#18) Finally Letting Go

The process that finally set my heart free

Things were never the same after the last rollercoaster plunge. Tara and I still saw each other around town now and then, but less and less frequently. Our email communication, which had been frequent and frantic that first year, ebbed to a hello, checking in every few months.

The year after we met and my dad died, we each sent each other one letter. Mine was several pages long and sent in the fall, proclaiming my deep love for her, but also sharing the ways she had hurt me. She emailed, thanking me for sharing her highlights and very lowlights in their entirety. Then a few months later, Tara sent me a birthday card, thanking me for all the ways I had been a catalyst for change in her life. She lamented, I seem to be terrible at conveying or understanding my feelings, and added how deeply she regretted not being there for me. She told me she loved me.

There was only one time, a few years later, that we meaningfully connected in person. We saw each other from afar in Stop & Shop. We smiled at each other across the produce, but didn’t say a word. After I had checked out and was packing bags into my car, I felt a hand on my back, and it was Tara. We hugged for a good long time, then I tried to let go, but Tara just held on tightly.

We caught up on our lives, there in the parking lot. My oldest was heading to college in the fall, and her oldest was getting close to applying. She bemoaned with all her work travel, she was so far behind on the college planning process. Of course for the old me, that was a trigger: I can help with that! The emails back and forth resumed. Amy to the rescue.

I was in the midst of a hectic time, in the final planning for our organization’s big annual event. She knew all about it, and told me how proud she was of me for dreaming up an event that had started in its first year with forty people, and now reached thousands of women across the country. I asked if she wanted to come, and then immediately wanted to take it back, but she jumped at the opportunity, Wouldn’t miss it for the world!

There I was in the final weeks of planning a major event in New York City, streamed to fifty locations around the country, and all the logistics that went with it, yet all I could think about was Tara. I was so desperate to impress her, inventing a fantasy that when she witnessed such a grand success, I could win her back. I even shopped to find just the right dress and accessories.

When the day came, I felt uncharacteristically like a bag of nerves: not for the event itself, but because it was a show for Tara, and I wanted everything to go perfectly. I got there early to set up, and greeted our celebrity panelists. I warmly welcomed the scores of attendees as they arrived, hugging my many friends, classmates, and colleagues who showed up in support. But all I could think about was Tara. I was surreptitiously looking over every shoulder, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. Then she walked in, and I had that same feeling of my heart stopping, and needing to catch my breath. She waved from across the room, came over, and we embraced. I clung tightly to hope.

After the event, she came over to say goodbye to me before heading back to work. I was surrounded by attendees, with a line waiting, so we waved, and I mouthed, Thank you! A couple of hours later, she emailed to congratulate me on such a successful event. Of course you were in your element today! Wow! Thanks for sharing this moment with me. I thanked her for coming and being part of the event. I couldn’t resist asking, Before we go our separate ways again, has anything changed on the homefront? Are you okay? She bemoaned, no nothing had really changed. She was okay and hoped I was too.

I thought to myself, What are you doing?! Did I really expect anything to be different this time? I felt incredibly stupid for having invited her, and allowing myself to get wrapped up in her again, and then predictably let down. That night, instead of celebrating an amazing event that benefited thousands of young women, I scolded myself for repeating this pattern.

I wrote an email to myself,
Promise...promise...promise...
Never again
Don't do it!!!!!!############

That was our final in person connection. Yet my heart was still stuck on the fantasy that we would be together someday.

One thing that made it so hard for me to let go was that Tara wasn’t letting go either. Other than letting me down, she was never overtly mean to me. There were times I wished she would just be nasty so I could hate her! It would be so much easier! But she never was. At most, she was thoughtless, insecure, and limited. When we interacted, she would tell me, I will always be cheering you on! or So proud of you for my work or community involvement. When I reached the milestone of having a book in print, she messaged, The List is a really big deal! I told you that you were going to change the world! Ugh, it hurts to even read these words now.

It also didn’t help that we lived close by. This made it unavoidable for us to run into each other now and then, although as the years moved on, this happened less and less frequently. I harbored the fantasy that one night she would fulfill her once promise, and just show up at my door! How many times she had shared her desire to come to my house after commuting back on the train, It feels like home. The commonality of being two Westchester, professional moms, and our proximity fed into a fantasy that allowed me to continue to hold on tight.

I worked hard in therapy on emotionally leaving the scene. My therapist told me, repeatedly: Tara will never leave! When that didn’t sink in, she told me the fact that Tara was staying meant she wasn’t a match for me. I got all this intellectually, in my head, but my heart and instinct said otherwise. I held on to the hope. Maybe when her older child leaves for college? Or when both children are gone? Or maybe a life changing or work-related event might jolt her and give her the courage to follow through?

Meanwhile, I continued dating, including some of the great women you’ve been reading about, or will soon. None of them really had a chance. I’m not a non-monogamous person: I love with all of me. As much as I pretended otherwise, Tara still had my heart, and dating other women felt like play-acting to pass the time until she would finally pull it off. After every meaningful, and not so meaningful, ending, when I didn’t have a woman to focus on, I reverted to full focus on the faux safety of an eventual lifetime together, Tara and me.

They say it takes a village, and the voice that added to my work in therapy, and finally pushed me to the otherside, was a famous astrologer. I had never had my cards read before, but Jessica, who followed my work with The Weekly List, reached out and offered to read mine. While other topics came up, including Arleen (the dog) trying to interject herself and lying about her age (she says she’s 12, not 14), I really only wanted to speak to her about love: Will I ever find my life partner? Have I met her already?

The astrologer saw Tara. She told me you are both in love with each other, and that Tara isn’t bisexual, she is gay (or more precisely: she is so gay!). This was a validation of sorts of why I felt hopeful. She also disagreed with my therapist, and said my instinct was right: Tara might eventually leave, it was unclear. All these things seemed promising, and what I dreamed of, but then came the kicker: if Tara does leave, she would disappoint you, and that’s why you should walk away. These words were a shocking, but obvious, statement, and they shook me to the core.

Things are so easy to see as a reader or in retrospect: Tara would never be a fit for me as a life partner. I am a person who always does what is required when the chips are down. I might even be brave to a fault, but I always show up at the scene. Tara had the capacity to be that person too—I could see that—but what confounded my brain was she chose not to be. She was like those rocks in California: they look like rocks, but when you pick them up, they crumble into dust. The fantasy I had constructed of Tara was an illusion. I needed to understand that she would never be a viable life partner for me.

A woman who could be my partner, would be brave enough to live as her authentic self. Coming out as gay in the 1980s, when Tara first had girlfriends in college, was an act of courage and perilous—the country was largely unaccepting of LGBT people. In the 1990s and into the millennium when I came out, there was still a high cost to coming out, both personally and professionally. As we approached 2020, there was almost no cost to coming out as an adult. In most of the country, including where we lived, it was zeitgeist; still, Tara did not choose it. She chose to live a small, limited, straight lie version of her life.

The first part of the process was grieving. I hadn’t fully processed the hurt. I needed to let in the pain to my heart, not just my head, and sit with the emotion of grief. I sat with these thoughts and the hurt for weeks. I allowed in the messiness and vulnerability of having let myself get drawn into this situation, and staying attached to the fantasy of her for so long. I started the process of forgiving myself. As I did, Tara started to appear differently in my mind’s eye. I started to truly see her. I had so much invested in the fantasy I had created of having manifested her at just the right moment, and us living happily ever after. Now I saw a person who lacked emotional intelligence, and would never be capable of meeting my needs on a soul or core foundational level. I grieved this realization.

My next step was a writing exercise. Those of you who know me through The Weekly List project might think I have a fetish for lists, but just the opposite. I am not a person who keeps lists of things in her life, except the occasional one for the supermarket, which more often than not, I end up leaving on the kitchen counter. The Trump project was really about my quest to preserve the truth. The astrologer told me I was obsessed with the truth, your whole life you walk into fire for the truth. She gave me an exercise that would reveal the truth, and grant me a sense of agency and control—for the first time, to write it all down.

I took this exercise incredibly seriously. It felt as if it had great weight, and at the same time could be what liberated me. I was very particular about finding just the right notebook for the task. I went to every shop in the area that sold journals, carefully inspecting their inventory for just the right one. I found it at the fourth store:  a journal with a red cover with small pink dots at the bottom of the cover that crept upward, but faded into the page by mid-cover. That was the work. To let the words tell the story that would allow the fantasy to dissipate.

That night, I made myself a cup of tea, found a couple of hours of quiet time, and took out my new notebook. I made notes for myself about observations from my therapist, astrologer, and my own discoveries in recent weeks. Then I turned the page, and on two pages facing each other, set up on one side, What is it that I feel about her? (hopes, fears); and on the other page, What is it that I know about her? (evidence). The truths came out of me as if they had been held captive and could finally escape!

The list on the first page were the stories I had been telling myself: love of my life, could take care of each other, dying to make love to her, two Westchester moms, easy to get along with. Then I started the second list, which quickly grew from one to two pages. I was ashamed to admit that I had hid these items from myself: would I get bored of her?, spiteful, manipulative, very insecure, put me in danger with her unstable husband, left her kids with volatile husband and escaped on business trips, erratic, limited, wasn’t there when I needed her, canceled on me, couldn’t follow through, immature, stuck.  

For the coming weeks, I kept reading my lists, and adding to it. The list of what I know about her continued to expand—the evidence of my lived experience. It stood in sharp contrast to the fulsome version I had created of the woman I was waiting for. That woman would never arrive, because she didn’t exist. The fantasy story I had built around her and an eventual us was full of holes, and now the truth was pouring out through them. 

This exercise was a life changer for me. It didn’t happen right away: I still thought about Tara now and then when I was single, or when there was major news, good or bad. When I did, I saw a holistic version of her, in which she wasn’t a fantasy woman living some extraordinary life, but rather a limited, fearful woman who had confined her life to a small, straight world. I gradually stopped looking for her car in parking lots. I gradually stopped yearning to hear from her as validation of my accomplishments.

Soon, Tara wasn’t my default placeholder at all. For a bit it was a famous supermodel, then it was no one at all. Now, when I don’t have a woman to focus on, I focus on other parts of my life, and remind myself to create time, space, and opportunities to meet women. I don’t look backwards! When I refer in stories to the necessity of living through pain and hurt, this is a prime example of coming out on the other side, and learning to do things differently and better.

I want to leave this series by telling you all, getting to the other side is possible. So many of you—straight and gay—have reached out to me in reaction to this series on heartbreak, to share your stories and struggles. I see you all, and am sending you each a virtual, embracing hug, and letting you know, you are not alone. I am also writing this series as a testament to what is possible. I wouldn’t change a thing: I would make the same mistake again, fall deeply in love, have my heart broken, grieve and lift myself out, and learn from the process. I remain Amy the optimist, resilient and hopeful that I will meet my life partner, but now more informed and better equipped to make smarter choices.

To close out this series, next week I am going to do a podcast, rather than written words. I think it might be impactful to hear more thoughts, this time in the form of spoken words. I want to share not only what I learned from this experience, but also the process of writing these four stories. Even now, as I revisited emails and reconstructed old stories, the pain and hurt could still seep in—it was palpable! Yet, the exercise of putting words onto paper has also been a new source of healing and understanding. And I want to tell you all about it!

Until then, please don’t give up. She is just around the corner. Believe!