Weekend Onesie: So This Is Love?

Weekend Onesie: 

So This Is Love?

Seeing this brought to mind a deeply flawed film from 1978. Based on the bestselling memoir of the same name, I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can starred, a then hot as a pistol, Jill Clayburgh portraying Emmy Award Winning documentarian Barbara Gordon on a downhill trajectory as her dependence on Valium increases.

At one point, her cocaine-addicted boyfriend bounds and gags her in a chair in an effort to control her emotional unraveling. It's a harrowing true story, but one which failed miserably as a film and at the box office. Still... images haunt.

The one great takeaway from the film is something Gordon's eventual therapist, as played by Dianne Wiest, offers up: "If you have to hurt yourself in order to get love, it isn't love you're getting."

That resonated with me at the time and I dragged it around with me for years as a I careened from doomed relationship to doomed relationship. I'm not sure where I learned to try to make the best of a bad situation - I think it may stem from my troubled relationship with my mother - but I always fought to make a relationship work, assuming all responsibility and magically thinking it was something that I could, indeed, fix. 

The folly involved? That's on me. 

Oh, I'd eventually wake up. But it always took me much too long. I'd leave the relationship having invested far too much emotional energy and having endured a great deal of self-induced psychological torture before finally walking away, feeling defeated, inept and unworthy of the very thing I sought. 

Growing up? Growing older? Great cures for all that. 

Now, I think back on all the times I tied myself to a chair in the hopes that love would stay - and I cringe. Oh, I think I probably enjoyed the drama - and, in a way, I think I still do - even at this distance. 

But, as Gloria Gaynor still sings... "I'm not that chained-up little person still in love with you."

And I never will be, again. 

Yes, I think it's safe to say I'm way on the other side of that particular brand of emotional sado masochism.

What I learned: the only thing you can ever 'fix' is yourself. You can't fix others. You can support them and help them - which means sometimes the best thing you can do for them is to leave them.

I'm fine being alone. Not that I am. But I am happy to be living in the skin I'm in. 

And I now know that the ties that bind should never be the kind that lash you to a chair.

Small victories, even this late in the game, are still victories. 

I am only too happy to take my wins where I find them.

 

Please take care of your fine selves. 

That person you see in the mirror every morning? 

That's the real love of your life!

- uptonking from Wonderland Burlesque

So This Is Love

(From Disney's Cinderella)

So This Is Love - The Cheetah Girls