6 days and counting......

What can be said for my emotionalness these past few days? It is so reminiscent of the days when I was in the mental health system, taking "anti-" everything drugs, feeling hopeless and like there was hardly a reason to do anything more than coast along. I have been terribly bitchy at work since Friday. I have gotten things done as needed but have seen the world around me through the eyes of misery and discontent, as opposed to seeing the simplicity of "nothing happening" that has really been the truth of what is going on.

I went back to porn briefly because, as any good addict comes to believe, I can handle it. I suppose I am addicted to the idea of "love" and being "in love". Do I want to be in a relationship? I don't know. I don't really know if doing so is a realistic and useful thing, an ingrained instinctual reality or structural/cultural training from early childhood that says we all must strive to cohabitate with someone else. I keep running into the wall over it, bloodied and persisting, and I have no way of knowing if the action of pursuit really is worth the trade off.

Are people really happy in their relationships? I cannot ever know. When confronted with it as a question, "they" will declare their happiness or "they" will declare their misery, but one does not really ever come to know the truth outside of living in that other person's reality, and obviously, that is totally impossible. It is within themselves exclusively that they know happiness or not and barring my ability to "get in" and live their experience, I will always just have an outsider's view and will always have to take their word for it.

So, it is a highly personal experience. I do get caught up in the ideas and pictures of how it looks from my outside perspective, how they spin it to look prosperous and healthy or "happy-making". I have no inside perspective right now on a good relationship, as I am not in one, and I wonder if it is not just "training" that drives me to great effort to fulfill this "dream". I do not "know" how it can be, "should be", "should look like", "should feel like", "how" it is achieved, where to meet people, if the effort to try to put myself in the sights of others is worthwhile or futile, if the reality is that "it" will just "land" in my life of "its own accord". I don't really know.

The belief that "it SHOULD HAPPEN" is a damning weight so great, so destructive to the soul. It robs me of creativity, fluidity or purpose, compassion and goodwill. This belief makes me small inside and miserable, bitter and jaded, ugly to the core. My belief in the ideal of it kills me slowly each time it is put before me and then ripped away again. My belief that I "should" be in a relationship, that it is "right" for me to do, that it is "natural" means that every time it is still untrue and I continue to believe in it, I am damned by my own perceived failings.

I am bombarded constantly with the images of companionship, the notion that is is a regular part of life, and without it I have always believed something to be wrong within me, making me feel "less than", crazy, wasted, useless, "it's all in vain", etc. I have friends who seem to be living in the same kind of mental state. Is it more usual for us to be single and act alone in spite of the near-constant barrage of messaging that drives us to seek fulfillment in relationship? How much time am I wasting daily, "on the hunt" for whatever(which leaves me feeling empty and blue, bitter and useless), as opposed to putting that energy to work toward an actionable goal? I do not know what that goal would be for me but I do see my activities around relationship pursuits going unfulfilled and offering a view into futility defined. It is like the proverbial banging one's head against the wall, to the point of (daily) bleeding, yet being told by some great aspect that it is good and right to expose one's self to the grind of the hunt because "We all belong with someone"! Is that true?

I am finding that I need a break from the effort. I need a sabbatical from the torturous effort that twists my heart up into a loaded and painful wretch and makes me miserable toward others, negative, hurtful, hurt-filled, believing a message of lack and emptiness. I am stunned as I read my words just how clearly I am self-abusing and calling it OK because, well, "WE all belong with somebody" but it is not the reality in which I sit, I live. I almost wish to be rendered emotionless so that I do not feel compelled and driven to pursue the "good feelings" associated with this particular effort to join someone else.

It is also not of great value to me to try to repeal the sadness by living with the creed of self delusion that "it's OK to be alone" because trying to prop myself up with that sort of "logic" is the other end of this issue which keeps me locked up in the yo-yo, boomerang effect that goes along with the effort to logic my way out of this situation.

The truth as I see it:

1) I am alone. Is that true? YES! The pitfalls and dangers begin within the meaning I assign to the word "alone" and the subsequent value as well.

2) I should be with someone. Is that true? Clearly it is not true, unless I am trying to predict an imagined future, which by its very nature(imagined) is based outside of what is real(I am alone) right now. There is such a great danger in trying to tell a story based upon "should". It becomes too easy to "dream" and then punish the dreamer(me) for not having what is dreamt about. Unequivocally A tool of destruction.

3) I am doing just fine alone. Is that true? YES! Emphatically yes. Unless I am swept away into the dream of "should", then I am perfectly fine with what IS right now. If I succumb to the deepening and damaging mental lifestyle of an imagined future(see#2) then I doom myself to not being able to know just how successful(what is the meaning of this word to me?) and OK I am right here, right now.

4) I need something more in my life. Is that true? If I lose myself in the dream of how "it should be"(see #2,3) then I fall victim to my own thinking, doom myself to misery and have no good, until I wrest myself from it and regain the reality of what is. Until then, my body suffers, my mind is swirling in the "stories" and I can see nothing good coming out of anything, which is also to future-trip.

If there is courage to be just what I am right now; no stories of how it should be different, no belief that it is wrong in its immediacy, then shall I find the courage to be innocent again, compassionate, tender, easy with others, generous of spirit, not quick to cast aspersions, loving and open. All of this is who I truly am which gets hijacked by the negative campaign of "how it should be".