An Audit of My Heart

2023 the year I untangled this heart of mine AND found it still has a pulse

Have you ever attempted to untangle a delicate necklace that has been caught in knots? You roll it around and around between your fingers, trying to find any link that may feel loose enough to serve as an entry point to begin the process? Only it doesn’t have links to loosen. You stare closely at the chain thinking, there has to be a place I can start from. You pull one end from another, but worry you might be making it tighter. Making it worse. It feels like a lost cause. You put it down convinced that only a professional with a tiny pin needle, whose hands don’t shake, could straighten it out.

This feels analogous to me - my mind- trying to write about my year of dating, sex and relationships in 2023. There are no less than 16 drafts on my computer, 56 notes on my phone topped off by an endless stream of consciousness playing in the background of my brain. The thoughts, sentences and words, no matter how I try to arrange, rearrange, think, or re-think, won’t come together.

Typically, my end of year The Sex is Great WRAPPED would be no less than 800 words where I tell all but their names, overshare the sexy mishaps and misunderstandings that went down and explain in detail, just how, I was able to survive, yet another (!) year of modern dating. 

But last year wasn’t a typical one for me. 

It was one where I dated less than years prior.

It was one where I  became less and less interested in making a mockery of myself and others in our attempts to find love, and make love, or point out the messes we haphazardly make of ourselves and each other in the process.

It was one where the humor was lost as I observed the truth: we hurt and cause pain, because we are hurt and in pain.

It was one where I realized the joke I had been telling about men in their forties, single, divorced, struggling to understand the meaning of their choices, unsure of what they wanted and who were perpetually sad, was actually the truth about me.  

(talk about the most unfunny, wait… what?! moment of 2023)

It was one where my dreams revealed to me what my life would have looked like if I had not left, cheated or lied in my previous relationships. They were not the nightmare endings I had once perceived my reality to be. And no where close to the nightmares I created in reality.

I can’t speak to everyone’s mid- life experience nor will I present as an expert in this department, as I’ve only just arrived, but I imagine the forties and fifties go the same for most of us who have any amount of awareness. It’s a bit of a reckoning. You hit pause long enough to look back, reflect and see the consequences of some of your choices along the way. You may even see how you could have done things differently. How you could have figured most things out.

Perhaps this is the gift of time and consequences: perspective. 

Unraveling these parts of my life and relationships didn’t lead me to feel any regret. It was less of an emotional process and more of a scientific approach. I experimented with this, did that, then this happened and everything exploded. Or imploded depending on the circumstance. It gave me new data. Like, what not to do in those experiments. However, I’m not so naive as to think the outcomes wouldn’t still be the same regardless of a different approach.

Perhaps this is the logical and learned position that comes with age and experience: acceptance.

What I haven’t been able to make sense of and have had a great difficulty in untangling is the matters of the heart; the parts where I made commitments and promises only to break them; the parts where I shared my heart and then turned it off; the parts where I was trusted to handle a heart with care, only to act in negligence. 

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

It is here where I am caught staring at my heart, fragile and intricate, caught in knots, thinking about love and my experience of it; this thing that just unexpectedly

happens

and then just, unexpectedly…

unhappens.

Like the time I encountered it in 2007. I remember the exact moment I felt it (love) radiating through me. We were driving along the coast of Maui in his jeep. The sun was sparkling off the water and shining on our skin as the wind whipped through our hair. Ryan Adams' Gold album was blaring through the speakers. I had never heard his music prior to this day.

My boyfriend, that label feels minimizing to type even now, had his hand on the stick shift, was wearing no shirt with board shorts, and was singing along. I watched him, mesmerized and consumed in thought, when he caught me in my moment. He did this thing with his knee and/or hand that I would come to learn he did anytime he was feeling nervous or self conscious, which was to slightly shake it back and forth. 

What, he asked with a little smile.

The ‘what’ was my body and mind were overwhelmed with a lightheaded, euphoria. Gratitude. Awe. My mind was swarming with thoughts like, this is my best friend- I have never felt this way- I can’t believe this - I found my person.

My person.

Aside from my experience of becoming a mother, it was the first time another person entered my life and changed how I perceived the world and myself in it; it was in that moment that I knew I was in love with him; that I wanted to spend my life with him. 

I believed that with every cell in my body.

I’ve touched on this memory, and that particular force of love I felt more times in 2023 than I can count.

How rare that experience is.

How easily it is taken for granted.

Research on the human body has shown that over the course of seven years, the cells that make you up will regenerate, replicate and renew themselves. It’s suggested that even you as a person will change.

Is this human metamorphosis? Does this explain the seven year itch? Where does the love go?

If you had told me that less than five years time from that drive in the jeep on the coast, I would not only cheat on him, but I would change, evolve, renew, die, metamorphose into a person unable to exist with him, unable to see a life with him, unable to be the woman I was when we met, I would have just stared at you. Your words and prediction wouldn’t have registered as remotely possible; it would have been incomprehensible to me. Inconceivable. 

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Winston Churchill 

Last month I was lying alone in bed when I decided to watch the French film Amalie. It’s a movie that I have owned since 2014, when a man I was seeing insisted we watch it together. As the movie played on I couldn’t help but feel like it was the first time I was viewing it. I remembered nothing of it with the exception that the man and I who watched it laid wrapped in one another’s arms on the couch. Watching it reminded me of our time together. The love I had for him. It was the second time I felt that force penetrating my field. There was this sense of calm I had never known. An ease in which we existed. A depth that I had never felt. It was a love I walked away from before it evolved into more. A decision that I’ve never questioned with the exception of, will I ever experience a love like that again?

Further findings on cellular regeneration show that some organs take longer to replicate. For example, the human heart is even slower to renew and will take more than seven years to do so. Only 40% of it will renew over your lifetime. 

You may remember me mentioning last year that I met someone and felt a shock go through my system. “Like a magnet, I felt pulled towards this person. I needed to be in his arms. Next to him. My arm around him, his around me. The feeling was the opposite of what most men brought up in me. I didn’t just want to be next to him, I wanted to be with him.”

It’s been an exercise, to say the least, to witness the conflict between my brain and body since our meeting. My mind comes up with a reason every few minutes explaining why this is a bad idea. There has been actual physical discomfort from what I know is my own mental torment, old wounds and patterns rising. I have questioned why anyone would say they miss the feeling of falling in love. My YELP review of the process would be ‘zero out of zero recommends- HELP!’

I have not been able to entirely understand myself in the experience because nothing has gone wrong and he is exceptional. Except the part of him that is attracted to me. I informed him recently that this is a concern of mine 🚩

As I watched Amalie I started to see- then literally heard- what that person wanted me to see and hear ten years ago, that I didn’t know I needed to hear now:

Your bones aren’t made of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance go by, your heart will eventually become as dry and brittle as my skeleton.

I paused the movie. He knew I was completely closed off from love then.

I thought of the man I had been seeing and my resistance to feel into it; of the man who showed me the movie and my resistance to receive his love; of the last love I allowed myself to experience which was my first love and it hit me; my heart had flatlined.

That was the last time I allowed myself to go all in on and receive love. After seeing what happened, I hadn’t trusted myself or love, since.

I had been too afraid.

There was this massive sense of tension released as I sat with that. Like I finally found the opening to the knot that was causing the blockage.

I loosened.

It was as if I had just been resuscitated; I felt for the first time, in a very long time, my pulse.

And a little relieved... maybe I would be able to love again. I guess we will have to see what’s in store for 2024.