So, it's been a year
I was surprised when Facebook told me yesterday that I divorced ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
schoolpsychnerd a year ago. I had honestly completely forgotten that the anniversary was approaching.
...which says it all, doesn't it?
I described it a couple people as feeling like in the past, I had been stuffed in a box, and now I was taken out and I could take up space. Not even extra space, just space.schoolpsychnerd had a lot of trauma in her past, and she put in a lot of effort to overcome it, and I think she was mostly successful--more successful than a lot of people would have been. But our relationship, and my personality, still ended up bending around it due to its gravity.
I asked my therapist occasionally what had happened to the old me, pre-moving to Japan, who accepted![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaiderai's invitation to travel two and a half hours to a college I'd never been to so I could meet a girl he knew and wanted to introduce me to, or who would hang out with friends after work all the time. And now I know the answer--he was there all the time, buried under everything piled on top of him. And over the last year I've pushed all that out of the way and stood on my feet. I've had a bunch of friends tell me how much I've changed, how I seem so much happier, how full my life seems now. All of that is correct.
And I can carry that hindsight forward. The reason I tagged this post 悟り is because I have a much better understanding of who I really am now, when I'm free to define it on my own terms. I remember my therapist being astonished at how much I changed over the course of the year-and-a-half we saw each other. At our last session, she told me:
Just look at my post for last weekend or the weekend before that for examples of what I mean. Last weekend, I very deliberately took the largest space of free time I had and filled it. I did the same thing tonight--I'm going to a lecture about architecture at a bar.
The previous chapter is definitely over. Now, it's time to live my life.
schoolpsychnerd a year ago. I had honestly completely forgotten that the anniversary was approaching. ...which says it all, doesn't it?
I described it a couple people as feeling like in the past, I had been stuffed in a box, and now I was taken out and I could take up space. Not even extra space, just space.
schoolpsychnerd had a lot of trauma in her past, and she put in a lot of effort to overcome it, and I think she was mostly successful--more successful than a lot of people would have been. But our relationship, and my personality, still ended up bending around it due to its gravity. I asked my therapist occasionally what had happened to the old me, pre-moving to Japan, who accepted
jaiderai's invitation to travel two and a half hours to a college I'd never been to so I could meet a girl he knew and wanted to introduce me to, or who would hang out with friends after work all the time. And now I know the answer--he was there all the time, buried under everything piled on top of him. And over the last year I've pushed all that out of the way and stood on my feet. I've had a bunch of friends tell me how much I've changed, how I seem so much happier, how full my life seems now. All of that is correct. And I can carry that hindsight forward. The reason I tagged this post 悟り is because I have a much better understanding of who I really am now, when I'm free to define it on my own terms. I remember my therapist being astonished at how much I changed over the course of the year-and-a-half we saw each other. At our last session, she told me:
"You seem really happy now. Some people never get there."That post says I play plenty of video games, but I don't even do that lately! I've played five minutes of video games in the last month. I bought Link's Awakening the day it came out, played it the following weekend, and haven't touched it since. There's so much to do that I just don't have time.
Just look at my post for last weekend or the weekend before that for examples of what I mean. Last weekend, I very deliberately took the largest space of free time I had and filled it. I did the same thing tonight--I'm going to a lecture about architecture at a bar.
The previous chapter is definitely over. Now, it's time to live my life.
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