Remember where we left off yesterday? The parking space that we found in full-fledged renunciation of a thing? Well, part of the reason why I’ve always struggled is that I’ve failed to come to a complete and full stop in that very space. Not even close. I can’t kid myself. I know a thing to be true and I fight against it with that knowledge, and so everything feels like a compromise that I have to make but don’t want to.
Let’s not be so nebulous, eh? I would love to look at a friendship and tell myself that everything is fine. Fine, fine, fine. It’s all good. There’s plenty of history and good stuff and all the things that make it work, despite the drama. I can’t though. Every time I look at the connection, I notice the cracks and broken pieces. I always think about think about the misshapenness of a thing.
I had a friend who told me that everything was fine between us, and I was just doing that thing where I was acting overly sensitive. You know what I did? I agreed. There is a baseline truth when it comes to my sensitivity and surely, that means that there is a certain validity to the statement that everything is essentially fine, save my overreaction based on my feeling everything. If only I weren’t so intense, the dynamic would be so different. Of course, this becomes an endless circular reference. I crave change but I know I can’t change and then I regret who I am and my inability to morph and so, I pretend. If I can’t pretend that I’ve changed altogether, then I fake it. And then, the event that would normally cause me pain seems totally manageable.
This entire process and engagement take a staggering amount of energy, as you might imagine. I am endlessly fighting against myself and my instincts. Also, there is so much bullshit that it’s hard to swim out of it. Sometimes I find myself saying ‘I’m fine’ or ‘that doesn’t bother me’ so often that I half believe it in the way that it annoys me when I still feel a tug in my belly. That war inside of me makes me question everything. I lose my deference to my gut, because I can’t get to the root of what my insides are really telling me. Not even a little. I feel endlessly upside down.
That’s no way to conduct a friendship, and yet, I feel like since it is so easy for everyone else, this must just be the price I have to pay to make it work for me. While it’s easier for everyone else, I am not everyone else, and so, I have to expect something different. Something that challenges me more. Something that occasionally makes me cry. Something that hurts me.
The problem is that I find myself exhausted a lot. I do. It’s so tiring to pretend to be a thing that I think other people are, and I’m way too afraid to let my real self shine through. What if I do and then no one likes me that way and then I find myself sitting alone? Will that feel unbearably lonely, or will it actually feel better because at least I will find myself in a place of honesty.
I think that’s perhaps the biggest mistake that humans make and I hear this from friends and family and co-workers all the damn time. They crave a thing because our society has told them it’s the solution. Get a partner and you will never be lonely again. Have a best friend and you will have someone to grow old with, no matter what. Have children and you will have people to take care of you. I am sure you must realize by now that these are false paradigms. Sure, they exist as reality for many, but for an equal number of folks, the experience is different. They are very lonely inside their relationship, and feel profoundly the conditional nature of their closest friendship, and worry that they’ve raised their children to actually not take care, of anyone.
Still, we hold fast to these ideas and we go against our better judgment and the thing that feels the most sensical to us is some deference or loyalty to this thing that everyone peddles without any specific evidence.
I had for most of my life until recently. I told myself that I was broken every time a relationship failed and I thought that if only I could get to the bottom of what in me pushed people away, or if I could do a better job of just sucking things up, maybe I would find myself on the right side of everything.
I knew that I needed to grow and learn, but it honestly never occurred to me that the growth I needed the most would take me incredibly far away from all of those constructs. I never realized that to be most myself and to feel free and to come into my own in the most real way, I would need to shed all of that skin. I would need to let go in a very, very real way.
This was so scary for me because even though I knew I wasn’t happy, I didn’t have any guarantee that I would find happiness on the other side of my journey. Funny, right? I didn’t have any sense of certainty other than my sadness and sense of disappointment on the “right” end of the world and yet, I feared change because that somehow seemed more uncertain.
And then, one day I realized that I had no choice but to plunge into the darkness. I had to step into all of it knowing that I could lose absolutely everything. I may not lose everything, but I had to be willing to lose it all. I had to be willing to let go of everything I had been and everything I told myself I wanted to be and everything that I thought everyone else was. I had to sit with feelings of failure and look at myself in the mirror and tell myself that I hadn’t failed. I wasn’t perfect, and I had work to do, but this exercise wasn’t a failure, but rather, a choice.
More soon.
x
L.
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