunshine and my eyes that noticed was enough. I had not learned to separate myself from the all of experience, and to see myself as seperate when i was a baby girl.

It was later as I ventured out into the society of others that I learned to compare myself to others, or worse yet, learned to believe that what others said about me was the truth. I spent many many years of my younger womanhood trying to be better.


One of the gifts of being older is that I don't try to be better anymore. I think I am good enough.
No one gets to try to take my joy by telling me who I am. I know who I am.