I walk away with my dignity.....

It's hard for me to tell my Mom things that are truly personal so if I could tell her something on the phone last night, then I really think that I ended my 10+ month relationship with Scott is in the books. Sometimes when we live life on a day-to-day basis, it's difficult to stop and see the "forest through the trees." So last fall and this winter, there were some days that were difficult and I just didn't have enough experience in relationships to understand what I was feeling. In December, I started to see a therapist to try to determine what I was doing wrong and if there were behaviors and actions that I could do differently to make the relationship better.

So once a week, I would go and sit there for an hour and leave with something really concrete to think about and an approach or skill or thought that I should try and do to reduce the amount of conflict. For those who know me well know that I will always retreat to the world of logic and reason and forget to think about feelings and history. But I learned that I often times I turn to logic and reason in a condescending way. So true, right?

Another thing I do is that I often times assume that I know what another person wants and act accordingly. In the process, I've skipped over trying to know what I want and then actually asking the other person what he/she wants. Translate this skipping from A to D and bypassing B and C and you'll be greeted with a lot of miscommunication.

Ultimately though what happened is that I got the "we need to sitdown and talk" talk from two of friends, with whom I have been sharing my stories too. This past Sunday, my friend Lynn had my friend Carlos and I over for a belated birthday dinner. Lynn and Carlos (Marl and Mom, I know it's weird that these two are, like, BFF (Mom, that's "Best Friends Forever") since I've introduced them to each other last year) asked me some pretty tough questions and called my bullshit on some of the answers I was giving. I sat there and listened to what they had to say. I so wanted to storm out of the room and not hear what they said. But here I was practicing a skill that I MUST work on, which is to not walk away from emotionally difficult situations. My M.O. is to simply leave a situation that is hard emotionally. I just never learned how to deal with them because I never saw them as a kid. A feeling in the House of Chen? What was that?

Ultimately, I had to let them use logic and reason to put together a big picture that I suspect I would have figured out in time, but because they were outsiders could see so clearly. There isn't a need for me to spell out any more than that. I have too much respect for Scott to air out our dirty laundry in this public space. I am more than willing to share with you in an email or phone call.

When Lynn and Carlos pointed out, "going to work shouldn't be a refuge for you", I knew that I was in an untenable situation and radical change was the only solution.