There’s a man I’ve been spending time with regularly this last week.  He’s Brazilian.  I met him the day after I moved to Ipanema.  I was coming home from dance lessons and was hungry, so I stopped at the burger shop right outside the metro station.  He was the only other customer in the place.  He asked where I was from and we got to talking.  His English is excellent.  We parted after about an hour and he asked for my phone number, which I gladly gave him, and we agreed to meet the next night.

It’s been such an enlightening experience, spending time with T.  People who know me know I don’t get involved in casual liaisons.  I’ve simply never enjoyed them.  I’ve tried, but to no avail.  I talked to an aunt about this recently – how I’ve never been able to simply enjoy spending time with a man I liked.  If long term commitment wasn’t both a possibility and a desire, I wanted nothing to do with any of it (with one exception – there’s always an exception).  Those times I tried to force myself to want something I didn’t want, I made myself miserable, and I’m sure I made the guys miserable, too.  I simply could not be in the moment – my mind was always in the future, and the present moment was a confusion.  This was true even in my committed relationships.

Not so this time.  I give much of the credit to T – he treats me like a human being, not a sex toy.  But, much more of it has to do with me – with becoming more my true self and less my false self.  Because, let’s face it – I’ve been incredibly false.  I bought in to every lie my culture foisted on me and perpetrated those falsehoods against myself and others thinking I was doing the “right” thing.  Becoming more my true self and less my false self means letting those falsehoods go and accepting the truths that rise up in their place.

One of those truths is that I really enjoy spending time with T, future or no future.  He’s very cerebral, like me, with many thoughts on many topics that I find interesting.  I like listening to him talk, learning about him, at least partially because learning about him also means learning about myself.  I like the feeling of his face close to mine when we kiss, and the way his hands caress my skin.

I was amazed at how easily I let this stranger into my life, at how open I am to him and with him with no expectations about what the next moment will bring.  I suppose one could chalk that up to the nature of being on holiday in a foreign country – I wouldn’t really know since this is the first time I’ve ever been single abroad.  Still, I remember how rigid I was, how resistant I was to the idea that I could have a meaningful connection with man with whom I saw no possibility of a future.  It’s new to me and it’s amazing.

And it lasted about a hot minute before my old insecurities started to creep in, threatening to ruin the beautiful space we’d created.  Our communications are all via text, and that’s pretty much limited to discussing logistics for our next date.  And I thought that was great – none of the needy, cloying texts insecure lovers send to one another to evoke a response to soothe (or justify) their fearful egos.  And then I found myself in that insecure role again, wondering whether the radio silence was meaningful, whether he might interpret my silence as meaning something it didn’t, feeling the need to reach out just to make pseudo-connection, concerned about sending the wrong message by not reaching out, what it meant that he didn’t respond w/in 5 minutes, etc.  I could feel his mental projections – which were only in my imagination – becoming more important to me than my own integrity – my own intentions and actions.  Unlike the past, though, I could see it happening in real time, so I could observe it – its causes and effects – without being taken over by it.  It’s progress, folks.  It really is.

We had plans to get together this evening.  I sent T a text as I was heading out the door to my dance lesson letting him know what I was up to and asking where did he want to meet.  He texted back asking if we could postpone until tomorrow since he wasn’t feeling well.  I was naturally disappointed, but I could also feel those old fears of rejection rising up:  he was standing me up, he didn’t want to see me anymore, etc.

I recognized it right away – the insanity of a frantic, fearful, insecure ego.  Before I responded, I asked myself how I would respond if I wasn’t crazy.  We had a “successful” exchange – we have plans to meet up again tomorrow.

I reminded myself as I was coming home on the metro that it’s not personal.  Perhaps I was getting what I wanted from him in terms of him responding to me, but even if he ghosted, I had no reason to be disturbed – he’s on his path, I’m on mine, and there’s nothing personal about any of it.  Still, I can be grateful for the progress I see I’ve made.  Even being able to be as open to him and with him, and as accepting of myself, as I have been is huge for me, as is instantly recognizing when I’m getting crazy and not allowing it to take me over.  When I was with M, I would often enough justify my craziness instead of recognizing it for what it was, instead of recognizing that I was whole and that M couldn’t hurt me, and I would project my craziness onto him.

Old insecurities die hard.  It’s amazing how quickly and strongly I can be affected by a man who…  I was going to write “a man who I don’t know” and “a man who I probably won’t ever see again” and “a man who has no ability to impact my life,” but those all seem superfluous as they all apply to all other people, really.  Except the bit about not affecting my life – everyone I meet affects my life in some way, the question is only one of how I choose to interpret that.

But, it doesn’t matter whether I “know” them or not, will see them again or not.  We are all Being at our core, and we all suffer from the same illusion, even though the manifestations of which are many and may falsely appear to be entirely different and separate from one another.  Neither the illusion nor any of its manifestations exhibited by others have anything to do with Me.  And none of the manifestations of the illusion I exhibit have anything to with them.  It’s not T’s fault him cancelling on me made me feel insecure – my insecurity is a manifestation of my attachment to the illusion of separation.  This is a perfect example of how our emotions are to serve as signposts pointing us to where our work needs to be done – where we’re clinging to illusion instead of letting go and letting “Good,” to borrow the old saying from AA.  I got insecure because I believed that T had power over me, that his evaluation of me (again, an evaluation that existed only in my mind) was meaningful.  I have work to do in letting go of investing meaning in others’ judgments (real or imagined) of me.

There’s nothing like a romantic engagement to show you where your work lies, if you let it.

TL;DR:  I got a little latin sugar in my bowl, and I’m feeling good.