Leavin’ in a Jet… ta

My apologies to John Denver...

So she’s really gone now… my friend, Betty, that is. She moved back to her home state about a month ago but it didn’t really feel official until today. First, I was busy with my mom’s visit and then we were on vacation. Then last week, she was back in town to pack up the rest of her stuff and say goodbye. At times, it felt a little like she’d never left… we had lunch after my psychiatrist appointment on Thursday, like we always do. Then this weekend, we went to her at her barbecue/farewell party. Today, she started driving her Jetta back to her home state. I don’t know when I’ll see her next.

I have a lot of feelings about this. It makes me very… emotional. And I’m not real sure which emotion I’m going to feel from one minute to the next. Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel angry, sometimes I feel bitter. (Ok, bitter’s just a different type of angry. I guess sad and angry are my two predominant emotions.)

Some recent history: Betty’s been going through a period of transition for the last few months. Her funding ran out at her old job so she was looking for a new job and trying to decide if she should stay in the bay area or move back to her home state. I think I always knew she’d end up back in her home state, but I held onto the hope that she’d find a wonderful new job here.

In September, things got decidedly harder. She hadn’t found a job yet so she had to give up her apartment and stay with friends. She came and stayed with us for a weekend. The night she arrived, she told us that she’d decided what she was going to do on the drive to our house. She was going to move back to her home state and substitute teach while she kept looking for work.

Part of me was really looking forward to having the weekend to hang out with her… but another part of me just wanted to ignore her for the rest of her stay. It was like, now that she’s decided to go, maybe it would be easier if I just stopped communicating with her. It would be like we’d never even been friends.

Sooo… I have this bad habit, this bizarre need to turn relationships on and off like a switch. I had this same urge earlier this summer when I had a fight with my psychiatrist. Even though he’s been a huge part of my recovery, I was ready to ditch him. My first thoughts were to walk away and never talk to him again. But this style of coping is not the greatest, especially after someone has played an important role in my life like Betty and my doctor have.

So I’m fighting it. I’ve stayed in contact with Betty. We email and blog and we even talked on the phone for over an hour two weeks ago. And I went to the barbecue on Saturday, even though it was hard to get myself there. (I complained a lot on the way there about random, inconsequential things.) Sometimes, it feels like it would be easier to just compartmentalize that part of my life that included her to excise it or wall it off from my current reality. But I’m learning that by doing that, I wall off a part of my own experience and my sense of self becomes just a little more fragmented.

Postscript: as you may have noticed from the above image, I signed up for a free clipart download service. (I needed an image for a worksheet I was making for work.) Anyway, I searched for images with the keyword "sad." I got the above image. I also got the following image:

Uh... yeah, he looks "sad." For some odd reason, this cracked me up. There were a lot of similar images from this artist. Look for the upcoming adventures of angry-grey-pajama-man.