Ambivalence

Theme song: Buckets of Rain

There is a special kind of heartbreak called ambivalence.

Now, if ambivalence always felt like this sounds, it might not be so bad:

They're both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
-- Wislawa Symborska

Unfortunately, ambivalence often feels more like confusion and it's, well, confusing.

As far as I know, there are four types of experience:

• It felt good but it was bad
• It felt bad but it was good
• It felt bad and it was bad and, my favorite,
• It felt good and it was good

When something happens to you, how do you know which one it is? Can you just trust your feelings, or do you have to dig for something deeper, like analyzing outcomes?

As we all know (we do all know this, right?), life is a journey and not a destination. So how can we even decide what the outcome is or when it actually became an outcome?

Get Arbitrary

Maybe the answer lies in being arbitrary. You just say, for example, before getting married or starting a new job, I will decide in two years, four days and five minutes if this was a good decision, or not.

But then, how do you measure it? Do you measure it by whether you feel good, you feel bad, or whether you generated world peace?

I guess what I'm saying today is, it's tough to be human.

Here's how I know. I just thought of way more types of human experience:

• It felt neutral but it was bad
• It felt neutral but it was good and, my personal least favorite,
• It felt neutral and it was neutral

I know, you'd think I would favor neutral over bad, but I find that, ultimately, bad builds more character than neutral. Or, to be honest, I'm afraid of neutral because it seems too d*** boring.

What The H*** Is She Talking About?

As you may know, I had a 22 year relationship with my ex-husband. You know, I cherished that relationship. Losing it was a tremendous, and ongoing, loss. With it died many, many dreams not to mention a way of life.

That marriage is so far gone I sometimes wonder if it even happened, and, I can tell you, that is a strange feeling because, of course, it took up half my life.

How would you feel if you woke up one day and half your life was gone?

Or, if not gone, strange to touch on.

You walk down any street in San Francisco and you see ghosts of your past self with a past man. The ghost smiles at you, but you aren't even sure if it's your ghost.

Or you say, "The opera. That's where I sat in the upper balcony wearing a (pretty awesome, I kinda wish I still had it) blue velvet dress, crying, because I was fighting with my husband on our anniversary.

Or, stranger still: "Remember the time we. . . ?" Who do you ask? No one is there.

I guess this happens all the time, but it seems maybe a little deeper when the person who is not there, who cannot be asked, is the man you called Max while he called you Vera and you ran through dark streets holding hands, fighting crime, and it felt like you were flying and it did not occur to you to wonder whether or how you would die.

All of this is not to say I wish I was married still. I get that the thing died and so it had to be buried.

It is to say that marriages are not as simple to bury as bodies.

Due to the fact that they are not material in the common understanding of that term, they are unburiable. And, because you were one half of it and because you are not dead, you should not, in any case, bury yourself.

But, then, what do you do with it? What do you with your half of nothingsomething?

Here's What I Do

Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I take it the wall and really sob, wishing to be held by someone who could help me make sense of it all (and sometimes, thank you, God, I am held by that person). Sometimes I smile a little, thinking, "That was fun," or "I'm so fortunate to have floated by glaciers situated in thick, creamy pea green water with someone who deeply loved me."

Mostly I just gaze in mild awe, feeling (yes) ambivalent, at what life handed me when I had no idea where I should be looking.

What Would You Do?

Do you feel ambivalent? Or are you sure?