Shame Train

I have a lot to sort out...  so, I'll warn you:  This post is likely to be a mess.

I spent Tuesday night, Wednesday night and most of the day Thursday with my ex-boyfriend from college...  and it has thrown me for a loop and then some.  I feel like the train of my past derailed right into my face, and I am having a difficult time piecing it all back together.

I feel like I need to lay out the background...   create a foundation so that I can reassemble my feelings into something I can better grasp...   but, as I get older, my memory gets worse and worse.  I can feel that so completely right now.  So...  my dates and memories might be really off.  Still, I have to try.

Shannon was a bass player at MSU.  I had already dated his then "best friend" Jon, but it had been more than a year later.  It had to have been...  because I'd taken a semester off, prompting Jon to dump me, and had then come back for at least another semester before dating Shannon.  I know we started dating on April 22, 1995 because I have it written in a memory book I kept at the time (one Tom LOVES to tease me about all the time).  People thought we hooked up because I wanted to get back at Jon, but that simply wasn't true at all.  Shannon and I were sort of pushed together by fate...  and a horrible turn of events with mutual music school friends of ours.  We were in a very stressful situation together and...  turned to one another.

I was 20.  I was a kid.  I didn't have a great track record where relationships were concerned either.  I'd had a long relationship with my high school band director which was completely and utterly dysfunctional.  Then I dated Jon...  which was fine, I guess.  I mean, it wasn't stressful, we never fought...   but I clammed up with him physically and I'm fairly certain that is why we broke up...  that and taking the semester off.  He may have thought I'd gotten back together with my old band director, but that wasn't true either.  Who knows.  It's only speculation on that point.  Anyway...

My relationship with Shannon was pretty great, honestly.  And part of what has messed me up in the present is that I'd convinced myself, made up the story, that he was horrible to me...  although I do recall him calling me ugly names, but he was joking...    still inappropriate, but...  we were freaking kids.  I probably did it back.  I can't remember for sure.  I only remember that we were both horribly sarcastic and a lot of people found us both fairly obnoxious.

We spent the summer together in his home town.  It was a great summer.  I loved his family, and they loved me...  apparently even more than I'd realized at the time.  Shannon told me the other day that his brother Steve has always considered me his favorite of anyone Shannon has ever dated.  So sweet, really...   can't believe that.  The only struggle we seemed to have was that I wanted sex a LOT more than he did.

I'd actually forgotten that, really...   how I practically begged him for physical attention.  I now remember how awful it made me feel.  How unwanted.  Maybe that was what started my story...   that he was unkind to me...   maybe that was the impetus for creating a negative picture of him.  Maybe.

By the end of the summer, it seemed like we were heading way too fast into something permanent.  Maybe it was the ring he gave me for my 21st birthday...  or maybe it was his sister-in-law asking when we were going to get married and start having babies.  Who knows.  I just know I started freaking out...  and shutting down.

Fall semester brought my new best friend Jill to MSU.  We got super close super fast...  and she didn't like Shannon at all.  I'm not blaming anything on her, mind you...   I was clearly already looking for a way out...  but when she said he was abusive, that he was mean to me, that his playful jabs (both verbal and physical) were totally inappropriate...  I allowed myself to believe her without question.  And by Thanksgiving, I dumped Shannon.

I can see now that he'd had no warning.  I hated confrontation and, although we did have our arguments, I never let on that anything was truly wrong or that I had misgivings about being with him.  All of a sudden, I just ended it.

And I became Bitch #1 at MSU's music school.

Of course, I wrapped myself in defensiveness and in the story that he was awful.  I vilified him, honestly.  But I didn't see that clearly at the time.  I thought I was justified.  I was hurt when friends took his side.

Kati, a mutual friend of ours, told me that I destroyed Shannon.  He boyfriend and Shannon's close friend Carl wouldn't even look at me.  Shannon sent Justin, one of the other bass players, to get me out of my practice room one day and to get my stuff out of his practice room...  all the things I'd left at his house (toothbrush, clothes, whatever it was, I can't remember).  I just remember how horribly his friend treated me...   gave me a message supposedly directly from Shannon saying, "Tell that bitch to get her shit out of my practice room and leave me the fuck alone."  Instead of thinking maybe I WAS being a bitch, I just chalked it up as par to Shannon's abusive course.

I didn't believe any of these people.  I just thought they were being defensive of their friend, which I thought was almost admirable in a way, if not simply understandable.  I never stopped being defensive myself long enough to consider what they were saying/doing...   the mirrors they were holding up for me.

In fact, I completely put all of it out of my mind for the last 16 years...   except to list him as an abusive boyfriend I once had in college.  Yes.  I did that.  I've told countless people over the years that I once had a horrible boyfriend who called me degrading names and even hit me a little too hard sometimes.  (He did...  he once punched my arm so hard in Landon Hall's dining room that I got a charlie horse...  I'll never forget the look on Jill's face when he did that.  He kind of laughed it off...   and I knew he didn't mean it, that he was kind of joking...   but...   you know?!  I let it solidify my abuse story, that's for sure.  But he wasn't giving me black eyes or pushing me down the stairs.)

Shannon left MSU very soon after we broke up.  I knew he went to Vanderbilt to study with Edgar Meyer, and felt even more justified in dumping him as I had.  We never spoke again...   until the magic of Facebook brought us back into one another's lives.

And into my living room this week.

We didn't talk a lot about the past...   but we did touch on our breakup a couple of times...   enough to really throw me off balance.

Remember when Kati said I'd destroyed him?  I guess, in may ways, I really had.  She wasn't being dramatic.  He said my breaking up with him changed his entire life...  prompted him to leave MSU, to not be able to date again for many years, to just not care about anything at all for over a year...

He had actually been in love with me.  And hearing him say that...  killed me.  Because it made me remember the truth...  that I had loved him too...  and that I'd sabotaged it all because I couldn't believe that I deserved to be happy, to be loved, to have a real future with someone.

It's part of the story I told myself about my dad...  that no man could ever really love me or care about me.  Shannon fell victim to that story in a huge way.  I changed his whole world with it.

He's in a great place now.  He's an incredibly successful musician...  in fact, one of the most successful bass players in the country.  He turned his pain into amazing things...  practicing, studying, following his dreams.  And he was so...    sweet and grateful and...   gracious about all of it.

There is so much more here...  so many more little details.  I wish I could sort it all out...  I'm just such a mess...  taken so much aback by all of it.  I am struggling to turn my guilt into something better, more productive.  I'm having a hard time not beating myself up for being such a selfish jerk to him...   for making up this defensive story about all of it and carrying it around with me for the last decade and a half.  I'm seeing all of the ripples of my actions...   both good and bad...   and learning new things about my own past that are hard to swallow.

I see our mutual friends in a different light, too.  I can accept how they saw me now...   how there was so much truth to their judgment...    but I also have to not accept their judgment, you know?!  It's hard...   paradoxical.

I feel so much weight.  Feel so heavy-hearted.  I want to feel it all the way and not miss a single lesson here, but...   I also want to be good to myself and not take on more than my share.

Where is the line?

How do I accept responsibility without taking on the shame?