i fear i’ve become boring. my life has settled down into a broadly recognisable shape, displaced by only eight miles and made more solitary. in many ways i’ve “made the best” of the situation - i get out for walks along the canal and in nature, i cook nice meals, i see friends. my work is going well. my work is the only thing that’s stayed the same. my new home is “lovely”, it’s comfortable, i enjoy being here.
something is missing, though. quite a few things, really, but all have congealed into one heavy Thing. i go a full week without spending time with anybody, both by choice and not. my newfound journalling habit is hamstrung by how little of interest i have to document at least half the time. the walls are bare. when the working day ends, i miss the purpose. walking around saltaire i feel overcome with dread about my future’s shape. possibly for the first time in my life, i have no clear idea of what i’m aiming for.
in some important ways, my current situation aligns with what i’d expected life to look like now - the hills, the canal, the convenient rail links and budget supermarkets. in more important ones, it’s nothing like that at all. in all honesty, admitting to still being in pain over the breakup after maybe appearing to be “taking it well” is almost shameful.
my whole attitude to romantic relationships has been dominated by various shames for as long as i’ve pursued them - being ashamed of being gay, trans, autistic, asexual, and now boring. openly expressing feeling anything much at all has felt agonising - i worry still that some of my family and closest friends have no idea how much i love them, because i still find it unspeakable. at odds with everything i believe about intimacy, i feel obligated to keep all details of my romantic life (such that it was) between me and, sometimes, my partner. knowing full well that a relationship being entirely uncomplicated by conflict is an often dangerous fiction, i still limited any expression of my concerns to just one person, or nobody, until the relationship was irreversibly failing. this isn’t to say things could’ve been different if i’d been more open with loved ones outside that relationship, but to instead contextualise why “confessing” any of my feelings about this after the fact feels so torturously difficult.
so, in truth, half a year after the breakup i feel as though i’ve been hollowed out. my former partner didn’t “complete” me, i don’t believe a single relationship does that for anybody, but he represented a stability and a future that are both now lost. the stability of my longest ever relationship, a remarkably easy one to be in until the final two months. few people in my life knew that he broke it off days after we first agreed to be a couple - i felt then, and i still feel now, that i understood why he did and that, if we tried again, the relationship could work. and it did.
tending to that relationship, moving in together and settling into a stable living arrangement gave a basic structure to my imagined future. the timing of the breakup meant both this imagined future and the present reality of my life were both upended. this is the essential heavy Thing from which all the smaller sub-things emerged. making the best of this situation has left me in a comfortable, successful but fundamentally unwanted position. my old home isn’t far away. in fact, i’m visiting it again the day after i’m writing this. i don’t think i ever appreciated it enough.
for the entire time i lived in leeds post-graduation, up until the two months between the breakup and me leaving, i had the imagined future as my goal. the present reality felt temporary, was temporary in my mind. in a sense this is perfectly reasonable for me to have felt - the plan from before i moved back to leeds was always for my former partner and i to move in together after he graduated, and i had no reason until shortly before the breakup to expect that this wouldn’t happen. i did also make it clear that i was sad to no longer live with my housemate of two years and friend of many more. did he, too, see it as temporary, my plans aside? if my former partner wasn’t a factor, would we have tried to keep living together indefinitely? when i mentioned us living together again as an impossibility on a late night phone call, they said we could talk about it at some point if it was something i wanted. instead of asking whether it was something they wanted, i just cried silently and let the moment slip away.
ultimately, then, i feel unable to consider changing my situation in any real way for many of the same reasons i find it remarkable i’m considering making this piece available for anybody to read at all. this doesn’t quite explain why i fear i’ve become boring, though. the twin massive upheavals of the breakup and unexpected, abrupt move to a town where i know nobody and feel largely out of place have also led me to settle into a smaller existence. much of the time i feel as though i hardly exist outside my job. i’m grateful that it’s stayed the same, that i enjoy it so much, that i’m appreciated there. it’s hardly enough, though. when i try to write at the monthly group i’ve been attending most months this year, all that comes to mind is the breakup. most days after work, i feel no desire to do anything. when i go on one of my nice walks, i find myself tearing up at nothing at all. some weeks i barely eat meals and forget to drink water, become paranoid about leaving the flat. it’s almost as though, without being observed by my former partner, i no longer see the point in keeping up the performance.
a university friend moved to leeds recently, and when we met in saltaire one afternoon i found that i had nothing but work to talk about. when i went on the first and only date i’ve had since the breakup, i found that i had nothing to talk about at all. when i see my friend i lived with until june, conversation is easy, but they’ve long been the person i find easiest to talk to. with other close friends i mostly try to let them talk at me as much as possible, occasionally throwing in an unsolicited factoid about the history of my new town or what baked good i’m planning to make and then probably eat half of in one sitting. i know as i write this that i’m being very ungenerous to myself and will probably read this back on a better day and think i had no sense of perspective at all, but it’d be dishonest to pretend this isn’t what i feel.
what happened in april and june has made me withdraw into myself, shrink away into this quiet flat and throw myself into my work. i write this not out of self-pity or to ask for sympathy but to try and excise this constant gnawing shame i don’t feel able to properly express. i know it’ll take time to move past what happened, inasmuch as that’s a thing you can do, but that isn’t going to happen if i leave it to eat away at me.
thank you for reading this to the end, as i assume you did if you’re reading this. i wrote this in one sitting and didn’t edit it much (as you can probably tell) after walking to hirst wood nature reserve and feeling frustrated that thinking about all of this was taking me outof the moment again. here’s a song i thought about while writing: