Free At Last

Day 172
193 Days Remaining

Getting closer and closer to that halfway point!

You may be wondering how I'm feeling about HB these days.  It's funny, but I don't even feel the need to write about him at all; it's only because I've had a couple of people ask what's up - Has he called?  Did you send him the letter?  Are you having a hard time with letting him go completely? - that I even thought of writing anything about it.

The truth is, although I needed to write that letter in order to get it all out on the open and really purge HB from my system, I felt no need to send it to him.  As it turns out, all I really needed to do to get him out of my life was to ignore him: it`s been over a month since he came to town, and he has contacted me exactly once since then.  A quick text message ("Hey beautiful! How's it going?"), a succinct and closed reply ("Hello! I'm fine.") and that has been it.  Apparently sending him a long-drawn-out and (hopefully) eloquent reason for why I am no longer going to communicate with him would have been completely unnecessary.

I'm fairly sure that HB knows that I'm not interested in communicating any further, as in the past I have always immediately and hungrily responded to any and every tiny speck of communication (or potential communication) from him.  I have wondered on occasion (when I do think of him and realize that he has not attempted any sort of communication at all) whether he has found or been sent to this blog (which I doubt, and even if someone had pointed out to him that I had started a blog about my dating hiatus - which he constantly conveniently forgets about anyway - it would not hold enough interest for him to actually search it out and attempt to read it), whether this is something that he just feels from my rather elusive reply to his (single) text message, or whether he is just happy that I haven`t attempted to get in touch at all.  I have recognized that most of our communication since he moved to Vancouver has been initiated by me.  Perhaps, if I had not been the one sending messages all along, this would have happened long ago, and he would have just heaved a sigh of relief that he no longer had to contend with my overwhelming emotions.

Well, it`s not worth dwelling on the whys and the what-ifs.  I definitely wasted a lot of time (three years!) on someone who obviously wasn`t interested in making any sort of real, solid commitment to me or to our relationship.  It`s been interesting to read back on my previous blog entries about HB (and for those who may want to revisit the story, I`ll post all the links to the hopeless tale at the end of this entry) and see how desperately I was trying to make everyone else feel about him the way that I did - that he was truly something special and that all my blustering and pushing and trying to make it work was worth something and would work out in the end.  It`s painfully clear that I was trying too hard, both in the relationship and in writing about it.

A while back, I got an email from Black Luke, who has followed my blog, and what he said to me made very clear to me something that I had been avoiding admitting: "I find you to be very generous in your assessment of people, and if even you can manage to make [HB] sound dubious, then he probably is."  And I recognize that in my re-reading.  Once again, it was a case of "Methinks thou dost protest too much"...rather than just lay out who he was and let his character speak for itself, I was constantly making excuses for why he wouldn't commit and trying to forcefully show what kind of person he was.  I needed my readers (and my family and friends) to understand why I hung in there for so long.  However, I overlooked some very plain facts: even though there is a lot about HB to love, and so many positive characteristics, many of the ones that I really want in a man simply were not there...the main one being that he actually wants to be with me.

Finally letting go of HB marks the turning point in my year without dating.  Letting go of him and the futile hopes I had for our future have set me free in a way I had tried to find long ago, and now I'm able to focus on me and what I want.  A long time ago, at the beginning of this blog, a good friend of mine told me to stop posting blogs about myself in the context of "the girlfriend" or "the mother" or "the student" or any one of a number of roles that I have played in my life, and just WRITE ABOUT ME.  I couldn't.  At the time, I had no idea how to do it, or how to step outside all those pieces of myself and just write from my own point of view.  Now, I find that I am learning who I am aside from all those roles, and I feel like I am accomplishing The Evolution of Lisa more and more every day.

Six months to go.  Six more months of learning who I am, what I want, what I don't want, and how to recognize them all.  

The Story of HB:

The Story of HB: Part I
Starbucks & Sushi: The Story of HB (Part II)
Beginning the End: The Story of HB (Part III)
You Say That You Love Rain: The Story of HB (Part IV)
The Story of Stu (Part I), (Part II), Part III) - overlaps with The Story of HB
Goodbye, HB: The End

L