Steph Not Stephanie

I wasn’t going to write this blog. I had it half-written about a week ago and I decided to hold off, in case certain readers had certain reactions. But a funny thing happened: I took my emotions out on my hair (as I’ve been known to do in the past) and went blonde. It turns out Blonde Steph just does not have as many fucks to give, so here we go.

I have had it with these mother fucking breaks on this mother fucking plane. Okay, it’s not a plane per se, but I am so very tired of men boys deciding to press pause on dating like they’re taking a pee break during a round of Super Mario Bros. Life is not a goddamn video game, and if you stop before you reach the save point, you have to start at the beginning because all your progress was lost. Soon enough I’m going to end up like one of those flowers, shooting fireballs at dudes as they try to run by. Breaks are bullshit.

Listen, I get it; things happen, life gets in the way. However, there are certain things that will always be constant in life, and stress is one of them. Figuring out how to manage that stress and continue to function in other areas is key to, you know, living. There have been lots of times I’ve wanted to just burrow under my duvet and take a break from work/friendships/relationships/family or focus solely on the one big thing currently occupying my mind, but that’s not real life.

In case you couldn’t tell, Ahab and I are on a break. In case you also couldn’t tell, I didn’t have much say in the matter. Now, this followed on the heels of the last cluster thing, which ended after a break (five hours after which I discovered via Facebook that he was in a new relationship — with someone who tweeted excruciatingly intimate details of their sex life — that was special, but that is a whole other blog post). My history notwithstanding, I was totally willing to give this one the space he needed to feel supported, but some sort of a discussion would have been nice. Instead, it was a unilateral decision that left me without a voice or a choice in the matter. Technically, I suppose I could’ve chosen to walk away, but I wasn’t willing to do that because of what I saw as a miscommunication. Here’s the tricky thing about miscommunication: you can’t solve it with silence.

So here I am, drinking and blogging (only good things happen when you blog angry and drunk) in the suburbs with my friend Janina. Janina, who spent the day chasing around two children, ages three and a half and 19 months, who fell asleep during Pocahontas, who has to tell her children things like, ‘Don’t lick my leg,’ and ‘Cheese doesn’t go in your nose,’ told me dating sounds exhausting. My life sounds exhausting to someone who deals with little balls of chaos in people form. The troubling thought? She’s not wrong, I am exhausted.