It’s Sunday, beautiful out. There’s plenty to do, but I can’t make my self do homework because it’s not physically distracting enough. My emotions are torrential at the moment, and I believe the only cure is time. Sometimes I worry there are better solutions, and that failing to avail myself of them means the time brings a shell, a hardness, that will be difficult to chisel in the future.
Writing has always been an outlet. Needing to have an outlet has tended to alienate me from my peers who in general act as if life is pretty okay. Over time I’ve realized this is a charade, but it’s not completely absolving. Sometimes I feel backwards, like my heart overflows uncontrollably where others jealousy or anger does. I try to identify common threads in this pattern to mark habits I can assume to dilute the strength to which I feel.
The worst is when I write because everyone in my life I could talk to is tainted in some way, most often by having had a relationship with them or because I feel that their advice tends to be patronizing. Not having a shoulder or someone to hold is probably the hardest part of being upset for me.
Despite deciding recently that having expectations of the path of relationships was causing me stress and not soluble with how I’m living my life, I somehow find that I never escaped that hole and I’m still looking down wondering what’s in the darkness below.
I feel like I’m stumbling towards my fears of being alone like my father, because I can’t seem to find a balance in people between wanting to be loved and wanting to live their lives. This feels inextricably linked to that path. I feel very alone right now, and impotent to do anything about it. The more my hopes get up, then let down, the more cynical I feel.
I don’t believe it the course of my life isn’t knit out of my own choices, but I do feel like the material, myself, I have little choice in the making of.
There are trends. Every girl I’ve dated since Heidi has made comment to the affect my strong feelings have on making the relationship move at an undesired speed. As a result, I’ve tried to withhold expressing them but tend to be talked out of that. I have no other manner in which to prevent my heart from leaking, like fuel from an drum, setting myself up for intense burn-off.
I fight the desire to leave this all behind. I love this place, and these people, but I’m burning out. Perhaps I’m destined to give too much because I feel so much, and it will always wear on me.
I guess I need to sit back for a while and watch, and hope life turns out a little better on it’s own accord? The quiet of my bedroom and the warmth of a blanket are calling.
I always feel weird leaving comments on this, as I am your friend and roommate and you are in the living room and I am right outside and so interweb communique seems sort of alien and bizarre. But- you are awesome and I while I do think that feeling alone is sort of necessary and helpful and clarifying -at times-, I wanted to say that, as one of your friends, I feel VERY shouldery (in re: my shoulder, your lean) in regards to you, and if I do ever come off as patronizing, its truly not my intent- its all coming from a very earnest desire to HELP in some way, though I do know (Tanya and others have told me before) that it can come off rather bitchy and urrg (!!!). I have trouble just being an ear for my friends, when sometimes a caring, loving ear is all that is needed. Rather, I want to take things apart and examine them and find a solution and on and on and, sometimes, ON ON ON. Which can be rude and overwhelming and its something I’m really trying to work on. But please, please, please never feel alienated from coming to me as a friend and I, in turn, will work hard at being a better one.
Also- when I think of my future, you are always a part of it, in a very concrete, wholesome, being old and grumpy and fixing shit up and drinking pabst and talkin’ bout bike powered hot tubs on our bizarre, container built porches, surrounded by other old grumpy friends who think life is awesome because, well, IT IS, and not because we are deluding ourselves into thinking that way, with children and pets and neighbors running amok and wrecking havoc all around, and that futurevision is inherently, almost by default, a different path than the one your father has found himself on. So whether or not thats the future you want (ha!), please know that you’ll always have a place within it. I really feel I’ve hit a point in my life where the relationships I’m forming/have formed are very real and caring and long lasting, and I feel ferociously loyal to maintaining them and working on them and nurturing them for many, many, many years to come. And you are one of those relationships, broheim.
OK- I’ve hit my emo output for the day. I have to like, go spit on one of the cats to counter balance it.
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I expect my future to be filled with more random adventures with friends. The relationship trauma at the turn of the year solidified that, insofar as much time was spent thinking about how I wanted to live my life in the near future. Which was that I don’t want to change how I’m living any time soon. Of course, not that I won’t, who knows, but you know, that’s not what I want now.
Which isn’t to say that I won’t change cities or jobs or such, it’s just that I have a lifestyle that I’m happy with, and it consists mostly of the things that we do every weekend, because living like this makes me happy.
I’m quite alright with there not being solutions to my problems. Or rather, I expect there not to be. I know they aren’t simple, especially when they deal with how I feel about people. My love for my friends and my family, for my adventures and my hobbies, is so much more functional than seems to work out for significant others. Which I suppose is a compromise that I should weigh in exactly that way. My heart really wants someone to nurture in my life, but it doesn’t seem like a model that’s been working for me. I feel like I’m unable to find a balance between dating people who have too much time and not enough independence, and the opposite. Which is fucking stupidly black and white of me to even say, but I do seem to be on some sort of pendulum here.
I’ve been feeling defeated because outside of a couple odd occurrences, I feel like all of my relationships since I’ve moved to Seattle have been good except they weren’t what I was looking for. Now that I’m more aware of what I’m looking for, I feel like I’m running into functional problems. Which may not makes sense. I’m feeling blindsided. In the past I tend to blame my late foray into dating and blame it all on being a decade of experience behind, but that’s mostly bullshit since I put a much higher than average amount of thought and introspection into all of this.
I had a tendency “while dating a girl once” (as I say now) to try to solve problems, which failed on two levels. One, whatever. Two, they weren’t problems that needed a solution. Really communication laced with compassion seems to move people along best of all. Yeah. Holy crap I’m still awake.
Yeah, I think some of how I relate to people is based in how I learned to solve problems when I was younger, which was very “active listening” and “conflict resolution” based- with the emphasis being RESOLUTION. Part of why I still operate in such a manner (and still run up against alienating some of my closest friends) is because that is how I work out my own inner conflicts- lots of introspection on past actions/reactions, trying to find the root of where certain feelings/responses/biases, etc might have come from, and what they mean to me NOW, and that is what I expect from my friends in return. When I want to go out to the bar and just blarg and not get any feedback other than a hug and a “totally”, I’ll usually try to preface those conversations with a “Hey, I just need to bitch and rant now” versus a “this is what I’m feeling, please help me understand it” sort of diolouge. But I also tend to internalize my issues and work them out on my own, then present them to the rest of the world and bounce them off others to see if I really did figure it out and if its really the truth (Like- I think this is what I believe, now lets put it into motion and see if it rings true or if I’m just squawking rhetoric). This emotional internalization is also, probably, my #1 romantic relationship “problem”. I was talking to your mom about it (ha! everyone is talking to your mom these days) a few weeks ago, about the idea that I don’t really feel lonely for a romantic relationship, I never really have felt that sort of pull, and for a long time I thought it was a defect, some sort of flaw that meant I was cold hearted and destined to be alone and bitter and mean. But, through thinking it out and talking with her and others, I realized that I have invested alot of time and energy and love into the friendships I have, and that I, in return, get the majority of my emotional and mental needs met by those relationships, which gives me the luxury of taking my time in being “single”- not needing a romantic relationship, but instead, waiting to find someone that I WANT a romantic relationship with, because of who THEY are versus what I need. If that even makes sense.
And there was some point to this that related to your post, but I think I’ve wandered into tangent land and lost it, which I will blame entirely on the coffee not being brewed yet.