ZAMM now allows you to keep track of which commits were responsible for which features. At the moment, this sort of record-keeping doesn’t actually do anything for you, but I anticipate this sort of information-gathering to be eventually useful for allowing LLMs to automatically maintain forks like mine on top of a rapidly evolving codebase. Perhaps the gardening efforts required for bit life could be drastically reduced.
Severing ties to the ex
I’ve decided to cut contact with my ex. Apart from final arrangements to get our belongings back from each other’s homes and a closing ceremony to acknowledge the loss of our relationship, Elmossy, I think we should limit our contact to saying hi in public (it would feel weird to not even acknowledge each other’s physical presence), emergencies (I wouldn’t want her to feel like she can’t reach out in case of a mental crisis), and attending final farewells for friends who are permanently leaving Siem Reap. I’ve told her the gist over text but haven’t been able to elaborate.
(I’ve realized that I pretty much never refer to anyone by name in this blog. It started out because I felt like it was weird to talk about someone publicly without letting them know that I did so, but at the same time I was too lazy to actually ask permission from anyone except for the two Australians I mentioned in my first post. My ex was the sole exception because I had ongoing permission from her to do so. Besides, our lives were so intertwined that any personal reflections on my own life would inevitably involve her at some point. I mean, how could you have known me during the years 2022 to 2024 and not have known her? But she’s now absent from my life — not the idea of her, as you can clearly see, but she herself — and I think it’s apt to start referring to her the same way I would refer to anyone else on this blog.)
The main motivation is keeping my life simple. I really value peace, stability, and simplicity in my life right now, and a clean separation from my ex feels like the best way to move on. Given our history and the strong emotions that still reside somewhere within us, it feels to me that continued interactions with my ex will only introduce complexity and confusion into my life. Additionally, given the itinerant nature of her life right now as she travels around the country, it feels as if exposure to her is exposure to a level of chaos that I don’t want to feel right now.
The second biggest motivation is that it feels oddly self-empowering to exercise what little agency I have to actively sever the remaining live connections between us. It finally feels like I too have a role to play in breaking us up; it only feels right that we’re ending Elmossy the same way we started it: together. It is a good feeling, but self-destructive behaviors can also feel good in the moment, so I of course wondered if I was simply self-destructing in a misguided attempt to feel some sense of agency. Did I not value the friendship that I could still have with my ex? But then I thought about what it was that our current relationship still did for me. At the time of my decision, we hadn’t talked in weeks, and before that we hadn’t talked in a month. At present, she isn’t doing anything for my life, and I intend to keep it that way, at least until enough time has passed for a new friendship to be beneficial to both of us.
In a sense, both of those reasons combined means that this is a way for me to actively promote my own emotional stability. I’m still feeling raw enough from the breakup that it’s a challenge to regulate my emotions after any contact with my ex. Whenever there was contact with her, I felt a deep sense of sadness afterwards from the reminder that our lives are so far apart now. When there wasn’t, I was doing fine. But I just know that if I get used to the new level of reduced contact, any further reduction in contact from her will feel like yet another painful rejection. It’s been happening throughout this breakup process, and it will continue to happen. Better to just rip the whole band-aid off at once myself than to let her peel it off little by little at her own convenience.
Then there’s the way she acts as if nothing has changed when we talk. I understand how natural it is to do that because I used to do that too with arguments: I’d simply interact with the other person the same way afterwards as if nothing had happened, because that’s what my mom did with me as well. Except that this is starting to give me the feeling — whether it’s true or not — that my ex hasn’t been taking the loss of Elmossy seriously. I mean, I didn’t either in the beginning. We’ve both been too cavalier about it. I had grinned as I told the cleaner during the day and the security guard at night, “អត់អីទេ យើងនៅតែត្រូវគ្នា” (“Oh it’s no big deal, we still get along”). To my surprise, each of them took it much harder than I did. I found out later they used to be married to each other. Now I wonder if perhaps both of them were somber because they could see that we had something beautiful going on. Even beautiful things have to die, and this one died beautifully; yet a beautiful loss is still a loss, and I now grieve our loss. If we’re going to have a funeral for the dead relationship, then I wish my ex could share in the gravitas, but I feel that won’t be possible so long as I’m still around in some way.
Am I just childishly trying to hurt her so that she too can feel some of the pain that I feel? Am I just rationalizing my childishness by deferring to hypothetical funeral rites? My internal experience says no. I found out that cutting contact with exes is actually a common, standard thing to do, and from my research I found out that cutting contact may indeed cause her grief. She might barely even care, or she might feel genuinely hurt. I believe that I have the right to take such action, I believe that such action is necessary for my own personal growth, and I believe that I should absolutely prioritize my own well-being over that of hers, but I nonetheless acknowledge the potential consequences of my actions and take responsibility for being the proximate cause of those consequences. (Ultimate responsibility for someone’s well-being always lies with them, of course.) It isn’t possible to move through life without hurting and being hurt, but we can at least be aware of and accept the consequences of our own behavior.
All that being said, I recognize that at this point in time, there’s no way to truly distinguish between this good faith explanation for my motives and the bad faith explanation that deep down inside the bowels of my subconscious, I’m really just looking for ways to get back at my ex. After all, I will fully admit that I felt a pang of excitement when I first discovered that what I was planning to do often makes the other person feel bad. The thought “No, we shouldn’t be intentionally hurting people” duly came right afterwards, but it only came afterwards. Did it come as part of an automatic drive to manufacture internal personal consent so that I can do an act of harm while still maintaining a positive self-narrative? I’d argue no because I only discovered that there were a lot of internet resources on the topic after I’d already made my decision, but there’s no way for an outsider to be able to tell that.
Which leads me to perhaps the least important but most interesting reason for cutting contact. I had talked to a female friend who knows both of us but is obviously biased towards me. She told me, “Look at her, coming and going as she pleases as if you’re going to be there for her no matter what. She’s keeping you around as an option while she’s off having fun with other dudes. She’s playing you. Even if she asks for you back eventually, you think she’ll stick around then? No, she’ll just move on again as soon as she finds someone else. Eventually, whether it is now or in three years time, you will have enough of this and want to end things with her anyways and really move on, but why waste all that time? You might as well end it sooner rather than later.”
My friend may have said all those things, but her words would not have resonated with me if I didn’t already feel deep down inside like I was being treated with a certain level of disrespect by my ex. During her recent travels around the country, she had actually dropped by Siem Reap and showed up unannounced at my place a couple of times, without so much as a notice that she was now in town. The time I was there, she interacted with me as intimately as if we’d never left the relationship in the first place, and yet was unable to stay for longer because she was in fact hanging out with a guy that night. Why indeed should she still feel like she has complete freedom to pop in and out as she pleases, as if she were still a girlfriend and no boundaries existed between our homes? Wasn’t it rather presumptuous of her to simply assume that I would want to give her that level of continued access to my life, when I myself have little access to hers because she’s been so itinerant?
If we were still in a relationship, this would seem like a minor issue to resolve. All I’d have to say was, “Hey baby, I just realized that I feel disrespected when you do this,” and the discussion would start around how we might address that. But what is the point of addressing this issue now? So that I could enforce stronger boundaries? I am already doing that. So that I could also receive a commensurate amount of access to her life? I don’t even want that access. I know my ex meant no disrespect, but disrespect was felt after all, even if I myself wasn’t consciously aware at the time that this sort of thing bothers me. And the perceived disrespect made the rest of my friend’s message that much more believable. I do want to end things. And I might as well end them now.
To be clear, I’m not at all accusing my ex of being intentionally manipulative. I know for a fact that she isn’t trying to manipulate me; hell, she’s the kind of person who would feel bad if I convinced her that she is actually manipulating me. I do believe her 100% when she tells me, “I still have a lot of love for you, you know?” I too harbor feelings of love for her still, although it is a passive love that largely lays dormant except in trying circumstances where I want to be reminded again of how love feels. But even so, there’s no way for me to know if she’s largely feeling that way because her subconscious wants her to feel that way so that I can still stick around. Even if you ascribed entirely positive intentions to my ex, I could easily see events playing out the exact way my friend described them: I remain close friends with her; we pick up our love and play it like a fine resonant instrument every now and then, just as she described before the breakup; eventually she misses how things used to be and we try getting back together, just for things to predictably end the same way.
It sure sounds like a plausible enough story to me, and why not when the most successful evolutionary strategy appears to have been one of “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”? If your brain could be architected in such a way that your speech and language centers are somewhat decoupled from your baser instinctual drives, then you get to reap the benefits of acting in accordance with your own selfish desires while also simultaneously having your verbal ambassador honestly proclaim your genuinely prosocial state of mind to other humans. If you didn’t act at all on your selfish baser instincts, you’d lose out compared to others who did. If instead you consciously act on them, your verbal ambassador will have a much harder time convincing those who can spot a bad liar. But if you can subconsciously act on them, that’s pretty much the best of both worlds. Or in other words: The best manipulation is done with wholehearted genuine love for the other person.
Nor am I accusing my ex of being unintentionally manipulative either, for that matter. I guess this really boils down to definitions. What does it mean to “manipulate” if hurt is neither intended nor guaranteed? This sort of coming-and-going arrangement works just fine for some people; just because I’m not one of those people doesn’t make it an inherently evil act. Doesn’t it makes sense to simply do things that make sense to you, and if others don’t like it, they can simply push back in a way that makes sense to them? Though I would note that others can’t push back until they become aware of how something you’re doing is negatively impacting them, and as was the case for me, they might not become aware of it until someone explicitly tells them. Of course, my ex wasn’t aware of the potential harm either, or else she would’ve made sure to communicate first before going for it. Is it “manipulation” if neither party is aware of what’s happening?
Not that any of this quibbling over definitions even matters in the end. Sometimes I hear about people falling for what appears to me to be an obvious scam. I’d think, Geez, I know I shouldn’t victim blame, but if people could pick up on obvious tells like this and that, maybe scamming would be less profitable and there would be fewer scammers in the world. Your lack of due diligence is directly contributing to the very problem! But as a friend reminded me, anyone can fall for a scam — especially those who think they’re too smart to get scammed in the first place. Now, it’s one thing to fall for a scam because you couldn’t pick up on the tells. But it’s quite another to be informed about how a particular type of scam works, to recognize that your present situation lines up precisely with how the scam was described to you, and then to still insist that you are not getting scammed because your situation is special and you know the person you’re talking to is trustworthy. I mean, look, at that point it literally doesn’t matter what the scammer says to you. It doesn’t matter how much sense they’re making or how little you can refute their arguments. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, you might as well treat it like a duck. (Alternatively: If it treats you like a duck would treat you, does it matter whether it was really a duck or not at the end of the day?)
I wouldn’t say my ex is being manipulative, because that word has negative connotations and I don’t think it accurately describes the kind of person she is and tries to be. But I can see that despite the pure motives of her internal experience, her outward behavior lines up with the manipulative behavior that people these days call “breadcrumbing.” It reminds me of the one thing I learned about boxing from my ex-roommate: Look at your opponent’s hands, not their face. What he taught me is apparently not even true, but the physical metaphor stuck with me nonetheless: If you’re trying to figure out whether or not to trust someone, don’t look at what they’re saying, look at what they’re doing. Once again, if something like this had happened during the relationship, it would’ve seemed like a potentially serious but entirely manageable issue to discuss. But I now realize that the list of things we have silently lost in this breakup includes trust, the desire to maintain that trust, and the conflict resolution mechanisms we had built up that relied on both of those to function. In the absence of any of that glue, it seems an obvious choice to me to simply cut ties instead of sticking around to find out whether or not I’m going to end up being hurt by her behavior.
Regret
At some point during the breakup process, I learned that part of the reason for the breakup was that my ex realized it is indeed possible to be understood and to be seen on a level much deeper than what I was capable of offering for her. She was seen and understood by someone who she could never be in a relationship with, but just knowing that such people existed helped her realize that Elmossy was not what she was ultimately looking for. One thing that I really appreciated about our relationship was that I had felt fully seen in it, and it was really validating to be seen in this way. So if indeed I was incapable of seeing how she’d like me to see, I wouldn’t hold it against my ex for wanting the same for herself.
That female friend of mine on the other hand felt quite strongly about the matter. She said that my ex will not find the person she is looking for, and even when my ex finds somebody, she will run into the same issue with them again because nobody can understand anyone else perfectly. That friend thinks my ex is making a mistake she will come to regret, but it will be too late for her because I may have found another girl by then. (Come to think of it, does that scenario come across as oddly specific?)
Personally, it doesn’t sit right with me that a well-intentioned decision someone else made would benefit me while causing them misery. This breakup has been the catalyst for a lot of personal growth that I’m grateful for. Once again, I see major parallels between this relationship and the last job I had. Being fired from that job was the best thing to have happened to me, but I would’ve never been brave enough to quit by myself. Even if you had told me how great quitting would be, I would’ve told you, “Personal growth? I’ll have all the time in the world to figure myself out once I have attained proper financial stability.” Looking back, I remind myself of my friend who reached E6 at Facebook, whose spouse was also a software engineer at Facebook. I’m guessing the two of them must have made at least $1 million every year (in 2021 dollars!) in pre-tax income, and they still felt financially insecure due to having to raise kids as they paid the mortgage on a $3 million home. At what point would they (or I myself pre-2022) have felt financially safe? Not anytime soon, that was for sure. But being fired from the job released me from the golden handcuffs that I was too chicken to take off myself.
Similarly, if you had somehow convinced me at the beginning of this year that I would be able to experience the best time of my adult life so far if I broke up with my girlfriend, I would’ve still told you, “Well, thanks for the info, but I’d rather live a happy life with her than a fantastic life without her.” I was in some ways a simple man. As with the job, someone else had made a great decision for my life that I would’ve never made on my own, and I think they should be rewarded for that.
So I hope my ex doesn’t end up feeling like she made a mistake and regretting it. But that got me thinking about what I would want to say to her if such a scenario did happen:
“Be brave. You chose this. I don’t mean that in a manner of ‘Haha, you’ve fucked around and now you’re finding out!’ I genuinely mean that in the best way possible: The beautiful act of exercising your own human agency involves choosing an action along with all its consequences. In tennis, you don’t swing just to hit the ball, you swing for the full arc, hitting the ball in the middle and following through afterwards. You can’t properly hit a ball with all the power it deserves without deciding to go the whole way in the first place. Follow through on the choice you made. Maintain your locus of control by remembering that these consequences, both intended and unintended, were a choice.
Remember how you had discovered during The Ceremony that this is Ultimate Reality, that this is truly it? Your higher self can leave at any time, but instead you chose to be here in order to bear witness to this moment of Ultimate Reality. Well, I think that one of our higher selves is our past self. By exercising your human agency, you too are participating in the divine act of choosing which Ultimate Reality to witness.
It’s okay to feel like you’ve made a mistake. Sometimes that can be a valid lens to view our decisions through. But it’s not the only one. There are many ways to interpret what had happened and is still happening. You’re all right. Everything will be all right in the end.”
I don’t know if my ex will ever read those words. I doubt the scenario my friend described will come to pass, and even if it does, I don’t know that my ex will feel like reaching out to me about it. And if my ex also ends up deciding to adopt the no-contact mentality for herself, that would include no longer checking up on these blog posts to see how I’m doing. It feels a little bit silly to write out a whole thing addressed to her that she will never read, but it also feels good to write out useful advice that I may just end up needing myself in the future. I have, after all, chosen to walk down this path of no-contact, and fear and pain await me.
Rather than what my friend described, if I am to guess at how things play out for my ex, it would be this: She actually does find exactly who she is looking for. Perhaps my friend was right, and my ex eventually finds herself once again wishing that her partner could understand her on a deeper, more fundamental level. Or perhaps my ex is right, and being seen really isn’t a problem once you cross a certain threshold. Either way, her relationship with that guy is going well and swell, but something or the other is just kind of… missing. Some emotions you can’t outrun simply by changing partners; at some point you have to stand and actually deal with them. So it is that her relationship with him reaches the same junction our relationship did, but by then she will have grown enough to make a different choice than she made for ours.
That’s just my little piece of fanfic, but if it does happen to play out like that, I deeply respect that. Looking back on my own past, I can see that there were women I could have totally chosen to get into a decent relationship with if I were the person I am now — but I wasn’t, and so nothing panned out. Sometimes love is not just about pairing up the right people, it’s also about pairing them up at the right time in their lives.
As for a piece of fanfic for myself: There’s this scene in Man Seeking Woman parodying Frankenstein, where this woman assembles the perfect man from individually acquired body parts and zaps her perfect boyfriend to life. He turns out to be gay.
Years ago, I had fantasized about what a perfect partner for me would look like. I ran some back-of-the-envelope math based on American demographic data, and found that she would indeed be roughly one-in-a-million. I told friends, and every one of them agreed on how impossible it was without even needing to look at the math. I think I did that exercise as a way to try to balance out what I valued in a partner with what was statistically attainable, to show myself that it’s not realistic to reject women simply because they don’t match up with my preconceived notions of what an ideal partner would be like.
Lo and behold, I actually met the perfect girl of my fantasies, and it was a merry time of idealism and adventure, but in the end she wasn’t someone for me to settle down with. I’m never going to meet a girl who hits my conscious ideals more perfectly than my ex, so instead of continuing to chase perfection, I look for and eventually find fundamental compatibility.
Difficulties and challenges
What I didn’t expect after the decision to cut ties was that I would feel overwhelming amounts of sadness. It was as if the breakup was happening all over again. Before my decision, I would have days where I hardly thought of her at all; after my decision, I thought about her constantly. Before my decision, I had some of the best days I’ve ever had in my entire adult life. After my decision, I had some of the most difficult days since 2022. And yet, as trying as those days may have been, they also felt necessary and healing.
One cute and silly memory in particular would make me sob. We’d say “BB world!” with our arms spread out like the emoji 🙌 , as copious amounts of sunlight streamed in through the bedroom window of our Kinkora Road apartment. The juxtaposition of that happy past version of her, blissfully unaware of anything that was to come, with the current morose version of me, painfully aware of all that would eventually unfold from the bliss, was too much to bear. It felt like a memory of a childhood that we both shared, like we were both basking in joy with all the innocence of childhood, without any understanding of just how beautiful such moments are, without any care for what happens down the line. It’s not that I can’t be present as an adult, but there’s something different about being present as an adult and setting aside thoughts that don’t serve the moment, versus being present as a kid because you didn’t know the first thing about mortgages or the consequences that a delinquent loan could have on your life. I don’t think it’s a worse kind of joy, but I do think it’s a different flavor of joy, and I don’t think you can taste the innocent childhood flavors again after having grown up from all your post-childhood experiences. I don’t think I’ll be able to enter into a relationship as beautiful as Elmossy again without recognizing it for what it is, and it won’t even be because I’m trying to analyze and dissect the relationship.
Sometimes it feels as if I’m a toddler learning how to walk by myself. I’m still toddling, but I’m learning. I fall down hard sometimes, but even if I don’t have the strength to get up right away, I can still crawl. I can take my time to stand back up and take the next step forward. It’s been an honor to have walked alongside my ex for the last three years of our spiritual journeys together. Now it’s time for me to fully grow into myself as I bravely walk my own path and see where it leads.