I'm lying in bed on a beautiful Saturday morning, my stomach slowly calming down from self-inflicted knots. You see, I did something stupid. Earl sent me some email, and I got all warm and fuzzy and decided to read back over the email Earl and I sent one another last fall, when we were first getting involved.

Stupid, oh yes. This was stupid. I seem to have a lot of stored up anger and fear from that time, sitting somewhere inside of me waiting for an excuse to come back out again. Reading the old email was just asking for it. What did I think I was looking for? Hints that everything would turn out all right? Well, things turned out wonderfully for me, but there aren't any hints of that in the email. Just affection and adoration -- and the occasional long miserable letter from me to him, explaining how scared I am in the midst of my happiness.

This entry started out a lot more incoherent. I've been editing it and re-editing it for several hours now. I'm worried about writing about this here, though, with all the people I know who read it. I think I need to, though. I can't always edit out everything that might possibly upset someone reading this. It'd make this journal pointless.

I'm realising that I've never defined my boundaries. What will I draw the line at talking about? There are some things which seem obvious, but the list of things I haven't yet made up my mind about is much, much longer.

In writing this I've managed to calm down some. Now all that's left is the tight feeling of unshed tears behind my eyes and the voice yelling at me inside my head for being stupid enough to try looking back.

I don't know what I'm trying to say.

Let's see if I can explain this sensibly.

Last autumn I made some choices. I thought them through very carefully, and went to a lot of trouble to gather as much information as possible. Some of the choices ended up being right. Some of them ended up being wrong. A pretty normal piece of life, all in all.

The problem comes in thinking about the choices. You see, I know that I acted with integrity and honesty during that time. If I think about it I can remember how much I agonised over the decisions I made. I can remember what my reasons were, and even why, given the information I had, they were the right reasons. I remember being happy.

That was then. If I was in that situation now, I wouldn't be happy. I'd be a miserable wreck for the, oh, thirty seconds it took me to extricate myself. I couldn't possibly make any of the choices I made then without betraying myself. My integrity, my (finally) well-defined boundaries, my sense of my own goals -- all of these things would be destroyed by allowing myself to be in the situation I was in last October.

But the person I was last October was behaving with integrity.

That's what I've got to remember. If I can keep that right in front of me, I'm fine. When I don't remember that I end up feeling as though I have betrayed myself, as though all the hard work I've done has been for nothing, and I end up wanting to cry, with my stomach in knots.

So, see? All I have to do is try to remember that I've changed. I've changed sufficiently that the way I was living less than a year ago would be actively harmful to me. But for who I was then, it was acceptable.

I think a lot of this comes from having a high rate of change. If it took me years to make big changes in myself... well, hey, I can look back on being fifteen, and feel like an idiot, but I don't mind it. Of course I was an idiot. It was years and years ago. This is recent enough that I'm almost embarassed to admit that I've changed as much as I have.

Even though the changes were good for me. Even though I'm both happier and more functional the way I am now.

You know, I've just now realised that Earl and I have always had a long distance relationship. By the time we move in together we will have been dating for fifteen months or so. That's my entire relationship with Bryant[1], right there, and all of it long-distance.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when that distance goes away.