Riding the Wave

Beautiful summer day.  Housemate is out of town for the next week so feeling spacious in my space.  I'm feeling the bullet update today:

1. Things are moving forward with my job opportunity.  The supervisor has been in contact via email, checking references and asking me about meeting with the two other caseworkers.  Still feeling some fear around this, due to jumping into another federally-funded, full-time job with a commute (40 min), but I believe the supervisor and work environment would be big pluses.
2. Moving forward slowly but surely on the green jobs writing project with sh/cm.  Meeting about this tomorrow to nail down outline and create a research agenda.
3. On other, more personal, fronts with sh/cm,  a couple of days ago we officially crossed the line into exclusivity.  On the one hand, so exciting to imagine all the things we can enjoy together now and the potential for some big life goals/needs to be met.  But on the other hand, immediately after, my intimacy defense mechanism reared it's ugly head, and my brain honed in on a perceived physical flaw, which I won't even give weight too by mentioning.  It was literally right after we made that decision. 

This defense has happened in other relationships I've had since completing a 12-step program 10 or so years ago, and I have various theories as to why it happens (more in frontal lobe and less primal in my choices of mate now? or, without the other ways of keeping "safe" and not getting too intimate that I had before the program, my mind came up with this strategy?).  But it's a big pain in the you-know-what.

On the positive side, instead of internally battling with myself and feeling distant, I am able to talk about things with sh/cm and we feel closer through doing so.  It feels like we are building trust, and I am hoping I might be able to ride this reactive intimacy-defense wave through to the other side for once.

Feeling a lot of gratitude and love for him and our connection, as well as sadness that my psyche is putting myself and him through some challenges right now.