When I get up in the morning, I often have odd things just pop into my head out of nowhere. Sometimes it will be songs or parts of songs that I haven’t heard for decades. Other times it will be odd memories, conversations, whatever.
This morning as I was writing in my journal, something popped into my head, and I remembered something I once wrote when I was dating this guy back in the early 1990’s. I’m not sure what led me into that relationship; Bob was unlike most men I had dated. But in most respects he was good to me. On the other hand, I had the awareness that he really didn’t “approve of” me. And over the years that we dated, there were some rocky times. Bob was funny and entertaining, I enjoyed being with him. And I know he cared about me even though I knew he didn’t totally respect or understand me. I remember being often frustrated. He had a particular world-view, based on his (Jewish) upbringing, which I found very foreign. We really didn’t have all that much in common.
For one thing, I remember that I would do what my brain often does, and say something like “ wouldn’t it be cool if …” and then be surprised when he would tell me all the reasons why whatever it was I was saying was unrealistic, illogical, or simply silly. But my mind was just “playing” and I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see that. I remember asking him, “Why do you always have to burst my bubble?”
We were together for nearly four years. But at one point I asked him if he could envision a future for us, because suddenly I was not sure that he did. And he said, “Frankly, no, I do not.” I asked him how he could spend four years with me without seeing any future; he told me that he had dated women lots of times for long periods of time without having any interest in a permanent relationship. I was rather stunned. Maybe I wouldn’t have been if I had been younger, but we were both in our 30’s, and it just didn’t make sense to me to spend so much time with someone with no future in mind. And that was it, I was done. But I was sad, although I could somewhat understand it.
And I remember writing this thing as I attempted to understand the things that were wrong with our relationship. And this basically describes a relationship of two people who come from different worlds: “Bob”
I shared this with my therapist (Molly) and she found it “moving” and speaks very well about the differences between “ADD” people and “linear” people and suggested that I share it in Group.