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The idea of meditation and mindfulness has attracted me since my early years. I brushed the edges of the practice a few times on my journey to adulthood. As far back as early primary school, I remember sessions in the assembly room, laying on a vinyl-skinned gym mat, my fingers exploring the gritty mottled-blue synthetic carpeting, a long-haired 40-something ex-hippy teacher leading us through a body scan. The experience must have been somewhat of an impact, as I still go back to it when seeking to calm down.
In my teen years, I would lay in bed listening to Enigma or other Euro-folk-electro-sample pastiches, and work to control my breathing in order to wind down to sleep after post-midnight homework sprints. As I moved through my 20s and into my 30s, and clambered through corporate obstacle courses and political mine-fields, I discovered meditation CDs and podcasts to help stay within the boundaries of sanity. Some were basic meditations, designed to put you "under" and leave you in peace until the end of the session. Others were designed to guide you to various outcomes, be that relief of stress, elimination of impostor syndrome, increase of confidence or attainment of sleep. Some seemed to work as advertised, others not so much.
Ten years ago, I was navigating the end of a decade-long relationship. We both had successful careers in IT, and it had been a long time since either of us had gone without anything other than peace of mind. We had bought a house in the suburbs, and had attempted to follow the patterns of of our forebears and countless families around us. That was not a good fit for either of us, no matter how romantic the myth of suburban bliss had appeared to be. Before long, we both wanted out, and all the podcast-delivered meditation in the world wasn't going to resolve that which was destroying our peace of mind. We wanted out of a relationship where we had forgotten why we were together. He wanted out of a partnership that was bound by the a lie of heteronormativity. Me out of one where I was either lied to in order to avoid conversations about the poor fit of my expectations, or in which I was forced to navigate shedding my emotional attachment to traditionalist ideas of fidelity at a pace that I wasn't equipped to deal with.
Beyond the relationship, I wanted out of a job in which I felt destined to eternally solve the same problems, caused by the same people, day in and day out. I wanted out of the bland suburban purgatory that we had bought into; we had naively assured ourselves that suburbia was the place to be, a place to build a life of security and comfort, because that is what you do to assure balance and harmony, according to generations of family tradition, and proclamations by mainstream queer pundits who had declared the suburbs the new frontier for well-adjusted queer couples. Most of all I wanted to be "me" again. In fact - I wanted to know who that even was.
After a couple of iterations ambling along various paths of denial - whereby I alternately attempted ignoring, sticking band-aids on, and applying open-mindedness to the emotional gunshot-wound of the mis-matched values that had torn our relationship apart - I called it quits and agreed that "you and me forever" was at an end. My ex departed to his inner-urban fuck-nest, and I lingered briefly in the vacuum of the suburban rhythm, packing up our 3BR-2BA tract home on weekends and after work. We divided the kitchen-ware, the appliances, the DVD collection, the furniture, the garden tools, the picket fences, patio BBQ and room to swing 2.5 cats in approximate halves, and went our separate ways.
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