In which I talk about an ex-boyfriend for a long time, as an illustration of the It Takes A Village concept (but as it applies to adults, not children).

In the mid- to late 90’s I was living off campus in a house on Kirkwood with Cat and M.P. when MLD moved in. He had this monster sex vibe – you could literally feel him walking in the front door down the hall before you could see him. He was only my height, maybe an inch shorter, but he vibed like a linebacker. (I’ve noticed that small/er men, least the ones who aren’t off on some Napoleon complex, often have really fantastic sex vibes. Mmm.) One thing led to another and eventually we were if not seeing each other then at least sleeping together. I think we told people we were “meditating together”; we’d go in my room at program time, meditate, then have great sex. (The man could totally eat pussy, let me tell you. I mean, OH MY GOD could he EVER. I’d tell you all about it except this really isn’t That Sort Of Blog.)

Anyway, I dropped out of MIU around this time because they’d finally pissed me off too much, and I ended up working full-time at Telegroup while I applied to the University of New Mexico.

The era at the Kirkwood house ended, and MLD and I ended up summering with T. & D. at this fucked up country house they were housesitting. (The house was huge and disgusting, and somehow three couples ended up there that summer, but the story of the house and all the strange shit that happened there – all three couples had identical fights over and over – is a whole ‘nother post.) When the summer was over, T. & D. loaded me and my shit into their truck and drove me to school in Albuquerque.

I’d asked MLD to come with me on several occasions. He was miserable in Iowa and had nothing else to do – not in school, no job, many of his friends and classmates had moved away – but he declined. And declined. And declined.

Okay, so, he’ll fuck me, but he doesn’t really like me enough to move three states away even though he clearly hates it here. Okay, fine. Story of my life. Whatever.

I got dropped off at U of NM, checked in, found my dorm room, met my roommate. Found the closest coffee shop. Started classes. After two days in Albuquerque, MLD showed up, knocking on the door of my dorm room. Oh, what a cute man, standing there with his left coast Cali blonde hair and his tight little body and his big grin. He couldn’t stay away from me!

Naturally I assumed he was there because he wanted to be with me; and the fact that he was, once out of Fairfield, quite content with public displays of affection rather enforced the idea. He didn’t bother to dissuade me of any of this. He seemed happier and more open than he’d been in Iowa and I thought that both myself and the move were good for him. We had a lot of fun for a few days. I suspected we were in love.

Then I discovered I didn’t have enough money and/or aid to be a full-time student. We took a weekly motel room because I’d dropped out of school and lost my dorm room. We job searched and house hunted like mad because we simply couldn’t afford a weekly motel for more than two weeks. When it became clear we’d never hook up with jobs or an appartment in time, we decided to leave. The work and housing market in Albuquerque at the time was brutally depressed. Or that’s what MLD told me.

I didn’t want to move back to Fairfield, but I didn’t really have any other plans. I would have stayed in Albuquerque if I could have gotten a job and an appartment and gone back to school the next year as a resident, but – and this may have been more MLD’s karma than my own – there really seemed to be no work, and there really were no appartments. It was weird. I’d never, ever had any problems getting either, but there it was.

We were stranded in Albuquerque with no money, all my school shit (boxes of books, clothes, etc.), his crap, and his Toyota Corolla. So I called my grandparents, and they said we could come on out.

I sold, trashed, and/or repacked my stuff to make it smaller. Many boxes were shipped to my grandparents’ house; what remained was shoved into the back seat of MLD’s tiny car along with his luggage. We drove that little 4-banger over the Rockies to Walla Walla, Washington. It barely made it.

So there I am living with a man in the guest room of my grandmother’s house. We stayed there together for nearly six months before we both found jobs and then an appartment. Again, I’d never had such a hard time getting a job, ever. Getting an appartment was easier, but still harder than I’d ever experienced it before.

Living MLD’s life was like living under water. It had this strange, silent, constrained quality to it even though he laughed a lot and possessed a depth of sweetness I haven’t encountered in many people. There was this genteel hopeless depression, this punk-but-snobbish anguish he seemed to suffer under; I never really did get it but I could see it was there.

Once we were settled into our new home, an adorable apartment in a landmark building, I got laid off. Luckily I was eligible for unemployment, so I spent the next five months drawing checks and watching the cooking channel, but because I never got out I basically knew no one but MLD and my grandparents.

I was totally, completely isolated. And he started to fuck with me.

Once at a Mexican restaurant, I kidded with the waitress as she took my order. When she left the table, MLD hissed, “That was awful!”

Me: “What was?”

MLD: “You! You made her feel terrible with that comment. You think you’re being funny but you’re not. You have no idea how bad you make people feel sometimes! You hurt her feelings, but she couldn’t say anything because she’s in a service industry and needs your tip! You should let me order for you.”

We continued to discuss my, as he saw it, brusque and overbearing manner, my innocent ignorance, my regular misinterpretation of others’ reactions. He was really nice and kind and subtle, and somehow convinced me that I was just, well, awkward. Since he’d been working on convincing me of this for almost a year by then, I was starting to believe him.

I’m an extrovert, a performer. I like to be the center of attention. If I say or do something that causes someone a slight hurt, it’s very true that I might simply not notice. MLD slowly convinced me that I was always hurting people – by accident, of course, but still.

And I had no friends to bounce these ideas off of. Just him. The guy who would come home absolutely fuming pissed off with a pack of cigarettes and a six-pack of beer (after swearing off both) because a customer at the deli he worked at called him “boy.”

“I have a fucking MBA, and that dumb blue-haired no-money pseudo-riche bitch thinks she can call me ‘boy’?!?” He’d pace the balcony and go on and on and on about what a goddamned failure he was, how much our life sucked, how he couldn’t imagine being any lower than our white trash jobs and our white trash furniture and our piece of shit car and jobs that required us to be insulted for a living.

I’d give him my standard optimist’s lecture about how I thought we were doing well; we had a roof and each other and money in the bank and our health… and when half the cigs were smoked and the beers were all gone, he’d agree that maybe I was a little bit right, maybe things were at least tolerable. But mostly he was ashamed of his life, our life. And himself. And me.

He’d expected, I think, to get his MBA and then become a corporate raider. A moral, spiritual corporate raider, sure, but a corporate raider nonetheless. He saw success and in it he was a suit-wearing, fast car-driving, trophy wife-havin’ business man. But lacking an expensive suit, a really expensive car, and the dick enlargement that those things give certain men, he hated our life. He was ashamed to work in a deli slinging sandwiches and coffee, even though it was the hippest, trendiest eatery in town.

I rather envied his job. I was a directory assistance operator. Talk about an unsexy job.

Eventually we broke up. He was probably clinically depressed, but I didn’t know enough about depression to know that at the time. In fact, he had a slew of insidious mental problems I just couldn’t understand then, having never suffered a moment of any of them myself yet. He went off to India to spend a few months at our Guru’s ashram; I went off to San Francisco to live with T. & D.

Not long after my arrival there, T., a really long-time and trusted friend said to me, “Mush, you’re a fucking mess. I’ve never seen you so fucked up. Pull your head out of your ass.”

I said I’d try, but I was broken. Maybe as broken as I’ve ever been. And it wasn’t just the loss of yet another relationship I’d thought had been more than sex but was, in fact, just sex – I’ve always taken breakups really damned hard – but I was so utterly alone. I’d spent the previous year and a half with one person, basically, one viewpoint. Everything I knew and thought had been filtered through MLD because I had had no one else to talk to. And he’d taught me that I was loud, and awkward, and that I was too stupid to know when I was offending or hurting someone – he’d taught me that I couldn’t trust my own perception, my own intuition. He’d taught me about being private, about (his version) of integrity and honor which somehow included not really talking about anything personal or asking for help because we couldn’t really trust other people to be as sensitive and insightful as ourselves.

And because I had been so isolated, because I didn’t have a T. or a D. or other friends to hear me say something like that and call, “Bullshit!”, I’d learned to believe him. I’d stopped trusting myself; I was so focused on the outside that I couldn’t get back in to my own inside.

~ + ~ + ~ + ~

All of that, really, was set up to this statement:

I’m feeling much better now.

After being fucking miserable for the past few years, I’m out of the house more. I’ve actually met new people and become friends with them, I’m making music, I’m hanging out with musicians. Good God, I’m a musician! What the hell was I doing, not doing music? What made me think I needed to go a couple of years without ever once saying, “Let’s pick it up at the bridge,” or “that should be a C major 7, not a C minor 7,” or “Dude! That thing you did! That thing at the end of the first chorus! That was SO HOT!” or “I’m totally chopped, I need some water.”

I’ve quit worrying about the damned housework (to the point of not really doing much of it, which is so goddamned freeing I can’t even tell you). (In fact, I think I’d like to work full time and let Bread stay home and not clean house himself. Fuck cleaning house, fuck not cleaning house. I don’t want to have anything to do with it either way.)

The point of all this is that I’ve been depressed twice in my life. The first time was after MLD and it took me a long time to crawl out of that hole. But I did, and I looked back in and I learned that I require a lot of stimulation, a lot of exposure to human beings, a lot of love, and a lot of attention. I’m not high-maintenence, but as an extrovert I do tend to base my vision of myself on what people mirror back to me. Isolation is simply bad for me, because I can’t see myself. I almost don’t even exist without others.

The second depression is one I’ve recently emerged from and this time I did it all to myself; the man in the equation didn’t have much to do with it other than expressing his preferences. I interpreted my surroundings and his preferences and, totally leaving out my own needs, I made choices that put me somewhere I just couldn’t see out of. I never wanted to be a housewife, but since I’d agreed to be one I took the responsibily seriously and quit doing things that I perceived to interfere with that schedule. No music, for one example, because how could I make dinner if I wasn’t home at dinnertime? I got so fucking bogged down with the mind-numbing details of running a household and so divorced from my feelings about it (because it was my job, and therefore it wasn’t really acceptable for me to bitch about it) that I just sorta started to go apeshit.

Bottom line is, I ain’t never gonna get even half my needs met at home. Home is quiet and out in the middle of nowhere, home is sedate, and disorganized, and under construction, and all the other things home is. It’s a great place to keep stuff, and I enjoy being there, but in the final analysis it’s basically a place to sleep and get laid and do my sunbathing – it’s not a career, it’s not my dharma. (It could be for some, maybe if there were children, or home-based hobbies. But not for me. I could really not give less of a shit about learning little remodel skills, or painting, or decorating. If I had my druthers the whole place would have white walls and wood floors and adequately attractive-but-sparse furnishings and some throw pillows. There: decorating’s done.)

Not to mention that if I need to discuss philosophy or religion or sci-fi or music or hardware or software or gynocology, I have to go out and find someone for that. Just like Bread has to find someone else to go eat fried chicken or talk cars with him.

I suspect that some folks can handle isolation better, but I can’t. I can’t seem to hold onto what I believe when I can’t express myself, when I can’t share myself, when I can’t reach people and bounce off them and learn from them.

I think the moral of the story is that the absolute worst damage I can do myself – beyond becoming a total tweaker or something – is to totally act like an introvert for three or four years.

Because doing that, it totally breaks my head.