The Break-Up

As you can tell from the title of this post, it's about a break-up.... its about my break-up. This is probably going to be one of the most personal post I have ever written. While not actually going into the details of the demise of this relationship, pointing fingers and trying to figure out what went wrong along the way. Who was wrong or who was right or whom broke up with whom. Just know there was miscommunication, hurt feelings, and misplaced anger. What I want to touch on is actually how I've be dealing with this break-up. Long story short..... not well. I've been so emotional I'm giving Whitney Houston and Carl Thomas a run for their money. There's been sleepless nights, which is how I know this shit is bad because nothing effects my damn sleep pattern. I go to bed around 11 or 12  and wake up at 6am, I never have a problem going to sleep or staying asleep. But here I am like Corrine Bailey Rae and I'm having trouble sleeping. I actually up writing this a 3:35 am..... this isn't me.

I haven't been me in like a week, I feel like I have taken on the life of someone else. Someone who has been listen to Mary J Blige's My Life CD on repeat for days on end. This past weekend I barely left my house. I spent hours laying on my bedroom floor listening to Sade, Carole King, and Melanie Fiona just looking at the ceiling and crying at times. Btw there's a lot of depressing ass music out there. Especially Solange's True EP, I think I have been come a fan of hers because track Somethings seem to never fucking work stayed on repeat..... who knew. I somehow seemed to find everyone of these songs. Especially Solange's True EP and add them to a playlist on Spotify  and titled it another sad love song. My diet consisted of potato chips, cake, and several bottles of red wine. Yes, I decided to become the definition of 808's and Heartbreaks and become a part-time resident of Heartbreak hotel. I do believe that this past weekend was one of the most depressing ones of my life. On Sunday night I tried my best to get my Brain McKnight on and give this thing One Last Cry. That was a fail because on Monday morning I still felt the same way. Did I have this or am I still having this mental collapse on purpose? I really have know fucking clue. 

What I do know is that, part of the reason I'm on Adele/Drake level of being into my feelings. Is that I have really shared this break-up or feelings of lost with anyone not my friends here in Chicago or back home. I'm basically doing what Mariah Carey said in Breakdown. 

Friends ask me how I feel

And I lie convincingly
Cause I don't want to reveal
The fact that I'm suffering
So I wear my disguise
Till I go home at night
And turn down all the lights
And then I break down and cry.

Yup that's exactly what I'm doing..... I'm suffering in silence because we all know real G's move in silence. Well I guess I won't be when people read this but why am I choosing to go through this alone?... idk. Maybe because I'm stubborn, prideful, or I just don't want folks to know how far gone I got of over a boy. How caught up in the rapture I got with him or just explaining what did or didn't happen between us. This is basically being prideful. Think I said this before on this blog but I don't get serious with guys a lot. I'll date a guy and before it gets too serious I'll let shit fall apart. I never allow myself to really get to into a guy. Yeah I may like a guy but I'll like him like I like pizza. Meaning that I like pizza but I don't need pizza in my life everyday, it's not a necessity like red wine. It's my defense mechanism, its my way of keeping men from getting to close and from me getting hurt. 

Welp I kind liked this guy like red wine and not pizza this time around and now I'm feeling like Carrie did when Big left her at the alter in Sex and The City. You remember how crazy she looked after that.... yeah that's been me for the past few days. 

So now I feel like an idiot and I'm just not ready to show anyone that side of me right now.... not even my Mama. I just want to sit around and watch Law and Order marathons and drink myself into 2013. Not that I think anyone of my friends would judge me or not be supportive..... I'm just going through the motions and right I don't want to drag anyone else into. I know that break-ups are apart of life, they happen to everyone at some point and feeling the way I have been for the past couple days is okay. It happens to even the best of us but I'm not okay feeling this way. So dear friends if I'm even more sporadic on this blog, this is why I'm way too deep into my feelings right now. I know I'll be okay eventually but it just won't be today.

Sweet Talk

I've never been good at schmoozing or kissing people's ass .... It's just not in me. I finding it exhausting and quite frankly annoying. I have always been the type to tell people, well let me rephrase that not people in general. It's more like the people I know... how I really feel about things. Back home it's called real talk no flex. I'm not that great at sugar coating things to people over the age of 12. I realized that the same loose lip way I talk with my friends is the same way I talk with people that aren't my friends... well at least to a certain degree. At work I'm definitely not in my real talk no flex mode... I am professional. What I'm trying to get at is I can't talk to certain people in the same manner I talk to my friends. What certain people am I talking about? Well boys, dudes I'm dating. This fact became very apparent over this past weekend.

See the way me and my friends talk amongst ourselves is like the uncut version of Sex & the City or something. It's very raw, real and unfiltered (real talk no flex). Actually I don't talk like this with all my friends, just a certain number of them. Because the other ones... well they just ain't about that life and that's cool.  Everything ain't for everybody. Anyway back to the ones that we talk to each other like we don't like each other... it's just the nature of our relationship. We curse like sailors and drink like fish. We objectify men, it's wild and reckless talk. That's cute for us but I have learnt its not so cute for others especially some the men in our my life. Let me be clear that I'm not going around talking crazy to the guys I'm dating.... I'm not going around telling them they ain't shit but a piece of dick or anything like that. No absolutely not. None of that is  going on. What I'm talking about is not exactly giving them that sweet talk... not putting a filter on my thoughts. Saying things I probably shouldn't be saying to them or I should say but in a nicer way. 

This occurred to me when the guy I'm somewhat dating said I was mean. After I gave him this face 😱 he cleaned up what he said by saying I just say things at times with no thought on how the other person may feel. I just talk with zero fucks given. I never thought about it that way... I'm not saying he was exactly right but he had a point. I can't talk to certain people the same way I talk to my friends... some people can't handle that type of shit. After talking to one of my friends she pointed out with people/men you have stroke their ego and give them that sweet talk. There has to be a balance, you can't always be all brass and sassy. That when I say certain things they (my friends) know I mean no harm and I'm talking shit but others don't always see it that way. Well I certainly see that now after a comment I made got blown way out of proportion by the guy I'm kinda dating. I meant no harm but boy did he take it as a fowl. So know I'm trying to embrace some of that sweet talk and leaving the real talk no flex for my friends.

There's No Crying In Baseball

You know some people are just criers and that’s perfectly ok. I place no judgment on them for that, sometimes the simplest things (that’s what most people think) can set them off and they proceed to cry you a river. I have friends that are easy criers, sometimes their cries don’t always indicate they’re sad or they have a serious problem. It’s just their release mechanism, everyone’s release or coping mechanism is different. Some people rage against the machine, some drink themselves into a drunken stupor, others take a nap, and some just cry about. I think I’m a combo of all those things, I been known to have my One Last Cry like Brian McKnight and they proceed to drink some wine and take my ass to bed. Please believe I’m not above crying about any damn thing. But what I refuse to do is cry at work. Let me re-phrase that, I refuse to cry in front of people at work because I have cried at work (like 3 weeks ago when I found out my dog died).

I’ve cried at plenty of times at work it’s just in the privacy of my car or the good old bathroom stall of the women’s restroom. See every time I’ve seen someone cry at work in front of people…. Well the shit is just terrible. Terrible I say!!  First if you’re crying at work people are going to gather around like they are witnessing the birth of Christ and ask what’s wrong. So there you are snotty nosed, puffed eyed, and red faced… just a hot mess and now you have to explain to people (1/2 of them you don’t like) what the fuck your problem is. If it’s non-work related people are going to be more sympathetic towards you but if your ass is cry because your supervisor chewed your ass out in the 9:00am meeting and you go to your desk at 9:30am crying….. People aren’t going to be so understanding. It doesn’t matter if you’re a male or female and if some gives you a tissue or not.  They’re all thinking what the hell is wrong with this bitchass. You will be ever and a damn day be labeled as well for lack of a better word a crybaby. Women you already know office politics are harder on us, is it fair no but life isn’t fair. So if you start going up in your place of employment crying like someone stole your bike, you will be JUDGED and labeled. People are going to throw your ass into the emotional, unstable, and difficult to work with category. People will avoid doing things to set you off…. It just becomes this all around nuisance. I know from first-hand experience how crying at work is just not the move you want to make.

At the time I was working at my after school job while I was in high school. I worked at a local grocery store chain in the Southeast region of the country. As Monica would’ve said “It was just one of those days where I wanted to be all alone” Now I can remember exactly why I was so upset that day. I believed  I had a shitty day at school, I want to say I got a not so good grade on my physics test, I’m sure something about a boy was bothering me as well, my mom had pissed me off, and I quite possibly could’ve been on my period.  Anyway I get to work, I was a cashier there. Now I distantly remember Simply Red’s Holding Back the Tears playing over the loud speaker at the store .My boss says something to me I have no idea what, but I was standing next to one of the bag boys and after whatever the fuck my boss said to me I burst into tears. Now I stand firm in my conviction in that Simply Red’s Hold Back the Tears is the saddest and most emotionally turbulent song ever written. I think hearing that song sent me over the edge and the waterworks ensued.  Yeah it was pretty bad, so bad in fact my boss sent me home for the day. Not in a bad I was suspended from work way but in a; you’re clearly going through some shit and you need to go lay down or something kind of way.  However before I went home I was bombarded with a 100 questions about what was wrong with me, and I couldn’t answer any of them because there was nothing really wrong with me to be crying like Trey from Boyz in the Hood after Ricky was shot. So that made me cry even more…smh. While I was weeping like a baby, I heard the bag boy say “well damn I’ll go get the buggies from outside, there’s no need to cry”. So there started the rumor around the store from that day until the day I quit was that I was crying and Waiting to Exhale because I didn’t want to get the buggies from outside. That was SOO not the case but it didn’t matter that’s what people thought. So whenever something went down at work, people would say don’t upset her, you know she’s sensitive, you’re not gonna cry about are you? So learn from my mistake at 17 don’t ever cry at work unless somebody has died or something. You better do it like Samantha Jones from Sex and the City and hold your composure until you get to the elevator.

The Quarter Life Crisis

I think I'm at he tail-end  of a quarter life crisis, even though I'm a few years over 25. This all started last year when I decided that I longer like my 9-5 and the city I live in. I started to feel for a lack of a better word restless. I just kept saying to myself there has to be more to life than what I'm doing. Going out to whatever hot or lukewarm spot in Atlanta and buying vodka tonics, just wasn't the business. I was tried of doing the same things and going to places, I realized that what I was doing was definitely not what I thought I would be doing after graduation. I thought I would have this bangin' ass job and living in a super fancy loft in a high-rise. My nights would be full clubs, drinks, and friends. I would be the black Carrie Bradshaw.

Well that isn't life as I know it to be. I have a job it definitely isn't one I would call bangin, but it pays the bills most of the time. No super fancy loft and my life resembles more an episode of Golden Girls than that of Sex and The City. Boy as much as I love that show, it really effed up my outlook of life for awhile but that's another post by itself.  I started to question myself like what is your life about? Is this really what my life is about? Waking up at 6:00am working for 8 hours and then coming home to watch whatever reality show was on tv, drinking wine and doing it all over the next day. It was like that movie Groundhog day, like I said before this just couldn't be life.

I wouldn't say I was depressed in anyway I was just in a funk and a little disappointed in myself. I felt like I just wasn't living up to my potential. Something like the way Kelly Rowland must feel. You know she has all the right elements there to blow up but no damn match to light that fire. She could be great but something just ain't working for her, really why can't she be great? Then she has to look at Beyonce soaring out of the atmosphere, when they where initially kinda in the same spot and she has yet to take off. Who in their right mind wants that feeling? Not I said the cat.

So instead of focusing time and energy on what happened to my life, I have decided to be great, only I have the power to change my life for the better. I not going to wave my white flag and let this complacent life I created get the best of me. I will not be a Kelly Rowland (I like Kelly, I just want her star to shine a little brighter) I'm Beyoncing out this little life of mine. The real challenge is exactly how I'm going to do that? Do I go back to school, change careers and become the makeup artist I really want to be. Idk but sitting around and waiting for something epic to happen has never worked for anybody. So to anybody who wants come along on this ride,  I'm saying all aboard. Its time to stop be ordinary and become extraordinary.