The Lovely Lydia's Blog for July 2021

Lydia, why haven't we heard from you in a while?

We all come to crossroads in our lives that demand of us a reassessment of our priorities. Shall we continue down the road we’re travelling, or would it be of greater benefit to choose another road?

I’ve had several crossroads moments in my life, perhaps more than most, and they generally arrive as a culmination of my own (often poor) decisions. Call it a midlife crisis, perhaps. Being a child of 1978, I should have plenty of years ahead. Yet I can see the wrinkles and grey hairs sneaking up on me when I look in the mirror. The yoga poses don't always come without an occasional twinge. And my chronic health challenges are taking more out of me as time marches on.

At my age, I should be able to look back on a life of some note and success. Yet ever since I walked away from my career in international aid some ten years ago, I feel as if I’ve been bouncing about aimlessly, searching for a purpose. When I left my career behind, I blamed compassion fatigue, but in truth it was just as much a choice rooted in my own restlessness with myself. Whatever it is I truly want from life, I sadly haven’t figured it out yet, which seems rather pathetic for someone of my age.

I came to America for love, and I stayed for my older sister. My girlfriend moved mountains to build a relationship with me, and she’s been nothing but wonderful to me. As you know if you read these entries, I also have a relationship with her boyfriend and with another lovely woman. That might seem chaotic to some, but it amounts the closest I’ve had to a stable relationship situation in quite some time. 

And yet here I am, continuing to feel unsettled, as if there’s some unfinished business I need to attend to. 

The madness of the past year and a half has certainly contributed to my existential angst. So has the death of my older sister. And I can never stop thinking of Gina, the one who stole my heart like no other. I’ve spoken of her here before. Things ended tragically for her, and I think I’ve felt adrift ever since then, wondering what I could and should have done differently. It’s as if there’s been a lasting void in me that nothing can fill. 

In the past, my crossroads moments have arrived after a time of great stress, and my impulse has almost always been to run and hide. I very nearly did the same this year, after having an extraordinarily vivid dream of my homeland.

Specifically, I dreamed of Ayr, a beautiful Scottish town on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. I visited there often with my family when I was but a wee lass. It’s a lovely town, and home (more or less) to our national poet, Robert Burns. We visited relatives there, long since passed, and I can recall long weekends spent there, playing by the water, whilst Mum relaxed on the beach and Dad went off to play golf.

I hadn’t thought of Ayr for years when my dream came, and I chose to take it as a sign that I needed to go back home. As my mum was half-English, half-American, our family spent as much time out of Scotland as in it when I was growing up, but Glasgow is my hometown and Scotland has always held a special place in my heart.  

I last lived in Scotland a decade ago, when it became a refuge for my broken heart. I’d been in a long-term relationship that blew up in my face. I thought I had it all back then – living in the beautiful city of Vancouver, helping others by way of my job, living with a stunningly beautiful woman who was the absolute love of my life. When she betrayed me, my emotions screamed at me to run. And for better or worse, I did. I left everything behind and retreated to Inverness, up in the rugged Scottish Highlands, living off my savings till I could figure out what to do next.    

A broken engagement, my star-crossed love with Gina, and my sister eventually led me to America. My time in Scotland had led me to decide to be my own boss, so I established myself in the gig economy, doing remote freelance work. I brought that work to America, where I then started teaching yoga and meditation classes. Several failed relationships, which I've chronicled here, including my marriage and divorce, managed to work themselves into that time frame.

Needless to say, my in-person classes abruptly ended in 2020. I’d been living contentedly with Cathy and Tim, my girlfriend and her boyfriend, but as we saw our professional obligations shifting before our eyes, our lives as a whole also changed in unexpected ways, as have the lives of so many in recent months. Amongst other things, I found myself growing closer to my other girlfriend, and she to me. I felt I was falling into my old habits of always looking for greener pastures.

Then my sister died. Our relationship was strained, and her death filled me with terrible sorrow and crushing guilt, for reasons I'm not comfortable expounding on here. Soon after, when I had my dream of Ayr, I took it as a sign from above that I needed to shift directions and get my life back in order before it was too late. I needed to slow down and reassess what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. 

The first order of business was that I needed to go home.

I felt too frightened and ashamed to discuss any of this with Cathy, who had worked so hard to hook me at a time when I wanted to do nothing but run from her affections. I felt ungrateful for even thinking about going back home and leaving her. So instead, for good or ill, I confided my feelings to my ex-wife, Shelley, who remains one of my best friends. She’s always given me good advice and has been something of a spiritual beacon for me ever since we met. We fell in love in the process of supporting each other through some difficult times, and that sense of mutual support has never diminished. 

And in hindsight, it was good that I chose to talk with her, because instead of encouraging me to make a rash decision and uproot my life, which is what I quite possibly would have done without her sage advice, she told me simply to go back and spend some time in Scotland first. Perhaps I just needed to clear my mind with a change of scenery, she suggested. Or perhaps the dream meant nothing. But there was only one way to find out.

And so I swallowed my fear and had a heart-to-heart with Cathy. She was undersatandably hurt by how I felt, but she knew of the wanderlust in my heart from the time we met, and she would only say that she wouldn’t hold on to me if I really didn’t want to stay. That’s what you do for the ones you love, she choked out as she dried her eyes. 

She was right, and I felt so ungrateful to even be contemplating a return home. Many tears were spilled between us, but she never treated me any differently and never stopped loving me, to her eternal credit. She truly has a heart of gold. 

I didn't trust myself to go alone. I knew I'd be tempted to stay in Scotland and never come back. So I inivited Shelley. If anyone could keep me focussed, it would be my wise-beyond-her-years ex-wife. Truth be told, I think she was eager to take a much-needed holiday from the moment I told her about my travel plans! So she accepted, and with a troubled heart, I flew off with her to Ayr. 

And I do think that having her there made a tremendous difference in the end. She kept me grounded, as I expected she would. It would have been so very simple to succumb to the nostalgia, my melancholy, and my instinct to run and hide every time life throws a problem at me. Instead, I ended up driving Shelley about Scotland like a tour guide, showing her the places that were part of my early life, and enjoying her company as she and I reminisced about our shared past. It made my time there happy, rather than the anxious experience I anticipated whilst attempting to sort out my future life's path. 

Shelley and I did make love in Scotland, as I expected we would. And somewhere in the misdt of our shared passion, I realised that everything I was doing involved looking backwards for some sense of security that I could no longer grasp onto. I still love my ex-wife, but there's a reason we live separate lives now. 

Likewise, aside from a few scattered college chums I haven't spoken with in ages, and some elderly and very distant relatives who wouldn't know me from Eve, I have no human connections left in Scotland. Most of the people I know and love are in America, including my ex-wife and my girlfriends. Scotland was my past. A ghost. Although a part of me will always love my homeland, I realised that was chasing after shadows because I was afraid of confronting the uncertainty of the future. My home was no longer in Scotland. I now understood that.

I sometimes wonder why I had the dream of Ayr. Perhaps it was so I could change course and see once and for all that one’s problems aren't fixed by running from them. I have a woman who loves me to no end, so why would I take that for granted and turn away from it? It’s a small miracle she puts up with me. But thank the heavens she does. When I arrived home from Scotland, she didn't coldly greet me but rather drew me into a fierce hug. She didn't even know yet that I'd resolved to stay in America and no longer run away, but that hug made me more certain than anything that I'd made the correct choice. She was, and is, my love and my future.

This blog got sidetracked in the process of all the turmoil this year. I tend to go through my collection of images and publish a large batch all at once, and I think I last uploaded in February. I’m still rather obsessed with feminine beauty and sapphic love, so I’m certain I’ll get things going again. 

Stay tuned!