Weight down this morning, so that is good.

I am writing, and writing always makes me introspective.  Even when I am writing things that have little personal relevance, like grant proposals.  (oh the horror)

D has many ex-girlfriends.  Some of them are my friends too.

He told me about one of them (he's told me about many of them, but this is the one that stands out to me).  I know this girl.  We went through school together, not as close friends, but generally within the same groups of friends.  She's beautiful and kind.  D mentioned the relationship in passing, saying it was short and that the break-up was amicable.

Her version is different.  I've read her blog (*sigh* I know, stalker.  In my defense, I started reading it because she posted a link on FB and I wondered how she was doing since graduation.  I always read blogs back to the beginning.  If I am following you, I have read your blog back to the beginning too.  It didn't cross my mind that things about D might be in there until I was almost halfway through...and realized she'd been keeping the blog since freshman year of college.  And then of course I had to read back to then.  I like knowledge and I like knowing things about people.  I don't do anything with that knowledge, I just like to know.  I'm always intensely curious how other people work, because it seems to be so different from how my brain works).

Anyway.  After they broke up, she had mixed feelings for a long while.  Much longer than D did, I am sure.  He seems to be able to slip from boyfriend status to friend status incredibly quickly.  Were I to be ungenerous, I would say it's because he doesn't let romantic relationships affect him strongly.

This is from months after they broke up:

My ex-boyfriend asked yesterday if I felt like a bit part in my group of friends. I stared at him, almost dumbfounded. But I realized he wasn't asking me. He wanted to talk about himself. Since I've been back I've felt distant from him, unable to muster the same depth of feeling I had before (although feeling in general has been difficult). He is a wonderful, interesting person. I do love him (platonically), but he frustrates me so much. To him I am eternally the listener. I play that role. I can rarely break out. I resent him because I feel that I give and have given as much as I dared to him and have not felt much in return. I have confided him spiritually, personally, I've given him my poems, I do his laundry, I try to include him in what I do, I seek him out. To him I'm just another girl, just another friend, just another person. 

And this is what I wonder.  Am I just another girl?

I'm certainly not his listener, though I wish I were.

I think D's tendency to give people roles (and he does this, most definitely.  Though to be fair I don't think he realizes it) creates problems in our relationship.  When things were good, everything was good.  Bad days didn't bother him because, as he once told me, "I will still love you on bad days."

And now he has decided that things are bad and hopeless and I feel that anything I do or say gets re-interpreted to fit into this cognitive world-view.  I'm having a great day and babbling about things that go on in my life?  Well, it's just surface conversation, meaningless, things that I would say to anyone.  (Though of course that isn't true.  I very rarely tell anyone at all details about my life.  Except for D.  What he interprets as idle chatter is actually something that most others do not hear.)  I'm having a bad day and stressed and cranky and insecure?  Well, then I am always down and no matter what he does he cannot make me happy.  (Which is also not true.  He makes me happy by just being with me.)  No matter what I do/say, I lose.

"If you expect us to fail, we will!" I tell him.  He tells me that he would like to be proven wrong, but that the probability of us not working is much higher than the probability that this relationship will last.

I understand what you are saying, D.  I understand that probability is against us.  But I need you to believe that we have a chance!  Otherwise, what is the point of even trying?

I read through some of our old skype conversations and the cute-ness and mushy-ness of some of his comments are unbearable.  There are significantly fewer instances of these interactions in more recent conversations.  Even when I am teasing and saying essentially the same things that provoked adoring comments before.

How do you change someone's worldview?  How do I get us back to where we were?  Or make us something better?

Re-interpret me, D.  I am still the girl you fell in love with.  But I am not just that girl anymore.  I am so much more.  Don't let me stagnate in your head.  Update the image, refresh the website.  I am a different person each day.