Thinking time

I went and spent a weekend at with my sister in country New South Wales. It was nice. Before I went up to see her I "outed" myself and my husband and she took that quite well. She was concerned for me and was worried that I'd hurt myself, my marriage or my husband. We talked things through and she is attempting to understand... but it cool about it all.

I spend a few days on my own as my sister was unable to take all the time that I was with her off from work. So I spent that time thinking things through... attempting to understand how I felt about the other man and my cessation of pursuing him.

I think in summary I feel

• sad that something which I believe would work so well has been denied
• angry that he wouldn't effectively communicate with me so I didn't know what he wanted/thought in relation to it all
• angry that I had put myself through so much pain
• sad and a feeling of loss that I couldn't convince him to give it a try

Some feelings I just sat with for a while and let pass... they didn't need to be named or investigated, just felt and farewelled.

And in other news, I also outed myself to another sister and her husband tonight. She took it very well and her husband was quite shocked... but not in a bad way. He had to rapidly adjust his world view of me... I like doing that to people at times.

Failure is not an option I take

I seem to have an aversion to failure. This means that when people tell me that I should accept myself not being able to do something the first time, such as distancing myself from my almost other man, I don't understand it. "Be prepared to fail," a girlfriend said to me. I can't do that... if I failed then I'm not achieving what I've set out to do.

Getting something wrong that I've never ever done before, such as... writing a computer program in perl say, is acceptable. I've never written one, I don't yet have those skills. I can fail there... but as far as allowing myself the luxury of failing in personal behavior goals I've set myself, now that is just not going to happen.

I've noticed that I've still prepared myself a list of "I shall nots"and not the corresponding "I shall or I cans".... I'll go back to the beginning of the story.

On Thursday morning, at some evil evil - should be non existent time - I got up to travel to Canberra for work. I bumped into him in the lobby of the office, quite by accident, and he told me that I needed to travel to the other office as room for the project I was working on was available there. I took my bags and traveled out to the other office. I worked and then for lunch I returned to the main office building. I met up with some other colleagues and we lunched in the shopping mall near work. Again I bumped into him and he joined us for work. We bitched about office politics and crappy systems design and then I returned to the office I was working in. At the end of the day I returned to the main office to travel to my dwelling for the night - his house in his spare bedroom.

I put my stuff in the spare room and then came out and realised that I should give him a hug. We hugged... long and well. I thought he didn't want to let me go. We played some scrabble, chatted about things, ate food and then I went to bed after my early morning.

For the whole trip I had to keep reminding myself that I could undertake some actions, that I wasn't punishing myself or him for my decision. I had to remind myself that I could hold his hand while driving or while we were away from the workplace. It was kinda odd for me.

I'm still feeling this out. I'm too stubborn to let myself fall back into the trap of hurting myself, and I know I need to sit down and find what boudaries I am happy with. It will take time, and I have that time to spend, so I am not upset about that.

I probably won't see him again until some time in December. So I'll wait and see what happens, if anything, and how I feel about things.