In my last post I said that I consider the material manifestation of my forgiveness of an individual to consist of no acts of retaliation against such a person.  I said that I often don't want to be best buddies with those I forgive, but that not retaliating against them is good enough.

I then said that, on the other hand, I have to forgive TONS of attractive women whom I would definitely like to be best buddies with, but that forgiving such women in hopes of being best buddies with them is not real forgiveness.  Forgiveness, the way I see it, involves letting go of the pain someone's emotional injury caused me and leaving it by the side of the road and going on down that road.  Hoping that a beautiful woman would desire to be best buddies with me in exchange for my forgiveness of them doesn't fit into what I consider forgiveness, therefore.  All sorts of ugly things like feelings of entitlement on one's part can come up if one hopes for or expects something material in exchange for such forgiveness.

Yesterday I came to the realization that the happiest I've ever been in relation to beautiful women who've been mean to me came when I realized that I could carry on by myself and be quite happy WITHOUT them in my life in a positive way.  That would really make sense then, if I hoped for nothing material in return for my forgiveness of such a woman, that being happy without them is a real place that I started working to get to in my twenties, a real place I've experienced many times since to the point where I can offer the most stunningly beautiful of mean girls a forgiveness that requires NOTHING in return from them.

Back in the day, a beautiful girl didn't even have to be mean to me for me to be miserable over them.  They just had to be unavailable somehow.  Unavailable logistically, like they had a boyfriend, and/or unavailable because they had no interest in dating me.  One of my earliest, meanest crushes came to me as a sophomore in high school over the dynamic between me and a freshman girl.  I KNEW there was NO WAY she could feel the same intensity of feeling for me that i felt for her, and that was enough to send me into a tailspin.

Over the years, I learned to accept greater and greater degrees of unavailability.  For example, a girl in my sophomore year of college committed the offense against me of being a really nice, beautiful girl in my art class who had a serious boyfriend.  At the time, THAT was enough to send me into a tailspin, but over time I learned to accept that kind of unavailability. 

Nowadays. they have to be really trying to be mean to me to tie me up in knots, but like I said, even those days, and those mean girls, might be on their way out.  Why? Because, hey, I've come to the realization that the happiest I've been in relation to ANY unavailable woman is when I discover I can be happy without her in my life.  What are these mean girls going to do about that one?  Can they keep playing cruel rejection games with me?  Can they keep tying me up in knots with such games?  We shall see. I doubt it, but we shall see.

I've talked often about the notion I've had concerning an internet presence that features me that I did not consent to.  A couple of months ago a woman I talked to said she heard that I was big on Reddit.  That was news to me.  Maybe that's the internet presence I did not consent to.  Tonight that notion I've had came to mind at a comic book reading event.  I got the vibe, a guilty vibe, that a woman there knew about this presence, possibly on Reddit.  Now, I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know for sure.

It turns out that I had shown up to the reading early, so I left to get some coffee and go for a drive.  On my drive I remembered the second of three reasons that makes base retaliation not such a good idea.  So, let's go over the reasons to not retaliate against people in one's day to day life.  1: One never gets the satisfaction from retaliation that one anticipates, 2, and this is the one I had trouble recalling the other day: Retaliation creates a lot more problems than it solves, and 3, from Dr. David Burns' "Feeling Good:" People never feel as if  they deserve to be retaliated against.

With these three reasons to refrain from giving anyone at that reading so much as a dirty look, I returned to the reading. I saw the first reader and then decided to leave.  Over the course of winding down my evening, I remembered something very important about forgiveness that I've discovered. One does not forgive someone in hopes of getting something material from the person in return.  That's not forgiveness in my book.  I call that "niceness."  

Some people, I don't really want to be buddies with when I forgive them.  Just refraining from retaliating against these people is the extent of my forgiveness of them.  But, hell, a lot of people I wind up feeling compelled to forgive happen to be women I'd like to date in some more perfect world than ours.  With that thought in mind, that expecting material "rewards" from women I forgive that I'd like to date is not real forgiveness, but rather, what I call "niceness," I would say that refraining from retaliating against such women, and leaving it at that, will have to suffice for forgiveness as well.

I can't get women to take an interest in me in this town.  I'm thinking about moving to a place where I can plug into a more vibrant comics scene than the one we have here.  All  these posts I've been writing about me trying to be more of a good guy to women are fine, but the women in question probably aren't going to take an interest in me even if they do detect whatever changes in me I want them to see.

I've just been reflecting on the past several years and how the most I ever talk to women are at comic and zine events and whatnot.  My job sucks for meeting women, because I don't really have anything in common with my female coworkers that would interest them.  I played another gig at a the Carousel Lounge yesterday, so there's music for me as well.  

The problem with that resides in my perception that making a mark in the local music scene seems for me too steep a hill to climb.  I mean, I can meet women at open mikes and whatnot, but I've already made something of a mark in my little corner of  the creative world-self-published indie comics-so why not work that nerve?  The pastures seem greener for me in that world than in the music world.  So, a move may be in the works for me.  I've already got a place scoped out that I'm thinking about moving to, so I"ve just got to start planning for that.

I think some women in my world seem just as intent on working my last nerve as much as some women in my past.  I think I've been doing pretty good at fielding those attempts to work my last nerve these days.  I think back on several occasions in my past where I lost it in response to women just going there, and although I understand why I lost it on those occasions, I still regret it.  I'm older, I'm on a good psych med, I don't drink, which would affect my mood, and I've come up with some good coping techniques to the adversarial stances so many women seemed intent on taking towards me over these last fourteen years or so.  Namely, I've learned to back off of women and regroup.  I've set limits on how often I'll approach a woman I'm interested in.  I can let things just go by the wayside if they aren't receptive to my approaches to them for social reasons.  All that coping stuff is as important as the good psych med and the abstinence from alcohol.  I guess I should just anticipate certain women in my world wanting to go there on me in the upcoming days and weeks and months, and that I can just see these occasions as opportunities to put right certain behaviors and responses from my past. 

In my post, "Beautiful Women." I went off on someone in my world.  I think I managed my response pretty well to some of the issues this person brought up.  The issues have to do with this person's availability and the availability of someone else.  I talked about how I first started teaching myself to exist in a happy place without someone such as this person I went off on giving me validation of my worth.  I first started teaching myself how to be happy without such women while I was still in my twenties.

In my early twenties, I had so many breakdown experiences that centered around this issue.  I could not make intelligent decisions about this or that young woman who presented me with this or that dilemma that centered around their actual availability.  One example was "Donna."  Donna merely flirted with me and the world in general one night early in the summer of 1986 over at a friend's house.  I decided to go on a spiritual quest for love over that one.  I carried a torch for her the whole summer, even though this mutual friend told me she had a boyfriend, and it all ended up in a breakdown mess at a party at that same house where she did her little act at the beginning of the summer.

I managed to smooth things over for a bit with a transcendent moment at another party at another location the following weekend.   I saw Donna and her boyfriend at this other party and I went up and talked to her as if it were all no big deal. This transcendent miracle attracted the attention of "Wanda."  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  She presented me with issues of whether or not she was actually available as well, all while basically pretending to be my girlfriend. So yeah, my crude sexual proposition to her was not an intelligent decision, I admit.

I didn't start making intelligent decisions about unavailable women until Sara in the spring of 1988.  My only criticism of my "what if I turned my back on love?" approach I came up with at the time resides in the notion that I didn't not take that approach far enough.  So, in 2012, I once again embraced this "buddha" I follow to the utmost limits I'm able to follow it.

As the example of Donna leading to Wanda illustrates, an inability to deal with relatively minor dilemmas concerning the actual availability of an individual woman can lead to a much bigger problem with someone else down the road.  I think about this person in my world, the person I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  I don't think the dilemma she presented me with is that big a deal.  I think I can handle it in a sufficiently professional manner and come out okay.  I don't want to be vexed by whatever minor dilemma she's presented to me, because that would not bode well for my prospects for making intelligent decisions about some real turkeys out there who might come up for consideration further down the road 

In Dr. David Burns' book, "Feeling Good," He tells several stories of elusive boyfriends and wayward husbands who leave his female patients beside themselves as to how to handle it.  He counsels them again and again to learn how to be the providers of their own happiness and to stop chasing after these men.  He also encourages the patients to see things from their wayward partners point of view so these women can move on and not get stuck there.  In at least one instance, one woman turns the tables to such an extent that the man comes back wanting to deal.  

I typically don't have that level of success in the situations I find myself in. One reason may reside in the fact that I don't, at any given time, have any actual romantic love relationships with the women in question.  For me then, turning the tables doesn't matter.  The discovery by itself that I don't need to be vexed every single time someone presents me with a dilemma of whether or not they are actually available provides me with a great deal of satisfaction.

Last week I apologized to someone in my world for going off on them on this blog. My post where I talked about beautiful women is what I’m referring to. I think I was right to apologize. I’m wondering if she knows about things going on in my world and if she was trying to show support for me. I know I’m not making much sense, but it’s too soon to go into detail.  For the record, this has nothing to do with that former cashier I go on and on about.

Someone I had a bit of a run in with last year has been really sweet to me lately.  Looking it at it now, I think they were trying to make amends to me.  I got paranoid.  I'm sorry.  I'm not about to fault someone for being, in my opinion, imperfect in their attempt to do the right thing.  That would make me an a-hole. 

No one is entitled to my trust.  That especially applies to anyone who has behaved in hurtful ways towards me in the recent past.

For much of my adult life, really beautiful women, if they've been anything to me at all, have often played the role of antagonists.  It might have something to do with my mental illness.  They see me as a loser and/or dangerous, and they set about proving it to themselves and others by playing vicious, deceitful, hurtful romantic-love-oriented rejection games with me.  In several instances I knew for a fact that they did so to elevate some man in their life onto a pedestal by degrading me in such a manner.  Sort of a female parallel to the madonna/whore complex that can bedevil a lot of men.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if I didn't ADORE so many of these beautiful women.  One of the first things I taught myself to do in response to this phenomenon, in my twenties, while still undiagnosed with a major mental illness, is how to live without such women as friends or girlfriends in my life.   In my twenties, I read in Doctor David Burn's book, "Feeling Good,"  how he counseled so many patients to learn how to be happy without wayward boyfriends and separated spouses.  He emphasized that these women could learn to be happy without unreliable or unavailable partners and learn autonomy and self-sufficiency through these trying experiences.

Oftentimes the patients could turn the tables on their wayward partners through such learned behavior and be the ones deciding whether or not to have anything to do with these men.  I haven't typically had that level of success, but it doesn't really matter.  What matters is the fact that I learned to live without these women as lovers or friends eager for my company.  I simply learned to get along fine without them, because I really didn't have any other viable options.  My more trying times back then came from what I now consider relapses to my love-addicted ways.  Still, I completed an undergraduate degree, and then a graduate degree, both in studio art, largely through the sometimes reliable emotional and mental stability such cognitive behavior techniques allowed me to have. 

I'm now at a point in my life where I can employ many, many tools to bring about this state of happiness. Not only do I know how to provide myself with good company, even when alone, but I have a good antipsychotic medication, access to counseling and support groups, an understanding of my diagnosis, an ability to abstain from cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, and friends who are better, more supportive friends than many friends in my past.  All of these tools together help me to like women in general more and still have such a strong attraction to really beautiful women without feeling particularly threatened or compromised by that attraction alone.  If really beautiful women want to play hurtful games with me, still, they won't have an easy time of it.

I can't help but think a lot of these really beautiful women come from a place of unimaginable privilege with these hurtful ways they so often visit upon me.  They've simply never had to learn how to be the primary providers of their own happiness the way I had to learn at their age.  There's always been some guy ready to step up for them, maybe.

Perhaps, though, at least some of them have really painful and/or frightening experiences from their past that inform such behavior, but I don't see how attempts to punch down on someone such as myself will help them.  I can't help but wonder if so many of them come off as hopelessly needy and complex to so many of these righteous boyfriends they try to elevate by tearing someone such as me down.  I would advise these really attractive women to find constructive ways of seeking personal happiness and fulfillment that don't involve a boyfriend or husband playing the role of primary provider of that happiness and fulfillment.

I sometimes get the impression that some of the women in my world play to me as some kind of a phenomenon.  If I had to say whether I am a mentally ill man who is trying to work a recovery from love addiction or, to this impression I sometimes get, a phenomenon, I'd say that I'm a mentally ill man trying to work a recovery from love addiction.  I might seek out a support group in the next few days or so.  It's all very confusing.

My gig is one month away.  I read an interview with Tyler Mahan Coe the other day where he said that one should practice guitar ten hours a day, among other things, to know country music.  Not gonna happen.  I'm giving myself the night off from practice tonight.  No pressure.  Tonight, I'm still a mentally ill man trying to work a meaningful recovery from love addiction. My biggest push to become a better guitar player comes from trying to learn some classic rock covers that my music teacher wrote out for me to play.

The comics are coming along slowly. After all, I've got to learn all about country music and practice, practice, practice on that guitar.  I got a good review from Ryan Carey on his Four Color Apocalypse blog on Patreon for the latest book I sent him.  I'm quite ambitious about growing as a comic book illustrator.  I used a lot more light versus dark in the the last book.  I was inspired from readings of EC Comics illustrators such as Graham Ingels and Jack Davis.