So My heavy but meaningful conversation with my father was just the tip of the iceberg.
My partner somehow chooses the best times to throw on that extra weight. I don’t say that as a complaint. Her role in my life, aside from making me laugh and smile 6 out of 7 days a week is to subconsciously magnify all of my issues and contradictions and help me fix them. She doesn’t know she’s doing it though, and it usually takes the form of her own drama coming up at the same time as mine, so it can get a little messy.
She’s been stressing over our future and visas for the past few days and distracting me from my work and we got talking about all kinds of things, but she had fallen back into her old kind of depression. She doesn’t want to be a burden on me and so she generally just shuts down instead of arguing and making problems, but for anyone who has lived with someone who is in a dark place, you know how it spreads to the air around you.
I usually take this as a challenge to be strong enough to keep pushing forward with my own projects and passions and also to be there for her if she needs me, but when it happens day after day, and starts to influence my sleep and throws off my rhythm because of the amount of attention needed (this usually happens after she has to face her parents), I start to feel a fire burning in me.
I don’t explode at her anymore but I will let my anger push me to say things I’ve been scared to say.
I had initially told her that if she really really wanted to go to school to study the creation process for some things she wants to make, I would help her pay for it somehow, and going to school means I’d be earning the bulk of our income for another 2 years.
It felt like some pressure but I believed that she’d work hard to build her brand and start earning money before she graduated.
As time went on though she started to act less excited about the school and so yesterday I told her that if she isn’t super excited about it I don’t want to pay for it. It’s not that I don’t want to it’s that I don’t really have the resources. If it was an ultimate dream of hers and she was willing to make the most of it, I could make some sacrifices but if it’s just because she doesn’t want to work, I won’t do it.
She agreed that she’s feel a lot better if we had both of us earning an income and she doesn’t want to hold me back all the time by making me pay for everything and not being able to make decisions without worry about her well being.
She is a good partner. She just tends to get caught between two choices and wants someone else to make the decision for her, and so I usually have to try and guide her through the decision making and help lead her to deciding on what she actually wants. I think I do a good job of keeping my bias out of it…but then after she makes one decision the other one starts to look more attractive and so we have to go back and forth at least once.
After this decision though it looks like it’s final. She isn’t expecting me to pay for the school and she prefers that I don’t and her family isn’t helping so it’s looking like she will look for a job instead.
This takes a lot of pressure off me, but this is still just layer two of this deep iceberg that is the changing rhythm of my life right now. It goes deeper and gets more challenging.
I’ll have to save part 3 for tomorrow
🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎
Join the Cross Culture Discord
Check out my Books 📕 Music 🎸 Podcast 🎬 and Merchandise HERE
Confessions of the Damaged 1.1 and 1.2 novellas - Out now!
The nice thing if you are really comfortable with someone, is to play out various scenarios to see how you both feel about them. Exaggerating extremes playfully helps a lot, even if it's done in a completely unrealistic way. That way you can both become acquainted with your own and each others' feelings, should life actually take a turn into that direction (even while not going all the way to the extreme).
Oh man...I do that on my own but I try with her only when I have a lot of time and patience. It's not easy when your partner has never really had freedom or been able to have honest conversations most of her life. A lot of situations scare the hell out of her, but she tries. I just need to be careful cause for me, I can do this for fun in 5 minutes but she needs to go through all the stages of grief and it becomes a 2-3 hour thing sometimes. It's always getting better though, she is trying her best
!pizza
Well, I'd say time for paying attention to each other is essential anyway. And let's face it, opening our eyes can be super scary, so patience is always needed for everyone involved, along with constantly making sure there is a safety net, while keeping in mind that it's all a simulation anyway. But in my opinion, it is perhaps THE closest a person can be to another another one, by giving them the feeling of safety to act and play and let out whatever.
I can see how this could be shocking at first, for someone who has never done this, but trusting in the guidance of the other one, they can discover amazing things... or simply have incredible laughs. In my case, I would say when I act out things with my partner, and we end up both rolling on the floor laughing uncontrollably... I think it's even more intimate than sex, honestly.
Of course small, easily digestible pieces of situations should build up the trust, and help drop inhibitions. Doing this frequently should get you both comfortable with it, allowing creativity to bubble up. And if you take purely simple banalities at first, just so that you get used to playing, the emotionally laden topics may not be so shocking any more later on.
Wait... Is it even clear what I'm talking about? Take for example the ice-cream vendor situation: One of you sells ice-cream, there are all the flavors except for pistachio, which is exactly what the other one wants to buy. What are all the different ways you could react? You act one out briefly, then you switch. After the third or fourth round I will guarantee that someone will end up sharing some previously hidden side of their personality, most likely something so minor and insignificant that it seems not even worth the mention. Still, it is an important piece of the safety net which will allow you to do this with heavier, more traumatizing topics.
Okay... it was not my intention to write such a long reply, especially not about giving abrupt advice on acting sessions! However, I don't want to discard what I've written either, hoping that you won't mind.
Thanks for the !PIZZA by the way! 😉
Ah! maybe I was imagining something a little more extreme...like "Imagine I got someone pregnant" or "What if I left you for him" or "What if I was actually gay and hiding it the whole time" or "What if we got kicked out of the country". Hahaha we need to tone it down a bit!
!pizza
Wow, these topics sound like upper-inter at best, but more from the proficient category. I guess they can be interesting, but only after you've had plenty of practice with more benign issues.
Well you know it's always better if someone else makes the hard decision so you can blame them if something goes wrong instead of yourself XD
Glad you eventually got something worked out :)
Lol I think you should tell her that, I don't know how it would sound coming from me hahah
!pizza
This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.
Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating to @indiaunited. We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.
Here are some handy links for delegations: 100HP, 250HP, 500HP, 1000HP.
Read our latest announcement post to get more information.
Please contribute to the community by upvoting this comment and posts made by @indiaunited.
Congratulations @selfhelp4trolls! You received a personal badge!
Wait until the end of Power Up Day to find out the size of your Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
Congratulations @selfhelp4trolls! You received a personal badge!
Participate in the next Power Up Day and try to power-up more HIVE to get a bigger Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz: