Adjustments

when i woke up on friday, jason was mad at me. that's nothing new. he's been mad at me since october, 2002. without going into too many specifics, he thought (with some cause) that i was a bad friend, untrustworthy, and generally rotten. a betrayer. pushing back against all that took quite a bit of energy. it all happened tangled up with other things though, so i didn't realize exactly how much energy i was expending holding that off.

i mean, i knew it was hard to have him mad at me; especially after i'd processed my own guilt and apologized. i suppose it was like leaning into a constant wind. after a while, i just got used to it -- the pressure and the turmoil of it.

well, on friday it suddenly stopped. much to my, and i'd bet his, surprise. madhavi told him that he better start dealing with me or she was going to have to stop talking to him. so he asked me to meet him and i agreed to.

sitting down together on the green in front of city hall, we talked through all this stuff that's grown untended between us. big ugly thorny weeds. we got to compare the pictures we'd drawn of each other with all those horns and bad mustaches and nasty word balloons doodled in -- with how the other guy actually is in person. i had forgotton who jason really was. that before all this, he was my friend and -- this is the dramatic part -- he was my friend for good reasons.

jason accepted the apologies i offered a while ago and owned his share of the responsibility for the mess last year. he said he was sorry. he admitted that he'd been holding onto his anger because it kept him from having to admit that madhavi and me were really together. this is, frankly, fucking stunning. i told him that i'd do what i could to support his friendship with madhavi. and i apologized for some outstanding things. mostly for all the pain.

and i liked him. he's a good guy. and i see how hard all this must be on him and i'm impressed with how well he handled it friday. and i really am sorry that it's been so hard on all of us for the past year. that now he's hurt the way i was last summer. none of us deserved any of that.

this brings me to the adjustment part. for a year and a half, i've been walking into the wind. now it's stopped.

so i think that's why i'm so exhausted. i'm adjusting to the fact that i don't have to lean into the wind any more. i can hear other things more clearly because the turmoil has subsided. i can take the energy i've been spending pushing back against all of that, and put it into other things. but first i need to regain my balance.

and stop wetting myself during mob weddings.