I think there may be something wrong with me. I am feeling lately like I have lost or maybe never had some essential skill to really connect with others. I feel like I have come to allow and let go perhaps a little too well.
I was hiking with my friend yesterday and we were discussing dating and falling in love. She is trying to sort through the morass of men on dating sites and figure out what she wants. She has met some men that she likes and several others that she did not. She seems to have a normal reaction to dating. She is looking for love and commitment and a partner, not necessarily right this minute...but eventually.
I feel broken. I feel like I am missing some sort of essential ingredient. That while all of those things sound lovely, I just can’t see it happening in my life. It isn’t that I don’t want them, I do. I just seem to not be able sustain a belief that a committed partnership is something that I can have in my life...
I can make a connection but I seem to lack some critical piece that transfers initial connection to something more. Like love or commitment or something else. Perhaps it is just not my time. Perhaps it is just not in the cards for me. I have met some really great men, but there is just this part of me that desires freedom over being locked in.
I have come to truly trust that that which is not meant for me, cannot be willed into being. I used to feel like I lacked worth. But I don’t anymore. It isn’t that I feel like I am not good enough or to the other extreme, too good. I am just a regular woman, who has some pretty great assets but so do a lot of other women. I am just trying to make the best of what I have. And share it while maintaining some life of my own. Instead of allowing myself to be subsumed into a relationship where I allow myself to wholly disappear.
I was talking to a friend the other day, and she kind of turned things on their head. She suggested that perhaps, instead of feeling like a dating failure, perhaps my failure was at remaining single. Maybe I am just better single and I keep trying to have relationships with people and that is just not my strong suit. Well, at least romantic relationships. I have a lot of good friends that care about me and I them. We are close and I have several that would totally take a bullet for me. Ride or die friends.
This was a completely new thought. It totally reframed my entire dating history. Perhaps I am supposed to be alone and I keep failing to connect because I am not supposed to be in partnership. Perhaps I am just still so wounded in loving and losing that that part of me willing to risk my heart is just not ready.
I have to say that I have yet to meet the man that I feel like I could live without...I am always able to envision life without him. Perhaps this is where the work needs to be done, getting over the one who I really wanted to spend the rest of my life with....why was I so willing to do that with him, and why can’t I move on, it has been almost three fucking years. I really am done with that and I really don’t want him back and I can really see that my life is better without him...so why am I here, asking this damn question?
I don’t know about any of you but as the Mansbatical nears the end, I am totally sick of talking about this! So I am sure you are probably even more sick of me talking about it. In some ways, I feel like I have made so much progress. Where I started a year ago compared to where I am now, light years away from each other. I have come into being in this most amazing relationship with myself. I love me. I care about me. I have learned to put me first. I have my own back. I can tell you when I am hurting and need something. I can be responsible for my own happiness. I have let men off the hook. It isn’t them. I am clear about that. They owe me nothing. I appreciate them and enjoy them and am no longer holding the current ones in my life accountable for the sins of men past. I feel like to the degree possible in life, I can meet men and others where they are and then share who I am right there in the moment.
But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that there still feels like there is something missing in me. Not the men. I see clearly now that it has never really been about them. The men just outward manifestations of my own internal conflict. I picked what I was trying to resolve. So grateful for this insight and to see that it was me more than it was them. I created the circumstances that got me where I felt stuck and lost. Some of them delivered some pretty painful lessons, but never as much as I did. I was the one who made the selection and then committed to something that was always and forever going to let me down.
I feel frivolous even writing about this. There is a worldwide pandemic, people are dying, we are having the largest political crisis I believe this country has ever known, the entire West Coast is on fire. The Southeast is being inundated with tropical storms and hurricanes. The sun has taken on a daily apocalyptic glow that dogs our days and lights up the sky with the ominous portend of finality. Who really gives a shit about my failure to connect...fuck, how self involved can I be?
But I am still over here trying to sort through it all. Trying to make some contact. Trying to reach out beyond my borders and touch another in a loving way. We all need each other, perhaps now more than ever. Perhaps that is why this failure to connect feels so acute to me right now. I already feel unmoored and untethered. Failing to be able to land in a place of loving, lasting connection just makes me feel alone in not a good way.
I am going to focus on the people in my life that I do feel connected to. Perhaps in highlighting those relationships where I feel like I love the person and they love me back, I will be able to see where I am missing the boat. Never have there been more people in my life that I love, deeply, madly and truly. Yet, never have I felt so adrift and unable to really find one person that I feel like I could commit to.
So I am going to try to own my brokenness and just allow it to be there. To not make too big of a deal about it. To just accept that the timing is not up to me. I am simply supposed to own my shit and be accountable for changing it. I am supposed to trust that when and if it is ever time for me again, I will be able to bridge the divide. Until then, I think I am just supposed to keep loving and fling wide the doors to my life. Anyone can walk in, anyone can walk out. When it is time to risk telling someone I really, really want them to stay...I will know and be given the words. Until then, I am just going to keep going, muddling through as best I can. Doing my best to honor the people who are here now and understanding that it will never be completely up to me if they stay or go. My only real task is to keep my commitment to sow seeds of connection. Be like the fucking Johnny Appleseed of heartfelt connection. Even when I doubt my innate ability to do it. Just keep throwing out the seeds, and trusting the the earth will know what to do with them when it is time.
