Where There's A Will There's A Way

My journey out of Hurt Locker hell and into sanity

You know what, I KNEW IT. I always knew that being sane, whole and healthy would be boring and guess what IT IS.

I’ve been MIA on this blog for a few weeks and I can tell you exactly why. I’m happy. Normal. But not just those things, I’m also free.

If you follow me on Flaze, you may have watched my video on seeing William my ex—my giant throbbing Hurt Locker of an ex—and how getting over him was like this skeleton key that opened all of the emotional dungeons I’d been locked in. When I filmed that video, I was exuberant and emancipated, almost giddy with the freedom of not loving William for the first time in five years.

It’s strange when you realize that love isn’t something that lifts us up but drags us down, at least when it’s unrequited and predicated on absolutely nothing.

A little background about the situation:

I loved Will almost the moment I saw him. I loved him blindly, obsessively, pathologically.

We met shortly after my marriage ended and while outwardly I was handling things well, staying positive and putting one foot in front of the other to start a new life, on the inside I felt…used up.

Not just used up from the emotional drain of my divorce, but like damaged goods. Old, bedraggled, starting over at a time when I really did not think I would be.

I was in my early 30s but felt 65. And here came Will. He was a college athlete, bright eyed and bouncy, like a Golden Retriever. As perfect and out of reach as a 1999 Abercrombie model.

Quick to laugh, quick to dance, quick to throw me up against a wall and kiss me, he was so…alive. And I felt mostly dead. Like a vampire. And what do vampires do but feed off the living?

I couldn’t get close enough to him. I remember once as we fell asleep, I curled my hands into his neck so I could feel his pulse and tried my hardest to memorized its cadence.

At the time, this seemed vitally important—I need to be able to remember the rhythm of William’s heartbeat—and now, for the life of me, I can’t remember why, probably because it made no sense. It was a bizarre manifestation of how badly I wanted—not to date him—but to be him.

That’s what I always say about Hurt Lockers: we fixate not out of love, but envy. These guys we can’t get over embody something we want for ourselves. If they were women, we could see this SO much easier.

But we don’t know how to process envy and the opposite sex. So our mind just pushes random buttons on our emotional calculator and says “Uh…IDK, love? Sure. Love. YOU LOVE HIM OMFG YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT HIM AHHHHH!”

Once I started going down the Google rabbit hole of “1999 Abercrombie models” there was no going back…

So, over the course of our romance, he went from man to god. And then after we broke up, from god to myth.

More than that, he was a drug. When he’s Snapchat me (ugh, as if that doesn’t say it all), I’d have to go out into the hall at my office and let the absolute bliss wash over me, like a heroin high or orgasm. I couldn’t even see straight.

But the reality of him was like a message run through the game of Telephone: by the end, it doesn’t remotely resemble what it was when it started.

And that became clear when I saw him.

I literally had to stifle a gasp when he opened the door. Not because he looked bad but because he…I don’t know, wasn’t emitting golden rays of light? I didn’t have to avert my eyes at the sheer glory of him?? He was…just a guy. A regular human guy.

Where was the Dionysian nymph I’d loved for the better part of a decade? Where was the grace and purity with which he’d always moved through life? He seemed…blah. Like a few years at a desk job eating Panera salads for lunch had just slowly ground all joie de vivre out of him. He was just a regular Joe, one I’d scarcely take note of at a bar now.

I’d never been so startled by normalcy in my life.

And I was equally started by my own subsequent normalcy. A new, William-less age had dawned. I was excited to figure out who I was if I wasn’t Shallon Who Loved William™️.

I can’t stop with the A+F pics. I can’t.

At first there was grief. The misery over him was my companion. A shitty one but sometimes you hold on to pain out of habit. It’s something to chew on when you’re bored.

Then came curiosity. It was peculiar that I didn’t love him anymore, I almost couldn’t believe it.

Then, I became an absolute monster. None of you deserve me, I thought as I unmatched with every guy I was talking to on Tinder. I never wanted to feel that manic Hurt Locker “love” again so and it felt good to be a savage after so many years of feeling like an emotional beggar.

Last one I promise

That savagery has cooled into a pretty hearty disinterest in the opposite sex. Again, who possibly deserves me? Or you?! Or any of us!! Don’t they know who we are?! I feel like a closed circuit, really and truly so A-OK on my own someone really has to knock my socks off before I give them a chance.

Is this…being healthy?

It feels weird and boring. Where’s the D R A M A where’s the dizzying high of a Snapchat?! Is this how healthy people feel all the time?!

A friend of mine was once addicted to Oxy and even after he got sober, he called himself a “dry drunk” in that he found ways to create the same drug-chaos but just without drugs—bad romances, terrible eating habits, insane jobs—until he dealt with the root issues that drove him to Oxy in the first place.

So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do re: William, and I think I have. I think moving to Montana was hugely helpful in getting over him. I feel like my life has started afresh out here in the wild wonderful West and I don’t want to live in the past anymore.

I can’t believe you fell for it wow

I say all of this because sometimes I feel sort of flat. Like, maybe my madness over loving him—or some other “him”—fueled my creativity. I think almost all creative people are fueled by pain. William was my muse in so many ways, ones I didn’t even realize until I was unshackled.

So, I’m trying to find that same heady creativity and feeling of aliveness without the chaos of a whateverish man. And clearly, based on my MIA-ness from this blog, it’s tougher than I expected.

I felt this way after Vince and I broke up, which I wrote about in my post here called “The Plains” and trying to embrace being alone and NOT cultivating drama to amuse myself. But even then, just a few months ago, I still had the William Mania coursing through my DNA, lying dormant. Just in case I did need that emergency drama fix, it was something I could resurrect.

But now it’s gone too. It’s like I’m peeling back layer upon layer of dumb obsessions and challenging myself to constantly make friends with ME. To stalk MYSELF. To be obsessed over the MAN IN THE MIRROR, BABY.

Ah if only it was this man:

Tell me: what did it feel like when you got over the guy you were going to love forever? Was there an emptiness to it? A grief? Sometimes all we have is the story we tell ourselves about why we love someone. And who are we without our own mythology?