The Distraction of Approval

I'd like to write about the charming fox sailing away in a golden walnut boat that arrived in the mail for me today, bringing me absolute delight. I kept trying to write about this and move into the comforting pleasure about writing about silly, happy, lovely things.

Instead I've been counting the days in my head since AM and I filed for divorce. I think today is 30 days since filing. We each received a slightly baffling piece of mail saying how a General Judgement was entered last week. I did some research and looking through the certified copies of everything. That's one of the pieces of paperwork that was in the filing. Once it is entered by a judge and 30 days had passed the divorce would be final. So I think it may well be today. Feels a little strange.

I think if we'd not done it now, to have just let things between us continue to drift, I think eventually it would have eroded our friendship hugely, perhaps irrevocably. Not rejection so much as a mutal willingness to look unflinchingly at what we've both avoided for years. My therapist pointed out to me last week that since I've been seeing her (going on 6 years) there has been this undercurrent of distance and a sense of my compromising on my authentic self for the sake of loving a friend so much. And now we both get to step off in very different directions, very different people.

Here I am, dropping another privilege of normalcy - this time all the things that going along with the shield, anonymity of "hetero-normal". I tried to hard to fit in as a kid, really throughout most of my 20s too. Moving who I was towards positive reinforcement, they ways in which I could be sure I'd be liked.

I feel exposed and notice reminders daily of how I don't fit in with society. How in some cases many people, if not several other countries, believe what I'm doing is abnormal and wrong, sinful and shameful. At the very best finding me extreme in my choices. It is kind of terrifying, much of the time really. Despite all of that, in the past 6 years I've come to know with certainty that to move closer to the Truth, to rest in the Essential Self, is to turn away from all the things I once distracted and comforted myself with.

The Distraction of Approval

Given sufficient uncertainty
The familiarity of bending,
Towards the false idol of praise
Felt as normal as breath,
More so.

At some point the stories
Lacked humor, especially to me.
The smile, merely pasted in place.
The laughter always sounded
Canned, a track stuck in a loop.