identity

now that I live in an apartment where I don't have to share a kitchen (and bathroom) and curtail my time in it, how have my cooking (and grooming) habits changed?

now that I can spend my hours outside of work freely in my apartment (e.g, stay up late working, binge watch shows), how have they changed? 

without social obligations or anyone to judge me or hold me accountable for my social life, how has my social life changed?

with new freedoms, how do I choose to spend my time?

are there new factors that influence my life now?

with these changes, am I living a life more true to myself?

• hemmed and hawed until brian asked me what I thought of this trip
• I said the "vibes were off" in the beginning, though I did also bring up maman on sunday (end of the trip) as an example. him scrolling [reels] on his phone after he had finished eating. yes, he did put his phone down and engage when I started serving him softballs (what's a harder trip, A vs B)
• he asked for "actionables" and I said there were none. I think we do approach problems similarly — if there's no "ask" for the other person to change, there's no impetus to bring it up. but I do think back to the principle, one I do not follow, of bringing things up when they bother you, even if they're small. of course, there needs to be a threshold, which I am struggling to find.
• ultimately, I did not say this explicitly, but I said everything around it: even though there is nothing I want him to change, I want him to know that I felt unhappy. because if we break up in the future when there is a conflict that can't be resolved with someone changing, I don't want it to be out of the blue. I don't want a "I never knew you felt that way."
• one good takeaway from our discussion though was establishing that I feel most connected when we have conversations, and he feels connected when we do activities together, like having dinner or walking around.
• I am feeling more and more that I am more needy than average, or at least more needy than I previously thought. I need to be entertained. I need to be engaged with. almost everyone I have mentioned this to tells me it's unusual. I haven't yet decided if I should (1) just accept that most men or most people are not interested in or perhaps not capable of constant engagement, or (2) accept that I have this unusual standard and take advantage of it as a barometer.
• what exacerbates things is two-fold. one, I'm not confident that brian's big picture and my big picture are aligned. if I were fully bought in, would it not be adequate to watch him thrive and to thrive myself? two, I guess I'm not thriving myself. if I were buoyed by fruitful coworker and friend relationships, maybe, just maybe, I would be satisfied with what I got from him this week.
• and truly, what helped me shake free of the overwhelming bad vibes at the beginning of the week included: finding out that sam is leaving notion, which made me think about my own path, of things outside of my relationship. and also, this is so bad, but when it occurred to me that I don't have to marry this man, I felt relieved. it's okay, it's not like we're going to get married. every time something happened, I thought this, and I felt better. BAD SIGN. but then, by the end of the week, it flipped the other way — every time something happened, I thought it's not like we're going to get married, and I felt sad.
• brian has been very upfront and honest and loud about who he is. he has told me and he has shown me. I'm the one who isn't honest. I keep telling myself that we are compatible. from the beginning when we first started dating, there has been this recurring loop of me thinking things are over, and then something nice happens, and I'm convinced to stay. over time, we've accrued both happy memories and a list of reasons I like him. I have started to take some of the really special bits of our relationship and of him for granted.