For partner dancers, and painters alike, “cutting-in” holds significant and somewhat different meanings sometimes involving leaving “something” in some corners… which I’d rather not explain, but do know both situations, personally. Here, I could and maybe might have included a musical reference to the band named “The Wallflowers”… but, alas, that will be it. I will offer a hint though, of the fact I’ve updated my “companion playlist” with several relevant songs I particularly enjoy. Please consider utilizing the playlist link… whenever you’re in the mood. You may catch a glimpse of some new additions before my next “publishing” of another chapter, and that may be interesting for various reasons, too.
For awhile now, admittedly, I have experienced some personal trouble finding a decent opportunity to get “some words in edge-wise” in my own head. To the interrupters, I recommended: don’t fret… I’ll take my own chance… and, thus, the inception of the autobiographic literary self-help manual and my willingness to share it via online publication.
Because, “IT” happened again; the gigantic “IT”… the “IT”: my remembering and knowing, immediately… figuratively and neatly wrapped in the seemingly tidy package of physicality… daily life experience is involved.
The above is true for me in many contexts. But pertaining to one specifically, I’ll share the following story:
During early 2021, late January and early February, I started to become youthfully enamored with the romantic notion of Valentines’ Day; though, not any of the St. Valentine’s massacre “stuff”… most likely the worst Valentine’s day ever.
Valentines’ Day is supposed and meant to be for lovers and filled with potential. I was feeling playfully inspired by some of my own personal youthful yearnings for relationship and romance. I took some of my colored pencils and small pieces of paper and sketched and wrote some sweet valentine cards… including invitations, about which I became even more excited… I felt some semblance of anticipation welling inside and around me, too.
And, though I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, I think I might have been struck by one of Cupid’s broken arrows… or perhaps it was just bent and happened for exactly the reason I feel now and have since during my process of creating them… the cards, I mean. After many years of post-divorce “singledom”, I’d felt ready to flirt and “try dating again.”
Some musical inspiration as fore-background became for me a deep reminder that I created the cards for me to express my then desire to make some headway for a specific opportunity, which didn’t exactly pan-out the way I suspected it might… but it was a beautiful reminder for me. I changed my focus and created some fun and beautifully youthful romance… sweet and silly, laced with mild adult innuendo and socially known pop-culture references… just my style. Not at all brazen and some might say a little “nerdy”, but I’m truly good with that…
I didn’t mail-out or hand-them-over… I kept the sentiments for myself… and have no regrets pertaining to doing so.
During my writing of the invitations for social interaction, which I thought and wrote to be sweetly romantically fun, I experienced some personal interference and I didn’t want to taint the experience for me or him; mine had been tainted by the interference and that is exactly what I didn’t want to share. I wanted to heal the experience by including and focusing upon the music which and musicians who mean so much to/for me, and about which I chose to make prevalent during my process of creating the “Valentine Courting Cards.”
If, whilst culling through my things during some later date/time I find any I might not have destroyed for reasons including my disgust with the interference I’d experienced, I’ll photograph some and add them to a different chapter, where they’ll still make sense, in a different context. The process for me, personally, included me feeling I didn’t have to keep the cards in some scrapbook which may have collected dust, to know I created them and for which personal reasons. I know I realized some personal catharsis during the process, and, that was, for me, one of the most important aspects of the experience.
My heartfelt joyful willingness to try, again, had been marred, though, I won’t let the marredness be irreparable or unhealable. Basically, I felt the situation of me offering another person the cards, considering the circumstance, wasn’t suitable for me to present to him.
The interference which I mentioned, which was somewhat different than other interference I’d experienced during other relationships, and, incited me to feel as if I needed to do a much-needed “cut-in” in my own personal experience. I do, when I feel the severity and profundity of the importance of it. And, I paint, too, but with a gleeful heart and I do fairly good free-hand cut-in work. ;).
Anyway, I felt as awkward as I’d felt in years (i.e., most awkward)… at the public location (a retail store where he worked during the referenced timeframe) where I saw the man whom I thought I might want to pursue “something more,” nearly half-a-calendar year before my having written the cards and, this chapter… nearly the worst scenario for me and my personal desires pertaining to my own “public persona”…
The experience was somewhat sweetly awkward and somewhat liberating… from my high-school age unwillingness to feel enough self-esteem to make some certain of my feelings known… it was almost notoriously youthful cringe-worthy awkwardness; I hold that feeling for myself, too. I didn’t want to “ooze” an aura of desperation, which I wasn’t feeling at all and/or having completely “given-up”… I was just feeling exasperated as pertaining to how to profess more “obviously” than felt I’d already felt I’d done, about how I was interested to spend quality time with him in a more private place (i.e., not a Dollar General store nearby to a desert highway).
Not all pursuits are trivial and the aforementioned encounter, I readily categorize as definitively “not-trivial”, but heart- and gut-wrenchingly important, one about which I wanted a certain kind of my youthful shyness prior to relationship intimacy to be important. I’m not a prude, but even at my current age, prefer that I “drive” my public behavior “in a certain direction” and determined I won’t allow myself to be so impudent as to intentionally embarrass myself or another in public; and, don’t usually do so in private environments, either, so it wasn’t much a stretch.
