I kinda hit a wall yesterday. I was tired from my late night weekend and all the energy I poured into getting to know new people. I drove home yesterday feeling drained. If I am honest, I was also sad. Feeling disconnected from my home life and from a social life. I felt alone...really alone. Usually, I like being alone. However yesterday, I did not. Alone felt like a sentence, a prison term that I could not parole out of...
Here are my thoughts which landed me in a jail cell of my own making...
I had this idea, need, belief to care about someone. I mean really be attracted and interested in someone else. Not that they would do the same for me, I mean, I guess that too because it really isn’t any fun when love is a one way street. But I was more focused on me allowing myself to be interested. To meet someone who really sets my soul on fire...that almost primal need to feel interested and connected to another person.
I ended up, quite by accident, having a long conversation with my friend John on my drive home and I was honest with him about the fact that I was a little down and feeling a bit despondent about my life.
I feel like I had true love one time in my life. It was magical and I felt seen, connected, wanted and loved. I felt the same about him. He was everything to me without taking over my life. He did not try to monopolize my life and needed his own down time. We seemed to have it all right up until the point he left...
For the past two years, I have been trying to unpack his departure. He now becoming the gold standard for my relationships. There is a part of me that will only be healed by the love of another, my inability to move on, dependent upon having something even better with someone new.
But that left me holding the proverbial bag. I loved him. I was committed to him. I just did. For once in my life, he was enough. He was everything that I wanted. He was my lover, my friend, my confidant. The place I wanted to rest my head every night. He was what completed me. It has been over two years now and I can’t seem to move on. I feel trapped between this honest desire to be alone and this still aching need I have to love another. I want to feel that connection and be someone’s other half. I want to love someone again but I wonder if I am able. My heart so broken from his departure, that I will never be able to again.
I am ok with either extreme. Alone or Together. It is my mental gymnastics that keep backflipping me across the divide between the two that is causing me hardship and pain. I spend a lot of time alone and I enjoy it. I relish in it. I can’t imagine my life without it. But then there are times when I wonder why I seem destined to be alone. Why can’t I connect? What is wrong with me?
It is like I have been given this life riddle that I cannot solve and I am wandering around aimlessly with a partial solution but try as I might, I cannot find the resolution to the remaining part.
If I am honest, I want that feeling again. But that feeling belongs to him. I have been unsuccessful in liberating those thoughts and feelings from him. He the keeper of intimacy, sex and love. I gave those things to him and now I cannot seem to reclaim them for myself. I do not know how to give them to someone else. I feel incapable and that makes me feel even more pathetic.
I have done the work to see where our relationship was off kilter. I see why he left and I see why that was not a bad thing. I can see that in many ways, despite the love, I did not want him anymore. He never really there for me in the ways and manner I needed. Perhaps, it was the same for him. Love present but him needing something different from me that I could not give. He brave enough to walk away from me so that he could have a chance to achieve for himself what we were not successful in creating together.
I wish I could just squarely land on one path...the solitary path or the together path. I am tired and weary from my attempt to walk them both. Today I feel somewhat devastated by my own trudging. I am moving forward with purpose but it is taking its toll. This would be the reason that I decided to take a year off of dating. But that hasn’t really happened. I have even failed at the Mansbatical. Fearful that an entire year absence would cause me to miss something amazing.
This leaves me in a position of feeling stuck. Unable to move forward, and unable to go back. I remain fixed in position, locked in place while also feeling like I moving forward as time seems to speed up. I want to trust the universe and divine timing, but I am also impatient and have this need for excitement and interest.
In my most thoughtful moments, I am unwilling to give up my dream of finding that person with whom I can be myself and be loved and love another. Working hard to round out my sharpness and edges. Committed to this other being as much as I am committed to myself. Working, loving, changing together. But often, it feels like a dream that will never materialize. I will be dreaming this same dream on my death bed.
On this MLK day, I wonder if he ever got to see from the other side the world we live in today that, for sure did not actualize his dream, but did move it forward a bit. We do not live in a world where there is equality but we do live in probably the most egalitarian time to date. He having helped us all to push past the confines of history and moved us into a new consciousness.
I guess in many ways I am trying to do that here. Trying to move myself past the limits of my current paradigm and into some sort of new way of living that brings a new reality. Trying, somewhat desperately, to love the circumstances of my life even when they are less to my liking. To not allow my thoughts to imprison me. To turn towards love, always.
Putting my current heart break into the context of social justice humbles me. Makes me see that my plight and lot in life privileged. Here I am bemoaning my desire to connect, to matter to be seen and loved, when there are so many people living lives that fight to spend one second in the light. I am pretty sure that Dr. King’s message was all about finding the light within and shining that, sharing that light with others so that their darkness could be lightened. Their heavy load lessened. It takes a lot of courage to love instead of hate. Maybe I can find comfort and joy in his words...perhaps my willingness to keep trudging, an example and inspiration to those still walking in the dark. My refusal to remain quiet, evidence of a life still being lived. So today I will say this: loving matters. No matter how fucked up our attempts, it still matters. Sharing our pain about those attempts also matters. Each sentence, each thought a beacon of light to those shrouded in the darkness. Today, I will do my best to shine on...so that others may enjoy the light.
