The Dissonance of Delusion...

All this time alone has given me time to reflect.  Reflect on how I love and how I fail at loving.  To be clear, I fail at the general loving thing a great deal but where my failures really shine is in the romantic department.  I know this isn’t a shocker, literally everyone who knows me or reads this blog, knows that I am just not very good a selecting loving partners.

I have thought about this a lot while I am away.  Removed from my daily living tasks and routines.  Mired in a few situationships that have pretty much failed due to my lack of care and attendance while I have been away.  I guess out of sight out of mind is operative here.

What I have come to is that I do not like the dissonance of delusion but it is comfortable for me.  I seek it out and I have replicated it repeatedly.  Giving my all to something or someone who I KNOW is going to let me down, fail me and disappoint me in all the ways I already know all too well.

So why do I keep doing it?

I am afraid to really love someone who is capable of loving me back.  I feel safe when I am the one that is functional, dumping gobs of love onto and into someone else.  I am the pitcher, they the chalice.  I give, they take.  I am barely involved really.  And I have to own that I prefer it this way...except I really don’t.  It is just familiar.  And a wound, and I so want that wound to heal but I want it to heal by me doing what I always do but working out this time.

And that is the delusion.  That it will ever work out any time.  It will not.  It can’t because my romantic relationships are doomed from the start which is why I pick them in the first place.  I am only comfortable getting into things where I can see the ending in the beginning.  Then I am safe, even though I am so not safe.

This is not a new thought.  It is not a revelation.  But I have been given the opportunity to sit with it for kilometer after kilometer.  And I guess where I am with it is that I derive a certain level of comfort in the dissonance of my own delusions.    The lack of harmony with myself and another feels so familiar it is all I know and so replicate because again, it is all I know!

The long shot is never going to pay off.  The drunk is not going to sober up. The malignant narcissist isn’t going to change.  The traumatized man isn’t going to commit to working through the trauma with me.  I have to stop selecting broken and then being so bitterly disappointed that broken breaks me further.

But how the fuck do you become attracted to healthy?  I have 55 years of crafting my delusional quest for the long shot paying off.  It feels almost like a self betrayal to give up now.  And that is where I am right now.  Caught in a trap of my own making, so far in that I am not sure I can ever find my way out.

I would love to be the person that stands before you that says “NO MORE, NEVER AGAIN!” And mean it.  But if we look at my distant and more recent past, we find that I say this a lot. 

“I am SO DONE!”

“I will not do this again!”

“NEVER AGAIN!”

Only to repeat the same mistake with a new fucked up man.  It is how I do things.  And I have reached a level of acceptance that I have not ever been able to achieve before.  And, for now, I am just going to try to own the skin I am in.  I need someone who has trauma in their lives, which isn’t a hard requirement to come by...we all have it.  Perhaps what I need to work on is finding someone who is willing to heal their trauma and is already actively working on it.  Or maybe I have to grieve the loss of what I think a traumatized person will bring to my life and start just seeking someone healthy.

Or, perhaps, I just need to accept that I love the dissonance of delusion.  This is who I am today.  I revel in it and I keep repeating it.  And today, this is who I am.  And for now, I am going to try to find some peace with this version of myself who doesn’t select well, who isn’t all better and isn’t making great stands that TODAY I will be different.  I am at a place where I am getting that perhaps I never, ever will be any different than I am right now.

There is magic in the lack of harmony, the chaos and confusion.  It keeps life interesting and though I find myself bitterly disappointed repeatedly, that seems to be something I enjoy in some perverse way because I keep signing up for it.  

So I guess I am just going to sit in my delusional dissonance and not try to fix it and make it all better.  No promises that this time...I swear to fucking God.  Today I am just owning that I am fucked up where men are concerned and slowly coming to doubt that I will ever be able to do this whole loving thing where men are concerned better.  Perhaps, it is a better use of my time to just accept that I am like this and try as I might, I just can’t change.

I know that until I address whatever payoff I am getting from these fucked up relationships with the men I choose to date, there will be no recovery.  We do not stop doing things until we find some other way to get our needs met.  We do not stop our behavior until even we can see that our behavior isn’t working for us anymore.  And I am there, I can see that my choices for dating partners is not serving me...but real change comes when you do the very hard work to take contrary action and this is the place it all falls apart for me.

And today, I am just going to allow myself to be right there.   I am not all better, I still want the long shot to pay off and I can see that this is perhaps just another striation of my addiction playing out in an area of my life that I have quite stubbornly refused to look at as an addiction.

That was very hard to write.

Sigh.

Again, still.

Sometimes, I get very sick of writing again, still.  Feels like such a defeatist admission.  But, again, still, is the only way I know how to own that which plagues me, still.  I keep trying, and I keep failing because giving up just isn’t in my nature.

Again, still...

Fuck.