Figuring out how to live without having it "all figured out"

1.22.09

Lately, I have found myself thinking about what my life would have been like if I’d stayed with Dominic. Who would I be? How did our breakup change me?
After a few weeks of not speaking to him, I was running up a particularly long hill with Mr. Munch the Scottie, and stopped. “Munch,” I said, “I can apply to grad school anywhere. It doesn’t matter if there’s an army base there!” I was elated. I told my friend Mark this, and he said, “I can’t believe that wasn’t the first thing you thought of.”
Well, it wasn’t. The first thing I thought of was the fact that I would not be planning a wedding any longer. The second thing I thought of was how I had to get rid of a bunch of crap lurking around my house—pictures, jewelry, clothes. And then the thinking stopped and the mind-numbing level of activity began.
Eventually, though, I started thinking about our relationship again, and who I was in that relationship. I can’t count the times I’ve told a friend, “I don’t know how many times I can ride on this ridiculous merry-go-round of dating.” So many times I’ve thought I’d gotten it right, only to have failed miserably. Dominic and I had picked out a ring, a date, colors, hors d’ouevres. Even though I was the one to end it, doing away with those plans and the certainty they brought was painful.
Because I am a person who loves certainty and plans, probably more than anything else in the whole world, the past few weeks of preparing for the GRE has been a strange experience—no more wedding guest lists on Excel, it’s all about grad schools and their 10% acceptance rates.
As I help two of my oldest and closest friends plan their weddings, I feel like the friend who will end up with nine cats in a one-bedroom apartment. I console myself by believing I will be like Carrie Bradshaw, with designer shoes instead of cats, but everyone at the Chimes knows I’m not a real journalist like Carrie.
Needless to say, their weddings combined with my anxiety over grad school and my very uncertain future has made me think a lot about Dominic and the future I expected to live out. One day, as I was doing my daily freak-out about life, and pondering our breakup, I realized I wasn’t smiling. At all.
The feeling I was experiencing wasn’t one of regret or loss, but nausea at the thought of the life I almost had. It’s strange to know that the life that nauseates you now was almost the life you chose, willingly.
At times I wonder if I was a better person when I was with Dominic—more secure, less touchy, and less prone to anxiety. If those are prerequisites for being “better,” then the answer is probably yes. But if being a better person means being challenged on emotional and mental levels and being at peace with one’s decisions, then I am most certainly a better person today.
I understand, a little more after every breakup, that every relationship takes a piece of you. We yearn for that person simply so we’re complete, not because we actually want that person in our lives again. And as I do after every breakup, I wonder how to rebuild.
How do I level the ground and build another foundation more sturdy than the last? I feel like one of the three little pigs building house after house, but in my version of the story, there are lots of pigs. An absolute slew of hogs. And an entire block of houses, all in various states of disarray.
As I start over with someone new, I am relishing in the fact that for the first time, the guy I’m dating isn’t sitting back watching me do all the drilling and sawing—he is right there, helping me with the heavy lifting. I am finally learning to lay a foundation with stone instead of building from the ground up with sticks from the backyard. It’s all any of us can hope to do.