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Happy birthday to me
Nov. 10th, 2003 04:39 amI had an interesting day today. It was definitely better then yesterday. I don't think I cried once today. Well, maybe a little bit when I first woke up.
So I got up, showered, and waited for my parents to arrive. They came to visit for support in the breakup. We went out to lunch at some diner downtown. I had a not-so-good chicken salad sandwich. But the food wasn't important. We had a nice long talk about my relationship with Jess and our breakup. For the first time in a while, I loved talking with my parents. They had just what I needed. They had support and love for me, but they also had real life experience to help me see things that I couldn't. We talked about what I wanted in our relationship, what I wasn't getting, what frustrations existed in my mind, Jess's frustrations, how dependent I was on Jess while at Cornell. They helped me come up with ways to break my depression. They helped me to admit to myself some things about Jess I've been holding back due to optimism. They helped me realize some of the benefits of being single, the freedom I was missing out on because of the tightness with which I held on to our relationship. I don't just mean freedom to date other people, I mean freedom to live my life without seeing everything in terms of JessRoss. I had a brief glimpse of that feeling today. I think I'll begin to feel it more and more as I'm able to start coping with the loss of the most important part of my life for the past two years.
Jess's mom said to me how interesting it was that our parents are becoming real life people to us now. The strength and communication I'm building with my parents is definitely a positive thing to come out of all this misery... They drove 12 hours today just to have lunch with me and talk for a little bit. My brother said, in reference to this, that we have the coolest parents in the world. I think I'm going to email them and let them know how much I appreciated them coming up.
So I was dropped off at my dorm with a couple small birthday gifts: flowers and a poster with guitar chords. They joined the happy birthday balloon and stuffed bear they had bear hugged to me, and the tin of baked sweets they had mailed to me a few days earlier. Also in my inbox today, I got one of those online cards from Kate. It's nice to know that someone else besides my parents is thinking of me on my birthday. She's away at a horticulture convention too. She also sent me a card in the mail, which I got four days ago, but which had a do not open until 11/9/03 on it. ^_^ I'm glad I'm friends with her. I don't want to go out with her, even if I am free, but it's great having a friend like her. Speaking of which, OG has come out of the aim/alabama woodwork to not only help me through my breakup and be there to do whatever he could possible do, he also wished me a happy birthday. I was quite pleasantly surprised he remembered when my birthday was. I feel somewhat bad not knowing his.
So I then hung out with Becky for a bit. Yesterday night, I spent some time in her room calming down. This consisted of my hiding under her lofted bed sitting on a pillow, hugging her stuffed dog, with a box of tissues near by. We eventually talked about stuff (her hockey games) and that helped too. So today while hanging out with her I started to let go some more by showing her some of the comedy stuff I had been saving for Jess. We also played NES and cards and had a pretty good time. An hour or so after she left, I went to dinner with Deb and Rivkah, suitemates of Kate. Rivkah's a really nice person and has invited me to hang out with them a bit recently, especially so I'll have company both during my breakup and during my birthday. She said it would suck for me to go eat dinner by myself on my birthday. ^_^ So after we ate I came to the painful realization that I still had homework to do for the next day. I took her up on her offer to hang out and work on my chem lab in their room. This being the first bit of homework I've done since the breakup, it went painfully slow. Type a sentence, space off thinking about relationship things, play with koosh ball, walk around a bit, edit typed sentence, think about various things that'll never happen again, emotions I won't feel exactly again, nice, nice, people I'll never again see, places I'll never again go..., talk with Rivkah about something random, type another sentence, etc.
Eventually by 2am my lab was mostly done. I came up to my room and found a happy birthday message from Jess on aim. ^_^ that made me feel good. I was hoping she wouldn't take the easy way out and just ignore the fact that it was my birthday for fear of saying something that could lead to more unrest or difficulty between us. All I wanted was a nice "Happy birthday, Ross" and that's essentially what I got. (thanks)
So now it's really late. I haven't been sleeping well recently, and it has caught up to me. My lab isn't completely done, but it doesn't look like any more of it will get finished tonight. I'll have to work on it tomorrow morning.
I'm glad my biggest fear of being totally alone during this low point in my life didn't come true. Even though I don't have close friends here, people have shown interest in my well being. I'm trying and succeeding, for the most part, to reach out to them. I'm also ever thankful for my wonderful parents.
With that, I head to bed and look forward to a new day tomorrow.
So I got up, showered, and waited for my parents to arrive. They came to visit for support in the breakup. We went out to lunch at some diner downtown. I had a not-so-good chicken salad sandwich. But the food wasn't important. We had a nice long talk about my relationship with Jess and our breakup. For the first time in a while, I loved talking with my parents. They had just what I needed. They had support and love for me, but they also had real life experience to help me see things that I couldn't. We talked about what I wanted in our relationship, what I wasn't getting, what frustrations existed in my mind, Jess's frustrations, how dependent I was on Jess while at Cornell. They helped me come up with ways to break my depression. They helped me to admit to myself some things about Jess I've been holding back due to optimism. They helped me realize some of the benefits of being single, the freedom I was missing out on because of the tightness with which I held on to our relationship. I don't just mean freedom to date other people, I mean freedom to live my life without seeing everything in terms of JessRoss. I had a brief glimpse of that feeling today. I think I'll begin to feel it more and more as I'm able to start coping with the loss of the most important part of my life for the past two years.
Jess's mom said to me how interesting it was that our parents are becoming real life people to us now. The strength and communication I'm building with my parents is definitely a positive thing to come out of all this misery... They drove 12 hours today just to have lunch with me and talk for a little bit. My brother said, in reference to this, that we have the coolest parents in the world. I think I'm going to email them and let them know how much I appreciated them coming up.
So I was dropped off at my dorm with a couple small birthday gifts: flowers and a poster with guitar chords. They joined the happy birthday balloon and stuffed bear they had bear hugged to me, and the tin of baked sweets they had mailed to me a few days earlier. Also in my inbox today, I got one of those online cards from Kate. It's nice to know that someone else besides my parents is thinking of me on my birthday. She's away at a horticulture convention too. She also sent me a card in the mail, which I got four days ago, but which had a do not open until 11/9/03 on it. ^_^ I'm glad I'm friends with her. I don't want to go out with her, even if I am free, but it's great having a friend like her. Speaking of which, OG has come out of the aim/alabama woodwork to not only help me through my breakup and be there to do whatever he could possible do, he also wished me a happy birthday. I was quite pleasantly surprised he remembered when my birthday was. I feel somewhat bad not knowing his.
So I then hung out with Becky for a bit. Yesterday night, I spent some time in her room calming down. This consisted of my hiding under her lofted bed sitting on a pillow, hugging her stuffed dog, with a box of tissues near by. We eventually talked about stuff (her hockey games) and that helped too. So today while hanging out with her I started to let go some more by showing her some of the comedy stuff I had been saving for Jess. We also played NES and cards and had a pretty good time. An hour or so after she left, I went to dinner with Deb and Rivkah, suitemates of Kate. Rivkah's a really nice person and has invited me to hang out with them a bit recently, especially so I'll have company both during my breakup and during my birthday. She said it would suck for me to go eat dinner by myself on my birthday. ^_^ So after we ate I came to the painful realization that I still had homework to do for the next day. I took her up on her offer to hang out and work on my chem lab in their room. This being the first bit of homework I've done since the breakup, it went painfully slow. Type a sentence, space off thinking about relationship things, play with koosh ball, walk around a bit, edit typed sentence, think about various things that'll never happen again, emotions I won't feel exactly again, nice, nice, people I'll never again see, places I'll never again go..., talk with Rivkah about something random, type another sentence, etc.
Eventually by 2am my lab was mostly done. I came up to my room and found a happy birthday message from Jess on aim. ^_^ that made me feel good. I was hoping she wouldn't take the easy way out and just ignore the fact that it was my birthday for fear of saying something that could lead to more unrest or difficulty between us. All I wanted was a nice "Happy birthday, Ross" and that's essentially what I got. (thanks)
So now it's really late. I haven't been sleeping well recently, and it has caught up to me. My lab isn't completely done, but it doesn't look like any more of it will get finished tonight. I'll have to work on it tomorrow morning.
I'm glad my biggest fear of being totally alone during this low point in my life didn't come true. Even though I don't have close friends here, people have shown interest in my well being. I'm trying and succeeding, for the most part, to reach out to them. I'm also ever thankful for my wonderful parents.
With that, I head to bed and look forward to a new day tomorrow.
