Plan for the rest of the semester

I have one more packet of assignments due for this my last semester of grad school before I can get my Masters. My more-generous-than-I-deserve adviser let me scrap my previous project and start something new that I was feeling a bit more. She reacted pretty positively to that, though she does want me to do a fourth revision of my ten-minute play. Grumble. Ah, well, I should just be grateful. Now what I need to do is shoot to get a complete draft of the new play I started just to have a substantive piece to call my thesis. That is a TON of work to do in two weeks, but she basically wants me to just get a first draft into existence, one that works on my weaknesses and doesn't worry so much about the stuff I'm strong on. And I'd be pretty unhappy if I didn't have at least that out of a thesis semester. So I am not going to worry so much about plot, which she says I usually do very well with, probably because I spend so much time working them out. Instead I am going to work on keeping high-stakes conflict going in there, and working more subtext in. Thinking about it, it occurs to me that I tend to like writing conflicts where one person forces another person to talk about something they don't want to talk about. This can be interesting, and can lead to strong conflict, but as my teacher says, it usually results in a very unsubtle, nuance-free interaction. Everybody says exactly what they mean, exactly what they think the truth is. That can come off as heavy-handed. So I guess I should push myself to do something that's hard for me, something that my writing lacks. I'm still a bit nervous about how much I have to do, but at least I'm not as screwed as I thought I was. At least this way, I stand a chance of having a first draft that isn't complete garbage. 

Three months later

April 20th marked three months since my breakup with Jared. Things are slowly getting more okay. The place he held in my life have been filled with shocking ease with my own stuff, my work, my projects, my interests. He hasn't left that much of a hole in me. The single life suits me, and things are uniformly better without him.

Unfortunately, that hasn't soothed my feelings about the situation much yet. I am still so angry. Not constantly, not overwhelmingly, but it still hits me, sometimes hard enough that I can't think straight, that I break down in helpless sobbing fury. I have a history of frequent bad dreams, but these days whenever I have one it's about him, in which he always behaves in some way that hurts me and I have to seethe with impotent rage that there's nothing I can do about it. As I am fixated on in life, there are no consequences I can give him. None that he cares about anyway. I can't believe how cleanly he moved on from having me in his life. I guess I don't KNOW that he did, as I've avoided him as completely as possible, but from what very little I've heard he's just subbed his new girl into my place. A girl he's willing to put up with having to share in order to be with. The thought that I did so much for him and he doesn't even miss me kills me. What a waste of my life that I'll never get back. What a lot of pain I should never have had to bear. This is the part I'm having an extremely hard time getting over.

I wish I never met him. I've been wracking my brain to think of some way he enriched my life that balanced anything about how awfully he treated me, and I can't think of a damn thing. Not one damn thing that was worth the emotional torture, the constantly being used, the damn near sexual assault. And he's enough of a dick that I don't even think he's sorry about any of it. I've seen no indication. No regret, no apology, not even a bit of acknowledgement of anything he did. I know I gave him a pretty clear message that I didn't want to hear from him when I blocked or removed him on every possible communication form I could think of, but it still bothers me that he apparently has no remorse. I wasted all that time on a monster. It makes me sick.

I continue to avoid him like the plague. I feel better and function better when it's like he doesn't even exist. There was, I think, a near-miss at Festival of the Larps, but I didn't actually run into him. I worry a bit for the future-- I hate the idea that I'll have to choose between doing things I want to and having to see or be around him --but I don't think there's anything in the immediate future to concern me.

We'll see how things continue from here. I want to get to the point where he means absolutely nothing to me one way or the other. That is likely a very long time in coming, but I hope at least to get better and better as time goes on.