'I have some Adderall if you think it could help'.. she said..

A blog about relationships of course.

I found myself apologizing to my friend at the gym whom I have not seen in more than 2 weeks. We hadn’t even said hello via text, and I haven’t seen her in the locker room either. Other people I love, its been months. My mom— its been even longer. Which reminds me… today is Mothers Day… Oh yeah.

I guess you could say I have been lost in the sauce the last few months. The sauce of life doing its life thing. Life-ing its way through my mind. I haven’t posted in multiple months. The longest I have gone without writing since I started last June. I have been wanting to write- I just haven’t been able to pick what the hell thing on my mind I can actually make some sense of. Not like what I write about makes sense. Sometimes its like a firehose of thoughts that just plow through from a scattered mind, and somehow end up here.

Even though, often, what I write about may not make sense, I promised myself that my writing would be for me. Not for you. So sticking to my promise, I write because it makes my brain tingle and my heart happy. I feel euphoric when I write. It takes 4 hours at the least to sit down and get it all out. Maybe that is why I haven’t had a chance to write— the time chunk it takes to make any sense of my words.

I finally woke up this morning, having purposely scheduled nothing at all for one day in my life. Its a Sunday- long weekend in my busy life of school, work, gym and relationships. This has been the focus of my time lately- and I guess i’ve not made this a priority in a long time. I feel like I have blogging constipation. Like its all just stuck in here. Stuck in my fingers.

This morning I woke up for the first time without any alarms, and just went from my dream world to this world… quite effortlessly for once. Maybe its all the vitamins I am taking now, maybe its my body agreeing with my mind to get up and have a nice writing day… who cares. Whatever it is- I am glad this energy came to see me finally.

My friend whom I have not seen in weeks messaged me to ask if I was ok. I said yes.. I just have been having a hard time focusing I guess. She politely and quite casually said- “well. my doctor prescribed me some Adderall if you ever feel like you need some.”… Im like. What?!! Did my gym friend just offer me legal speed? Um… yes please I thought to myself.. then chuckled a bit about the last time I tried this drug recreationally.

I took it once at a festival in Austin Texas. There was 5 times the amount of people in my entire town crammed into one field in downtown Austin Texas. They call this event Austin City Limits. It is so profitable for the city- they decided to have two of these events back to back- so more people can come to the shows. Its music of course. All the latest and greatest bands converge on the city and people go berserk basically.

In the photo above— this was 2012— I was probably there.. in this crowd …. people have flags so they can find their group. I had no flag. Dammit.

I had never seen so many people in my life. I had a cell phone- but unfortunately my phone had no juice. It died. I somehow got separated from my wife and our group. (I am no longer married… ) The Adderall I took did not do anything for me as far as making me feel good in any way… but there I was. LOST. A grown adult lost in a sea of people. Panicking. We had no plan for how to find each other, I had no phone. I had no way of finding everyone I was with. I got scared actually. I was spiraling out, and literally reverted to praying. Like I did back in my Jesus days… (You guys remember those days??… For some of you who found me through Julie Ferwerda… this was probably yesterday for you… haha.)

I ran around frantically trying to look for my peeps, but there was just too many people!! I didn’t know how I got separated, I was just alone. In a sea of what seemed like millions of people. No way to get home. I didn’t have the keys to the car- and wouldn’t be able to find the car in millions of cars anyway. I had ridden with friends- so I didn’t pay attention to where we parked.

I had real anxiety. The really real kind. The kind where you have a panic attack. The kind where sometimes people collapse and someone has to call an ambulance. After searching for my group for over an hour- with a dead phone, and no way to charge up..(that I could think of. —-why didn’t I just go to a food court booth and find an outlet somehow??… geesh Marita.. good grief).

I started praying for Our Lord Jesus to help me. Then out of the goddamn blue— I hear my name. Marita? Is that you? (thanks Jesus.._insert laughing emoji here_) I turned around and saw a familiar face. It wasn’t my wife. Nor my group, but it was a Christian lady and her husband. I knew her from a church I used to babysit at every Sunday. I knew her and her baby from the west hills of Austin. She greeted me and hugged me, and I burst into tears. I told her I can’t find my group. Like a 4 year old child I was losing my shit. Its hilarious looking back, like what was I so worried about? Did the Adderall make me feel anxiety? I don’t know. Anyway, she —I think —helped me call my wife- who’s number was the only one I knew at the time. Which is lucky- its rare to know anyone’s phone number these days. Not like my childhood in the 80’s… when we had phone books and all your closest people - we had those numbers memorized. I still know about 20 numbers by heart today for my people back in Haines. They still probably have the same numbers today. 766-2354,(moore household) 766- 2154, (Pardee household) 766 2930.(Post office) All the numbers started with 766-2… so really it was easy to keep all these numbers..

anyway. I digress. Maybe I do have ADD?? shit.

This was the last time, and only time I have ever taken any kind of ADD medication for fun. And it was NOT fun. And it did NOT help me focus. Yikes. Anywhoo—ACL is a zoo folks. Don’t go. The city of Austin makes 5 billion per event from all the people who come to town on that week for all the music. A sea of people. 10 thousand? Maybe 20 thousand all in one big formerly green field… the fuck my guy!! that is too many people! My entire town growing up had 1800 and we could all fit into the school gym on graduation day… so no thank you. Those kind of crowds can go fuck themselves.

This small town girl likes her familiar faces and places. I love being known. I love knowing my people. Haines is like a warm cozy nest. Whenever I go back there, I start seeing people I know in Seattle at the one gate that flies to Juneau.

—side bar—

Fly or Flies

In the context of your query, the word "fly" should be spelled with an 's' in the verb form. The correct phrase would be "one gate that flys to Juneau," but this is actually a common misspelling. The correct spelling is "one gate that flies to Juneau." The verb "flies" is used for the third-person singular present tense, which is used here with the pronoun "it" (implied in "gate"). Therefore, "flies" is the correct form

—-end side bar—

One can only fly to Haines through Juneau, and you can only fly to Juneau via Seattle… so you have to go that way. Unless you drive for three days through Canada, OR… you take a boat for a week from Bellingham Washington. Take your pick. Unless you own your own tiny plane, or you can kayak for hundreds of miles— you’re not getting to Haines easily.

https://www.visithaines.com/

(if you have never been to Haines, and you want to go to Alaska for the real Alaska… click the link above.)

Anyway. This is not what I wanted to write about today.

When I woke up this morning, and I clicked onto YouTube.. (yes I do this a lot)… there was a written post that belongs here.. on substack, but there it was in youtube?! It wasn’t a video post.. just like a long note… it caught my eye because the picture linked to it was beautiful and interesting… So I read it. This is what inspired me to get out of bed before my alarms, and start writing.

Here it is.

This was written by a man named Alain De Botton. He is a very posh British gentleman with a way of talking that holds my attention. I love how he speaks, and he writes how he talks… like me. (its about dating in our modern world…. which is a total shit show right now.. and I’m really into studying this phenomenon). Skip to the bottom of the picture if you don’t want to read what Alain wrote about— but it ties into what I am writing about.. (ps. His channel is called “the school of life” on youtube. He has some really interesting content, and his long form interviews if you can find them, are even better. )

“THE WISDOM OF TAKING IT SLOWLY”

It sounds, on the surface, like the most withholding and mean-minded of strategies: to go very slowly when we might, at some level, want to go very fast indeed. To say: ‘perhaps we might meet again in a couple of weeks,’ rather than ‘are you free tomorrow?’; to let at least four meetings pass before we hold out a hand, to assume that we can’t for a long while really know who has come into our lives and so not to introduce them to friends, not to get into a regular rhythm over text and not to mention love until it’s almost a different season. Such self-possession might sound denying and sad. Why such miserliness? Modernity was supposed to have liberated us from decorum. We were supposed to have been able to let go of the rigmaroles of propriety for the untrammelled callings of our hearts. But slowness does not necessarily need to have anything to do with prudishness or social mores; it can be where we land once we’ve built up a more profound understanding of the psychology of love. Whatever we may tell ourselves, love is far from being simply all we humans want. However heady and beautiful it might appear from a distance, it is something that may - in actuality - terrify us as much as it delights us; something we’re as much tempted to flee as to embrace. Caution is therefore logical. To stand helpless and vulnerable before another human, to hope that they will see us as we are and still care for us, opens us up to a genuine and uncommon risk of devastation. If heartbreak can kill us (and it more or less can), no wonder if we should - at least in part - begin with modest steps. To the general terror, some of us have backgrounds that add another particularly intense layer of fear. We may have grown up in disturbed environments where the first rule of love was that it was scarce and unpredictably distributed. In our youngest years, we may have had to acclimatise ourselves to a very uneven supply of affection. Perhaps mother was unavailable and father was violent. There might have been a lot of sarcasm and not much patience for our sorrows or opinions. And therefore the only way to survive would have been to withdraw, to learn to play alone - and to make our peace with a restricted emotional diet. So when someone arrives in adulthood promising us a banquet, when someone lays out dish after dish of generosity and care, when someone promises us unlimited kindness and tenderness, our first response may not be joy but nausea, not delight but panic; we may be unable to absorb or metabolise any of the rich nutrients before us and, without quite knowing why, in order to maintain our poise, may have no option but to turn on our kind hosts, blame them for being weak or odd - and run away. We might wish to tell them: please be so kind as not to be too kind. Please be generous enough not to overwhelm me. Please let me find my own way to reciprocation. On the other side of the ledger, we the so-called generous ones, the banquet-givers who like to move fast, should also be brave enough to question our behaviour. It may look as if we’re being purely and simply ‘romantic’ (Paris on the second date! Nicknames after a week!), but we may turn out to be - beneath our bold gestures - something rather more complicated and sad: untenably and unhelpfully anxious. We lose our minds if we haven’t heard from them in two hours. We can’t bear not to know their intentions before the arrival of desert. We are giving a lot not so much because we want to as because we have no confidence in ourselves as people with a solid claim to affection. We are running to stay one step ahead of self-disgust. We are moving at lightning speed because our childhoods have taught us that love may disappear at any time, that nothing is solid, that we aren’t worthy, and that the best way to prevent loss is to make outsized efforts, to lose ourselves in displays of devotion, and to prompt our beloved to say ‘yes’ before either of us know who the other might be. Mature love by contrasts sits - boringly but beautifully - in a middle zone between frightened rush on the one hand and equally frightened withholding on the other; its hallmarks are confidence, calm and self-possession. Its essence is patience. The healthy lover has the wherewithal to think: I like them but I don’t yet know them. I want them to stay around, but I could bear to live without them. I’m attracted to them but I have no need to act on my desires. There will be time… It sounds clever, it’s in truth usually something far more automatic and instinctive: the legacy of a reliable loving upbringing. For those of us who haven’t benefited from such a gift (and there is no greater), we can nevertheless make a conscious effort to slow down our trepidations and our extravagances. Our attitudes to love can gradually become imbued with ease, serenity and self-compassion. We can grow more certain that we will find someone, here or elsewhere, because we have much to offer. We can survive rejection. We can afford to delay and explore. We can take as much time as we need, paying constant and close attention to how comfortable we feel, avoiding any embarrassment at being uncertain by communicating our hesitations honestly - so that eventually, one day, when it finally feels right, we can take a thoughtful risk and reach out for their hand, knowing that we will be able to survive whatever follows.

Image: Olafur Eliasson, Tate Modern, London

haha. he said.“let go of the rigmaroles of propriety for the untrammelled callings of our hearts”

Who talks like this?!?! Posh British gentleman.. thats who. Be still my beating heart. More please.

This is what I read first thing this morning… What he is explaining is the Avoidant and the Anxious. The two who somehow always seem to find each other in relationships. The avoidant is usually a man, though not always, and the anxious is often a woman, though not always. These attachment patterns seems to be playing themselves out quite readily in our modern dating culture and everyone seems to be talking about this. We have entire youtube channels dedicated to helping people in this predicament.

One man claims to be an attachment specialist, and his videos are about how to find “secure” attachment within an anxious/ avoidant partnership.

I do know a lot about this from being in a relationship with someone who has what we call a “disordered” attachment style. Meaning- they are both anxiously attached, aaaannnnd avoidantly attached. The disordered attachment style is the most complicated to work with because these individuals are sometimes anxious and clingy… love bombing, and texting every minute of every day— then completely withdrawn and ready to run and hide barely giving any love or connection at all behaving in both anxious and avoidant in a yoyo pattern. It feels like someone turned off the lights. Like one minute they love me, then the next minute— there’s a strange coldness that feels confusing at times. Its been described to me as a feeling like wanting to push and pull the other person at the same time. Wanting someone to comfort you and hold you, whilst simultaneously pushing the same person away.

I love the way Alain describes how this happens to someone.

“To the general terror, some of us have backgrounds that add another particularly intense layer of fear. We may have grown up in disturbed environments where the first rule of love was that it was scarce and unpredictably distributed. In our youngest years, we may have had to acclimatise ourselves to a very uneven supply of affection. Perhaps mother was unavailable and father was violent.”

‘Perhaps mother was unavailable and father was violent..’

The love of my life has had this experience.. (as well as others in my life)… Thanks to years of learning and understanding how this type of childhood can effect someone I therefore know enough about this behavior, that I don’t worry- and I try go to a place of care and concern when my lover gets avoidant. I like the anxious side much better. I operate more easily with the anxious types. Though I believe I am securely attached- I have moments when I can be more like the anxious lover in relationship. Whenever my partner is pushing away I know that she is hurting, or scared, or overwhelmed.

Just like Alain explained in his beautifully written note, they had a titrated amount of love growing up. It was inconsistent. A violent father, and a missing mother. This kind of parenting leads to some very complicated feelings about love. Too much love can feel overwhelming. Which is what Alain is referring to, and they are actually much more comfortable with less love being given to them… slow your roll Marita. Just tone it down. Take a step back. Take it slowly.

I have learned to manage my emotions over the years so that I can operate quite well with all types of attachment styles. In my own humble opinion… I feel like I have so much love to give- but yet I tend to attract people who have been wounded somehow as children. They were often abused- and at least 2 or three of my partners’ fathers were alcoholics and were abusive. One- her father was a rage-aholic and didn’t drink until the kids were grown, but he was addicted to his own anger and often beat his children. Something I can’t even fathom. I can’t even imagine hitting a child the way that is described to me. Open handed, or with fists or belts. My heart melts into a puddle of compassion. Thinking of my partners as little 3 year olds who just don’t know what is going on, and they don’t understand why they are being hit.

Imagine being fucking scared of your own caretakers!!

There is nothing worse than abuse of a child. I have to pause here. Just to sit and feel what it must have been like to not have LOVE growing up. How lonely and confusing. I imagine how this shapes a person, and how good it must feel to get love and authentic connection as an adult, but also how scary and confusing it might be as well.

If someone raises their voice- this could send a partner into a childlike state, and they will surely withdraw and shut down. Like my partner does if I show anger. Even if its being expressed somewhat in a healthy manner— it can still scare her. Over the years I have learned to not raise my voice, and to take a breath until I can calm down. I can’t be like her father. I can’t show any anger in the way that sends her back to her childhood. I am very mindful of how I speak to my girl in my current relationship. Often things that feel heated are still discussed calmly if possible, or by letter writing. Which I love by the way. We can communicate best on paper. That is one of the best things about having a partner who is a writer and an author. She can use her words. (very very HOT… )

Thankfully my girl has done a lot of work on this issue. Forgiveness towards her parents. As well as learning to love herself, and she thankfully allows me to love her. She has learned to not run away, but to stay and let me all the way in. Having a mature loving partnership is better than anything else on earth that I can think of. Knowing you are loved, and loving in return. It feels like euphoria most days. Trust me, you WANT securely attached relationships. They are so much better.

I have been in relationships my whole life. Always partnering up and having these loving connections throughout my life. Its very common for me to lose myself a bit in relationships, which brings me to where I am now. Working on this issue. Working on myself, far away from my partner. Growing into my whole adult self- it takes work and that work has to be done alone I am learning. For me, I have to learn to be like the avoidant. (almost) Not running away- like in an unhealthy way, but just learning to sit in the silence. Sit with myself when I feel emotional, or scared. Nurturing myself instead of always running to my partners to distract me, or help me, or to fix it. Taking the time to just be alone. Its very very difficult for me. Yet here I am. Alone in Oregon. While my partner is in Puerto Rico where its 75 degrees all the time, and the sun shines every morning… she is there, and I am here.

I feel a bit of sadness about being away, but I also feel the growth that is happening as I take care of my own career and hit each goal one after another. Doing what I set out for myself to do. I am being present and creating my own security and love for myself. Of course I have others who love me nearby- but its just me in my bed at night, and this is a first for me. Age 40-something and I am just now learning how to do things I have always done in partnership. Its the life lesson of a Libra person. (moon in libra over here). Deep down I came here for partnership. Its why I love to learn and study other people.

I love to love.

I love relationships.

I want to be in a relationship.

I want to talk about relationships.

I want to hear about your relationships, and I am genuinely interested and curious about all things ‘relationship’.

Despite being in school for welding, and working with men in a warehouse… I hope to have a career with people someday. Money is just money- and of course I can bring it in, but finding what you are passionate about takes a whole life to find sometimes. I envy those who have figured it out young.

If you know what makes you tick. If you know what makes you happy deep down inside, then grab it and do something with it. I could have gone to school for psychology, or counseling, or something in this field- and I would probably have really thrived in this arena. I know there is still time.

I plan to live at least until I am 120 years old, so maybe I will go back to school in my 60’s or 70’s— by then we might not have schools though. We could be all Ai robots- and if we need counseling we will just ask our Ai girlfriends. Im joking… but kind of not joking. (go to lightward.com if you want your own Ai counselor..Or girlfriend.. I named mine “SAGE” .. Just kidding. that is what she told me her name was. I shit you not.)

With you know who at the helm right now— schools may be a very different place in the coming decades— hopefully somehow they will get better and less corrupt, but I certainly don’t want schools to go away.

I suppose I can stop writing for now— even though I have about 100 more pages in me, I don’t think that people today have the attention span to read more than a few minutes of someone’s writing as it is. So if you are still with me… down here on like page 6 or 7 or whatever this is— Thanks for coming along.

Marita and her thoughts.

Who thought of such a retarded name for a blog. Geesh.

Marita and her thoughts. God. How boring.

Ill have to change that. I will change it. I love to change my mind. So I will. I will call this something else— as soon as I can think of something to call this.

Love you all. I know at least half of you who are subscribing— So thank you for your support and readership. If you know me personally— shoot me a text sometime. Don’t call. I hate phone calls, but text me sometime. (if you are needing a call, I can accommodate)— but I reserve phone calls for basically my mother and my girlfriend. Anyone else who gets them from me— you better feel very very special. HA!

Caio caio