#NotANerd: Confessions of a Broken Heart

Editor's Note: Nerds, meet my buddy Lindsay. She's crazy ... and bat shit ... and I love her for it! For reals, she hitchhiked across various African countries!!! The girl is a whackadoodle noodle, but not at all a nerd. That is where I come in handy- I'm Lindsay's navigator on adventures. See, I show her how we get places via google maps, and she reminds me to stop tweeting and look up every once in a while. It's a match made in nerdy/non-nerdy heaven. That being saiiiddddddd ... she just went through a super gnarly breakup, and kinda wants to talk about it. So, there ya go! Hit it Lindsay!

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Lindsay Mc

So, I’m a really optimistic person. Like really really Always On The Sunny Side, Smile Like You Mean It, It’s Always ‘All Good’ optimistic but this June I got the shit kicked outta me. Seriously. I’m gonna do a quick recap so you can see where I am coming from and so I can move the hell on and get on to the good stuff that is happening (and is ALWAYS happening but is sometimes just hard to see.)

Three AMAZING things that were rocking my life-

I had an absolutely wonderful boyfriend who I was totally in love with… and I know you don’t know me very well but you will quickly find out that I am not ‘that girl.’ I live by the relationship motto of Easy Come, Easy Go, ‘Let’s play and learn from each other and move on.’ I’m not into commitment, I don’t get wrapped up, I don’t fall in love and I definitely don’t get heart broken… 

I had signed with a pretty damn awesome television production company to help develop and sell a travel show that I had created. I had an amazing agent from an amazing agency negotiate my contract and all signs were pointing to Go on this baby getting sold to a network by the beginning of summer which means I would be the creator, host and producer of my very own travel television show- Sweet! 

I had moved in to a bomb ass beach bungalow with one of my best girls and her boyfriend. We all grilled out and watched movies from a projector on the side of our house which was about 6 blocks from the sand and 2 blocks from the bars- life was gooooood. Could things get any more perfect?

Wrong question to ask. 

Shit hit the fan and the entire structure of my life fell apart in three short weeks. My girl and her boyfriend broke up and he moved out leaving a chunk of the rent to be paid, the landlord raised the already high rent which suddenly meant that I could no longer afford to stay there. I had put absolutely all of my energy and time into getting my show off the ground with the production company and without any warning, things completely stalled. We were suppose to be taking meeting and in constant communication to get prepped and ready for a sale and *crickets* on their end with our contract expiring that month. WTF?! Okay, dammit.

Those two things alone were pretty tough to deal with- realizing that I would soon be homeless and having my dream pulled out from under my feet was obviously disheartening but I have dealt with worse… maybe. I also should know the nature of show business by now and to never get my hopes up (and never let them fall down, the trick to staying sane in television is to always stay even keel ‘cause you just never know) and living in my car is no big deal for me. I’ve hitchhiked and backpacked all around the world with much less, I have friends all over California that I have been wanting to visit and stay with and it’s not like a have a job that I have to stick around LA for… so okay, things kinda sucked but they really weren’t that bad. 

And then a curve ball… the stupidest, most unexpected, W-T-F?! curve ball in the whole wide world.

My boyfriend broke up with me- AND I ACTUALLY CARED.  

T and me started dating while we were both living up in Big Bear for the winter. He worked Patrol and I was a snowboard instructor for the mountain and we lived together with a few friends in a cute little house, walking distance from the slopes. Us dating was totally unexpected and our relationship started off as friends and roommates and extremely quickly turned into a Boyfriend/ Girlfriend living together situation. We lived together for 6 months and did the long distance thing for 2 more once we both moved back to our respective Summer locations (Venice Beach for me and Solvang, in his parents guests house for him.) Our relationship was awesome. It really was. So so fun and easy and I felt so… understood. It was serious but casual, carefree but deep. I knew from day one that he was not ‘The One’ but he was amazing and I was still very very in love with him. I had gotten to know, love and absolutely adore his family and we had made plans to go camping at the Grand Canyon this summer and talked about what we would be doing next winter. We maintained our relationship with phone calls, texts and photos and visited each other every chance we got (and neither of us have a real job so we had a lot of chances) so I was completely floored when he broke up with me… via text message. Text message. Really? And the reason is even more absurd than the vehicle- He was breaking up with me because I am a vegetarian and he wanted to hunt. Wait, what? Yeah, you read that right. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!? Seriously. Even while writing this, I can’t wrap my head around the silliness of this surprisingly painful situation. After I was done being shocked and then pissed, I was hurt. Really really hurt. All and all, we only dated for a little over 7 months but when you live Minute by Minute like I do, 7 months is an eternity… and it’s all over without even the decency of a face to face conversion? He couldn’t even Skype me for this?

And that was the final blow.

I lost my shit. 

I had been wondering where the bottom was as things started to unravel with my living situation and my show but until I had by heart broken, I knew I hadn’t actually touched it. The trifecta of shit had finally hit- my security was wrecked by having no place to call home, my dreams were crushed by a stall and lack of momentum with the show and my heart was completely trashed the one guy in my life right now who was suppose to make everything feel all better. Talk about the perfect time for a break down. 

Bottoming out fucking sucks. It’s terrifying, it’s debilitating. It’s empty and heavy and makes you feel like someone is standing on your chest and you just can’t breathe. It’s the feeling of hopeless and being alone as well as being completely over and underwhelmed somehow at the exact same time. I feel like a whiny little bummer chick even typing this but it’s important for you guys to understand and if you have gone through it personally, to relate to.

But with all that being said, there is something wonderful about touching bottom. When you touch ground, you at least know where you are and once you adjust to the weight and pressure, it’s cliche but calming to know that the only place you can go is up. Losing everything is actually incredibly freeing and once you get your footing, the bottom is the best place to push off from so you can rocket back up to the top (or so I hope.)       

When it comes down to it, I can only be thankful for the opportunity tear down my life and personality so I can rebuild and restructure ultimately for the better.     

So there you go. That’s my shit. Here is where I am and that was where I was at. I am homeless, boyfriendless and production companyless. Talk about a perfect time to rebuild.

#thatisall

#NotANerd: Confessions of a Broken Heart

Editor's Note: Nerds ... meet Lindsay. Lindsay is my bat shit crazy buddy that had the friend who knew the dude that owned the pot farm in Northern Cali (read more about that adventure here). This chick is insane - I know, I know, it takes one to know one ... I'll own it. That being said, Lindsay and I are total opposites with the same free spirited personality. For reals, she's totally hardcore with everything in life except getting her nerd did. Dudes, it was hilarious, I was tweeting, emailing, and working from my Droid Charge on the way back from NorCal and every 15 minutes she would say, Jen look up! You have to see this!! We're a great team because we're both so alike while remaining super different. I'm going to help Lindsay start to understand tech - she just got a tumblr!!!!! And she's going to help ground me and serve as a reminder to look up every once in a while. I'm excited to have her in my life ... totally am. Either way, Lindsay just had her heart broken by a duderino like the day before we left for our trip. I asked her to write about what she experienced ... and here ya go!

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Lindsay Mc

I was recently dumped by my boyfriend because I am a vegetarian and he wants to hunt. Yeah. Seriously. Besides the fact that the whole situation is ridiculous, I really can’t believe that I didn’t see it coming.

We started dating almost as a fluke. We were friends that had a previous fling who decided to move in to a house together with a few other friends up in Big Bear (a ski and snowboard mountain in southern California.) Literally, two nights after I moved in, we drank too much cheap whiskey, make out and I claimed ‘my side’ of his bed and moved in to his room for the rest of the season. It was an interesting situation that was unexpectedly awesome. We got along great and honestly, there isn’t shit to do up in Big Bear in the winter besides snowboard, drink and hook up so it was the perfect time to fall into a new boyfriend. I, in no way was looking for a relationship but things with T were so effortless. He was one of the nicest guys I have ever met and I loved doing stuff with him, from making dinner to taking day trips off the mountain to fight cabin fever to just taking laps snowboarding. One time, I remembered that I had left my yoga mat outside in the windy, snowy cold and he jumped up out of bed and brought it inside for me with out me even having to ask! Not only was he amazing in those ways, but he intuitively understood me in a way that no guy has ever gotten me before. Needless to say, I was smitten.

We took a bunch of trips to visit his family in Solvang (which is 5 hours from Big Bear, right outside Santa Barbara) and I fell completely in love with his family. T’s parents are hands down two of the most amazing people that I have ever met and I absolutely loved every minute I spent with them. I was totally cool with the idea of having a commuter relationship once summer came, where we would be three hours away from each other with me living in Venice. It’s all good, “love conquers all,” right?

Me and T were perfect all winter long. We never fought (we ‘disagreed’ but we always talked things out before anything ever escalated) we had extremely similar temperaments, sometimes we partied, other times we stayed in and all and all, it was a pretty freakin’ stellar relationship.

I was in the process of writing T into my life but I kept saying “If we make it through the summer…” because a relationship is easy when there is nothing else to do but if we made it through the summer, I knew it would be huge. I knew that being up in Big Bear and snowboarding every day diluted our personalities. I am a slightly different person in Big Bear than who I am in Venice simply because of my surroundings and daily activities. I knew from meeting T’s family and friends back in Solvang that he was different as well. What I was curious about was, would our summer personalities be as compatible as our winter ones?  

T is a ‘cowboy’ in every sense of the word. He grew up on a farm, goes to rodeos, knows how to drive a tractor and he definitely won’t be voting for Obama in the 2012 election. I’m from Virginia and went to school in North Carolina so I understand the mentality and I have a soft spot for southern boys. That being said, I’m pretty hippie-ed out. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was old enough to tell my parents I don’t want to eat meat, I spend a lot time looking into and understanding far out concepts and ideas and I’m really getting into yoga and meditation.  

We had very different interests but we were operating from very similar moral compasses (or so I thought.) I loved the fact that we were so different and I, from the bottom of my heart, enjoyed what made who we were. 

The cracks started to show a month into T being back in Solvang. It seemed that back in his hometown with his hometown friends, T was a different guy. Without the laid backness of snowboarding and our mountain friends, me and T had very different ideas of what ‘fun’ was. His late night texts were regularly incomprehensible (gotta love drunk texts) and what ever little time I did get him on the phone to catch up, he rushed me off the line. While I was at the beach, working on stuff for the show, and grilling out with friends and surfing, T was getting black out wasted on “$200,000 dollar boats” with his little Rich Kid Friends accompanied by fake-blonde, fake-tanned, fake-boobed chicks and posting things like “GOING HUGE!” on Facebook. 

Apparently, in Solvang, my boyfriend is a douche. 

A few days later, we got in an argument over him wanting to go party on the lake and me wanting to go to a Dispatch concert and little did I know at the time but that would be the last full conversation of our relationship. Miscommunication was taking over, things were starting to get heated and I tried to break the tension with a Big Lebowski quote “This aggression will not stand, man” and it went right over his head. We opened the relationship up. 

Our entire relationship, I in no way ever thought that T and I were meant to be. My parents are happily married after 27 years together and my mom always told me that “When you know, you know”… and I didn’t know with T. But then again, “I don’t know” was SOOOO much closer than I have ever gotten with any other guy (which is usually “Absolutely not”) so I started thinking, what if my “I don’t know” is “I Know”?

With all of this, you would think that I would be okay with him finally sending me an ‘It’s over’ break up text… but I wasn’t. I had never been broken up with before and I NEEDED to work it out. Love conquers all and I LOVED him. If I could just talk to him face to face, if I could just touch his arm while he was talking to me, if I could just be with him, we could work it out. But I didn’t text him because in my heart, I knew he didn’t want to and I was crushed.  

At the bottom, I called my best girlfriend Chevas and broke down “Maybe I do want to live in Solvang, work at his parents bakery, let him hunt and be happy with T” What was so bad about killing a bunny anyway? I could live in the country! 

And then I realized- I had lost my damn mind. 

And I started laughing. Seriously. In the middle of my tear-filled speech, I heard what I was saying and I started laughing. 

It was done. We were done. Love is blind, sometimes borderline delusional but it’s going to be fine and I am okay. Phew. Holy shit, shake it off. 

It scares me how distorted things can get when powerful emotions are involved. It scares me that I might have been willing to settle and give up on my dreams and love of living in LA. It scares me that I was willing to possibly compromise one of the longest commitments that I had made to myself ever over a guy (my vegetarian lifestyle.) But most importantly, it EXCITES me to think how amazing it will be when I meet the guy who I’m meant to be with… and I won’t have to.

#TheDudeAbides