Personal Journal

October 24

October 24, 2003

Tonight all that I have to look forward to is falling asleep.
I know that I’m focusing on a lot of negativity right now and that’s not my fashion, but I’m out of my element, and I’m a rhythmic person. Without my rhythm, I spend all sorts of energy inefficiently, waste it.
I came here tonight to write about Jean.
Jean has twice said to me, without subtlety, that I should write her an e-mail. To that point, she’s right, I should. But I got to thinking about why I am not writing her, as I had planned to do. I’m a very sexually frustrated man right now, and it bothers me a helluva lot more than I care to admit, and with respect to talking to Jean, it feels like it’s a subject I’m not supposed to talk about.
It’s a taboo. If I talk about it, she’ll think I’m putting pressure on her or she’ll think she’s a failure as a lover. I’d like to put pressure on her, actually, and she is a failure as a lover right now, and I feel that pain in a deep place, because I am monogamous and I possess a sexual identity that requires genuine participation from my lover (I am a sometimes transvestite, not near as much as I’d like to be). Jean knows all this. Jean is typically accepting and sometimes encouraging, and I need more encouragement. I need more participation. I need more sex, imaginative and resourceful.
And there is a weight building in me regarding how difficult it is to have a relationship with Jean. I’m open with myself; I know my flaws, and most of the time I give myself credit for my strengths. I continuously choose to try to be happy, optimistic (yes, present travel situation being an exception, and I admit that if you only know me from my journals, you’re seeing more of the dark side of my soul than I show in passing casually through life). I don’t feel any need to apologize for crying, and for being angry, only for lashing out at the undeserving.
I grow weary of Jean’s inability to live a completely human life. I grow weary of the battle she fights between what she fears she is, what she won’t believe she is, and how she so often struggles with any emotion that isn’t “comfortable.”
We, in our lives, we struggle to come to the place where we can accept, as someone at work said once, “that we’re not on the varsity high school team.” That much of the fantasized life I dreamt of in high school isn’t going to come to pass, but I can seize with impassioned tenacity those parts that do, and those parts that fulfill this precious soul, which is all that will inevitably matter.
I’m finding my self, fulfilling myself.
Yes, I’d like to lose some weight, get down to my old Army weight. Yes, I’d like to make more money, and I wish I was slower to anger at Jean in particular. But I’m learning, and it’s no painful process to interact with her, have conflict, come to understandings, and move forward. For me. For her, I have to concede that she’s not moving at the same speed as I do spiritually. And I note with some dread that the soul moves at the speed that makes me feel as though I’m gliding – too fast and I encounter the discomfort of danger. Too slow and I encounter the drag of being held back, of stalling and falling.
I am operating under the auspices that Jean and I have the potential to be a good married couple, to make it work. I still assume that, but now things are taking a shape that makes me question whether the fit can be good for me. I acknowledge that I’m waiting for her to adapt – to learn things about being comfortable with herself that took me quite a while to learn. I wonder if it’s a really bright idea to wait with no finality to my waiting in sight. I wonder if I ought to discuss with myself whether I should set for myself some sort of idea of a comfortable glide slope.
Jean and I have been together for almost a year, in just a few short days, it will have been a year. The endorphines wore off very quickly, and the lean time that followed was very very low. We have picked that up well, and we’ve made some steady progress in the time between that and now, and for the first time in this relationship I feel like I’m not being weighted down.
In the absence of that weight, though, I wonder if I’m giving the relationship more credit than it has thus far merited, and I’m wondering how on earth can I strengthen this relationship, when Jean is starting to become a person with whom I cannot have real conversations…




It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn