Two very serious things.

[mrissa]

1. My face did freeze that way.

2. You know that meme that's going around, with all the checkboxes? Nobody on my friendslist has admitted to having been the psycho ex in a past relationship. I wonder if it would be different if it was, "I have been the heartless jerk who broke his/her heart." Or maybe you're all model exes; who knows.

Is this useful? Not at all, but I'm in a very odd mood for getting things done. Where by "very odd," I mean "silly and not very useful." I should probably go away from the computer so that I still have decent shoulder-time left when I'm feeling less silly. On the other hand, if I don't corral the brain now, it may run screaming off and not return for weeks and then with beads and feathers it got heaven knows where. I will write longhand tonight. Yes. I will write the end of "In the Velvet Swamp" longhand, since the rest of the story is longhand anyway, and it's probably good for me not to get too hooked into one mode in case I need to be in another for some reason. But before then I will make two little things in MSS go more sensibly. Really. Truly.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Two years is a long time, and "can't mention her name" is an extreme reaction. How many kittens did you stomp in the course of this breakup? Were you pulling the wings off butterflies in his presence?

(Please note: you do not have to go into detail about what you actually did or did not do. This is rhetoric.)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

well, he was 17 (I was 15), so that should make the reaction more understandable. :)

I do try and write about it now and then, because I know it really messed up my approach to dating and is at least responsible for my being dateless until through college (since then is other things, I think), so I like to look at it and talk it into less importance, if that makes sense. I hurt him a great deal, and it really really bothered me that I hurt him that much, and I avoided relationships not because I was afraid I'd get hurt (because that can happen anyways) but because I didn't want to hurt someone else.

When I first wrote something about this (since deleted), I wrote "He broke up with me" which I think was interesting because yes, he did, sort of. He definately started the process, and I think he may have been the one to say something like, "do you want to be in a relationship with me" or "maybe we shouldn't be together then". Except that the reason why we broke up was not him, it was because I didn't want to be in the relationship. I broke up with him. I may or may not have said the actual words, but I broke up with him.

I think he'd been a lot more in love with me than I was in like with him, and he hadn't realised it at the time, and we broke up via a fight on the street (he was on the street, I was in the doorway of my dad's house) in which I made him cry, and I refused to talk to him afterwards. I knew it wasn't the right way to act, but I didn't dare let him convince me to try the relationship again. And I couldn't explain that to him because I was 15, and he was best friends with my best friend's manipulative boyfriend, and I didn't want to be trapped in a relationship the way she was, and it was too similar, and I couldn't tell him because I didn't know him, we weren't friends, we were just dating.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As long as you're talking it into less importance rather than more.

It's a fine line, because on the one hand, I do believe that teenager's feelings are important, that belittling those feelings because of the age of the person who has them is a bad, bad idea. But on the other hand, teenagers are inexperienced in handling relationships, and if they aren't as careful/considerate as they would like to be later in life, I think they deserve a little slack from their future selves.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I try and make it assume less importance when I talk about it, which I think it largely does--when I start to understand why I behave in a certain way, I can start avoiding the bad stuff and just doing the good stuff.

I don't doubt that a teenager's feelings are important to them, and at that time. I suspect that now, 13 years later he's probably more embarassed by the depth of the response he had, but I don't think that makes it any less real, particularly while he was living it.

It's like PMS--just because my emotions are all over the place doesn't make them any less valid as emotions. It may mean they're extreme, but that's just a factor, not a reason to dismiss them. (the one thing my mom does that I HATE is ask me if I'm premenstrual when I get upset about things. Way to marginalize my opinions.)