Moving to Medium

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Hello to the handful of folks who are here to see my dating and general life advice! I'm moving that portion of this randomass blog over to Medium. Follow me there: Victoria Sauvage.

A 10 Year Non Engagement

Today marks ten full years since my third and final marriage proposal. I don't know why, but every year it pops up in my Facebook memories, I feel compelled to reflect upon it. Why is it significant? Who cares? It's significant to me because it makes me think of all the lives I've lived and have yet to live still. Proposal 1 came during my childbearing years, the response to my first pregnancy when I was still a teenager. Proposal 2 came during my motherhood years, when I was a housewife, raising small children. Proposal 3 was when my children were in their early teens, and I was in the midst of buying my first house, in grad school, proving to everyone and no one how I would not be a failure. 

That last proposal came just before all of the loss. I should have been eager to accept it. I was quite literally losing everything. My fiancé could have been (and wanted to be) supportive of me during my struggles, but I could not go through with it. I didn't love him the way one is supposed to love their partner when they agree to share the rest of their lives together. I gave the ring back (like the others), and told him he deserved better than this. I hope he found it.

I definitely did. But, not without going through the absolute worst, relying solely on my small support system online and in real-life. And, eventually, I found myself digging my way out of the rubble and finding a life for myself that I never thought I had in me. It never occurred to me that I would be anyone else. The time hadn't passed yet. I was still too close to get any perspective by looking back. I read these old journal entries and see how slowly time was passing back then, how hard the healing was. But still, something inside of me must have known that I would find myself again, and what I wanted above anything else was my freedom.

When I think about this proposal, I think about how free I do feel now. I think about all the people I've met and loved in the past ten years. I can't imagine feeling like my life would have been full without having met them. I think about the interactions I've had while dating and choosing not to date, while maintaining friendships, all the ways in which I had to adjust and learn to accept (or not accept) people. I learned to find something I love about almost everyone, especially when I initially don't even like them. And, I owe it all to allowing myself to experience a life that isn't tied to just one person. 

So every May 17, I feel a little excited. I was on the precipice of making the boldest move of my life, the one that would change who I was as a person forever.

Lightfoot's Grave

I didn’t know my dad very well, and most of the things I did know were almost mythical in nature. Some things were his own Big Fish stories. Some were other people's recollections of him. My father has mostly been fiction to me, the guy who convinced all of south Florida that he, and only he, could detail Rolls Royces, and the dealers in South Florida believed him. He ran them from Palm Beach to Miami and back for years with a gun on the seat next to him. He drank whiskey at the Blue Boar. He was a misfit songwriter who won a contest for writing a song about my mom kicking him out. And he claimed to have written music with Gordon Lightfoot. 

My dad was dead by age 45. Over the years, there were times when I wondered if there was even 1 true thing I knew about my dad. It seemed easy enough that I could simply ask Gordon Lightfoot (or his people) if he had known him. Who can forget a last name like mine? Or a wiry maverick who went by Roscoe? I've written and rewritten the letter a few times but could not send it. I decided to let my dad have that one. I would simply believe it. Now it's completely carried to the grave, and I will never get to know. There's a strange comfort in the not knowing.

Holiday Melancholy

This was the 1st Christmas that I didn't have any family around, didn't travel to see anyone, didn't arrange to do anything. I shudder at referring to myself as a "lone wolf," so we'll just say that I'm used to being alone during the rest of the year, so the holidays should be a blip on the radar.  At least, that's what I thought. Because I never feel alone. This year, I did - or I don't know how to describe the weird emptiness of not being festive at home, of being nostalgic for a time when my home was mine and when my children were little, and I made the magic of the season. 

I was invited along to celebrate all December, so I wasn't ever alone. But that feeling crept back in whenever I wasn’t distracted, whenever there wasn't the big warm brotherhood-togetherness glow I get, sometimes even with strangers in unlikely places. Not being part of making the season special for someone else is what ultimately took the wind out of my sails. 

There were a lot of emergencies this year, particularly toward the end, that caused a huge disruption in how money and time off were spent. So next year, I'm going to make a point and allocate time to be available, emergencies or not. 

That said, I'm glad the intensity of the 2022 holidays will sink with the sun tonight. I live on an island, but it turns out that I'm not an island myself.

Fistfuls of Time

Just some thoughts: You have to unclench the fists full of the thing you're clinging to if you ever hope to have two open hands to receive what you truly want, what you deserve.

You've been grasping at it for so long, thinking it's easier to wait for the thing that's close enough to change into the thing you long for - waiting for yourself to change too, to settle, that you've missed out on the enjoyment of the thing that it actually is and all the things you could have had if your hands had been free.

It's time to open them. Clinging causes damage, not just to the thing you want, but to your very own hands. You've held on far longer than you should have. Give everything a break already and let go. I promise there's no free-falling. Just you realizing that the ground was always just a couple of feet beneath you the whole time.

New Year New You

Some of you need to do yourself a favor by the new year and leave your ex alone. Let them go into 2022 with an open heart that's capable of letting someone else into it. Everyone wants their partner to be their best friend, everyone does. But if you keep a previous best friend too close, there isn't room for anything new to come into your life. Regardless of your special circumstances, your ex's world should not have so much of you in it that it's almost like you never split. It keeps them stagnant with love because they're trying to keep things good with you, because they're holding a place for you to come back to, or because your current friendship is meeting enough of their needs that they don't bother trying again. It's unhealthy for both of you.

The Time

Sometimes it knocks the wind out of me when I think of how long I've walked the earth since you've been gone. So many things have happened that I haven't gotten to tell you about. I hope there's truly an afterlife and that you're simultaneously impressed and horrified by watching me. I drink too much and love all the wrong people, but you have always known that about me.