Hi, I’m Crystal, 37 and I’m looking forward to killing all my darlings…
Hi,
My name is Crystal, I’m a grown woman and I know nothing about men.
Well, let me give you more context:
I’m in my late thirties and I’ve had only a handful of boyfriends, and perhaps literally one remotely serious partner from among them. You could classify me as someone inexperienced when it comes to actual love and romance. It bugs me but I’m doing okay. One thing that just dawned on me right now though is how I was completely unprepared for a loving relationship.
My mother told me nothing about finding a good man. My father, an emotionally unavailable man with emotional regulation issues, did not give me the slightest example of what a healthy and well-adjusted man looks like. He was, to his credit, an excellent provider all the way up until I was nineteen years old.
However, outside of the financial provision of the essentials of life i.e. tuition, clothing, and food, I was not shown how to love. Neither he nor my mother gave me an example of what a happy relationship looks like. I do not have a single memory of either of them complimenting each other sincerely because it was some random day. I have more memories than I care to remember of them disparaging each other, ignoring each other, and being downright abusive. I remember confrontations, rage, and anger and being unable to stop them from shouting at each other. I remember seeing my mother in tears. I remember hearing my father say, “… If you don’t like it, then move out of my house…”. She eventually did.
Yet, to this day, my mother talks behind my father’s back about how difficult he was and is, even though after several decades they eventually divorced. I can not even state one good thing my mother told me about my father. As a child, I remember running away from the family room every time he got home from work because we kids didn’t want to deal with him, especially if he wanted to shout. He wasn’t addicted to any substances and so it was not fueled by that. No, it was him and what was in him. Now, I know it was remnants of generational abuse that caused him to be a terror to us.
So now, as a thirty-something-year-old woman, I find myself entering relationships with men who are often very different from each other but similar in one way: neglectful, and emotionally unavailable. Sometimes they have treated me like I don’t exist, even. I don’t see this initially but it becomes clear over time.
I’m single now after almost entering into a relationship with yet another man with whom I managed to get entangled and that happened to be quite unsure of a deal-breaker I told him of on day one of meeting him: my desire to be child-free.
I’m tired and dishearted but I am so glad I have the avenue of writing. I intend to blog here and share my romance stories. In fact, I intend on vicariously living through the characters I will create in those stories. I also intend on selling them on Amazon, Gumroad or whatever works.
I accept that I am ill-equipped to foster a healthy and balanced relationship because I keep finding the same guy. I am working on fixing that but I also am learning to accept that it is very possible I will keep letting myself fall into the same scenario over and over again. Not dating and staying single forever may even be the healthiest approach I can take for my own peace and happiness. I am not jaded, just a bit tired. Tired of wanting to love someone with all the love I have in me. Tired of choosing the same kind of guy who is emotionally constipated and completely content with depriving me of emotional presence. I am tired of being stupid. So, now I will create characters who can be stupid for me and sometimes make sure they end up overcoming their stupidity.
I know that I have a script in my subconscious that I need to rewrite. I am working hard on rewriting that script, believe me. My codependency issues, my anxious attachment/fearful avoidant attachment style, anxiety, and depression are aspects of my being that I am painfully aware of and eager to change. Therapy, self-help books, emotional/mindfulness exercises, and self-directed healing work are among the efforts I’ve made.
However, all this makes me grateful for writing. What a gift being able to create is.
The wonderful thing about being a writer is I can create characters and engineer their whole evolution. I look forward to wielding the level of control I lack in my own life over these people and I invite you to this arena. If you are a writer, you are probably familiar with the phrase “kill your darlings”. Since homicide is a crime, at least we get to be God in the stories we create and we not only get to kill those darlings but we get to create them too.
I hope you stick around and get to meet each of my darlings in the fiction stories I’ll share with you…
