Andrew the counsellor asked me to think about who I am, between one session and the next. I was really stuck, to the point of crying fits about the fact that I don't/didn't know who I was. It was already a stressful time for me anyway with a lot going on in my day to day life, and so, not a particularly healthy time for an identity crisis. With help from Nate and Nate, however, we worked out a strategy as to what I would do to get a hold of the answer to the question: who is Ami?
Start with who is Ami, who are the different Ami's in the life of me.
I am David's fiancee
I love him and want to be with him for the rest of our lives, and it frightens me sometimes that might not be as long as I need or want. I'm terrified that he'll go first because of the grief I would feel at losing him, what the process would be like, the day to day of getting used to life without him. He plays a large and central role in my life as him who needs me. I help him in lots of ways, in many ways he can be quite ill-equipped or ill-suited to the larger world. So I do some work as his go-between, his translator. I help him cope with things, sometimes he surprises me though with what he can handle. That makes me proud and also somewhat ashamed of not knowing already that he could. So I'm sad if I go first, especially if I already knew I was going, the thought of saying good-bye or trying to get ready for it horrifies me, but I also think he'd manage. I wouldn't be in a position to worry any more, I would hope, this is a reason that the notion of the afterlife terrifies me so -- watching him grieve for me rends my heart. In our day to day lives, Dave and I get on well, though we're quite different personalities to eachother. His head rules his heart most of the time, he understands the world through reasoning and logic and systems. I feel like I don't do that, that I can see where he's coming from with that, but that I chiefly understand the world through emotions and my imagination of what people (all me, really, I guess) would think and feel. So that's different to how I think Dave understands the world. I feel that he doesn't see things the way I do -- he says 'that doesn't make sense because ...' and lists logical, reasoned steps, where I would say "But why would someone who ... do that' listing thoughts or motivations. I feel I see the world on a personal, human level and he sees it on a conceptual level.
In terms of our relationship, another thing is that we're always making sure that we communicate with each other, we will go through times when rather than communication that we need and love, we take on the roles of carer and supporter rather than partner and lover. But then we'll work together to bring us back to reconnecting on that ideas, feelings, philosophy level. This happened last Tuesday (sometime before 28/2), I think recently because of how things have been between me and Mike and how things have been with me, I'd not been connecting with Dave emotionally. But we've reconnected and now that I've been able to sort things out by talking to Nate (debriefing) for what happened with Mike, I think that I'll be able to sort things with David, to be able to talk to him emotionally again. I love him, I'm so fascinated by him because he's so different and but also he can not always follow what I'm saying but I can tell that he's interested and he never thinks that I'm a smartass or know all, he always says he wants to hear what I have to say and he always likes to hear more information.
I'm an information junkie, so, while he frustrates me with his questions sometimes, I love that he wants to know everything, just like me. The other thing is that, like me, he doesn't make judgements about people. Though in his case, I think it's lack of capacity, while, for me, it's something I fight with, something I deliberately avoid because I have so much sympathy for everyone's plight. I would say that I'm somebody who can feel or think about feeling or imagine what other people are thinking or feeling, though David always surprises me so much that it makes me realise I don't have 100% insight. He helps me to stay grounded and not drive myself in to the ground observing or trying to read people's minds.
One thing about my David, and our relationship, that is vital, is that neither of us really 'do' jealousy. That which builds our trust and relationship is not some standard of conduct, where one isn't to see a lot of other people, or talk to them, it's not built on our relationships as two individuals. That which builds our relationship is based on conduct and a relationship and a shared effort based on who we are as a couple, not as two individuals. So we work together on things that affect our relationship, in a way that we each seem to see as quite separate from work we do on ourselves. That which binds us is communication, plain and simple, as if the daily task of actually sharing and communicating with another human being might ever be called simple.
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