Return of the Blog Part I

I've been out of touch for a few months.  Not just with this blog, but life in general.  I have a habit of isolating myself when things get to be too much.  It might be bad if I were just hiding under a rock.  Mostly I use it to slow things down.  I cut myself off from a lot of good stressors so that I have enough energy to separate and deal with the bad ones.  After that, I have some decompression time.  I'll have itemized ad dealt with most of the big things, and just need time to find focus again.  But the latest cycle is over and last week I finally started reaching out again.

You'll have noticed the "Part I"  in the title.  I though that since this is a blog about life and such, I'd separate some items out and explain them to you you a bit.

Part I - Love and Relationships
Part II - Health and Family
Part III - Career
Part IV - Goals and Career
Part V - A new Year

Once I've written the others, I'll try to remember to add links to the above.

Love and Relationships:

I broke up with Hunter almost two weeks ago.  At seven months, he was my second longest relationship.
After all the fighting we've done over the last few months, we managed to end things amicably.  I think we were both tired.  I baked vegan brownies to bribe him to stay my friend.  So far, that seems to be going ok.

My big problem was that it got to be exhausting to spend time with him.  Every time I'd talk to him, it was such an emotional toll, I'd lose the rest of the days productivity.  It would probably not have been that bad if I had a job to provide more structure to the rest of my life.  But I don't, so I work with what I've got.  In any case, I need to not feel like I'm the only one making effort for a relationship, and that was what things got down to.

I made a lot of exceptions in my priorities for Hunter.  Right from the beginning.  Things like time with my friends, or how long to wait to get physical, keeping it as an equal  partnership, and setting boundaries.  These are my rules and I set them for a reason.
The lesson I learned is that no matter how attractive someone is, or how much I love them or want things to work out - if I keep breaking my own rules, I won't be happy.

This relationship did give me more opportunity to explore than any previous relationship, and for that, I'm happy.  I don't think I'm going to keep up with most of that, but it is nice to feel like there are more options.

The other issue is that this is the first time I've had a relationship that could effect something else.  I volunteer with him for theater tech with a small company.  He's the tech director and I've been sort of main on lights.  But while we're still friends, it looks like that could continue to work out.  I'd really like it to.

Now I'm taking some time to reconnect with all of the friendships that I allowed to slip with the relationship drama.