I told my therapist today that I felt perfectly comfortable at cardiac rehab on Tuesday. I said I look forward to going back,  the experience was safe and warm, and I know I will work hard there and help my heart to heal.

According to much research, heart patients to take cardiac rehab do dramatically better than those who don’t. Cardiologists love cardiac rehab.

“Why do you think it is that you felt so safe and comfortable there and so fearful and uncomfortable on the bike?” she asked me.

I was startled by the question. I hadn’t thought about that.

As I thought about it, I said one reason was that I was in women’s care, there were no men there. And the women seemed to care about their work and my health.

I guess I feel much safer around women, especially when it comes to my health care. Women often take the trouble to get to know me and listen to me. Men most often don’t.

My therapist – she got me through my breakdown and helped me turn my life around – and I have been talking a lot about my being fearless about so many things – work, heart surgery – but rarely about how I will perform at physical or athletic things.

We are trying to explore why that might be so. This is what that e-bike started. I guess life never moves in a straight line. Zigs and zags.

I have found men much more judgemental of me in much of my life, especially my father. I am in control; I can easily stand or climb on a treadmill or stationary bike.

I can control the settings, get lost in the new Taylor Swift album.

I have confidence there, assurance, and determination.

The therapist suggested that because of my family situation, I never really learned how to learn. This is true, no one ever taught me anything at home.

I dropped out of college and never took writing class; I hated every day of school.

Some of this, I’m sure, was my undiagnosed Dyslexia, which made school difficult. I never asked for help or was offered any.

But you have been very successful in life,  she said, you seem to do what you want to do and succeed.

I was lucky to be a writer, I said, I always loved it, I never took a creative writing class or needed one. I wrote a book a year for many years.

In a sense, I hid behind my writing. It permitted me to avoid facing the truth about me and my life or learning how to live in the world.

I didn’t really have to learn about life; I just wrote and wrote. The difference now is that I still write, but there are many other things in my life that I do and that I love – Maria, the blog, photography, the dogs and animals, my farm, my greatest teacher.

But I never learned to live or love.

I told my therapist that I never understood what love was until I met Maria. That, I said, is how I ended up in a loveless marriage. I really didn’t know there was another choice.

But you can’t accept the love of people, she said, you always push people away when they get close, at least you did until Maria.

But my wife and I lost our love for one another, I protested. I didn’t know how to love.

I know you don’t want to hear this, she said, but I think Paula loved you very much.

This brought me up short. This surprised me. I never saw it that way.

Paula and I  ended our 35-year marriage with five years of argument and fear.  I’ve always seen it as something we both wanted and were relieved to get.

Yes, a divorce lawyer once told me, the worst divorces are the ones where people loved each other.

Those were the ones that are hard for people to let go, nobody wants to say goodbye.

I have no regrets about the life Maria and I have built. But still, the idea stunned me. Could I have missed that much in my own fog and haze?

This was something my therapist wanted me to consider, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it.

That for most of my life, I couldn’t be loved.