Searching For a Former Clarity

That is all I want.

I’ve never believed in making New Years resolutions. I don’t quite see the point. It’s not like at midnight, some magical reset button will be hit that will offer everyone a clean slate. I understand the importance of symbolism and I suppose for some people a symbolic restart is all they really need. Maybe I’m just too damn cynical to be affected by moments like these. 

I find it comical and slightly sad how many people make such unrealistic expectations for themselves on nights like these. They expect the party to be the best they’ve ever been at, they expect to be kissing someone amazing at midnight and believe that they will wake up tomorrow thinking that the night before was the best night of their life. Only once in my life did I have an unexpectedly amazing kiss on New Years, and it wasn’t at midnight and it was terribly bitter sweet. Realistically most people will be waking up with a hang over tomorrow asking themselves what the hell happened the night before. Once the glitter has been washed off and the hang-over has subsided life with continue on as it always has. I don’t understand all the fuss about one night. I wish people would realize that if they really wanted to, they could make any night magical with enough ambition and spirit. 

In spite of my over-all cynicism about tonight, I will take my step out into the new year with one hope. I hope upon all hope that this year I will find clarity. I hope that this year I will stop hanging on to all the sad and painful memories that have haunted me so voraciously these past few years. I hope that finally I can stop digging up memories that should have long since been forgotten. I don’t expect that I will wake up tomorrow and all the sudden I will feel differently about my life, however, I’m hoping that this year, I will figure out how to find peace within myself.

If I can ask anything of this new year, I only wish that it won’t hurt nearly as much as the last.

 That is all I want.

It’s dark all the time

If I were to have a daughter, I’d pray that she only ever fell in love once in her life. Love is an agonizing pursuit. As I reflect on the various love affairs I’ve had in my life, I get lost in trying to process the residual guilt and regret. 

I often think about the first person that I ever truly fell in love with. It was a tortured endeavor from the moment it happened, as I knew that I’d never be able to have him. In retrospect I see that we probably would have been just as miserable with each other as we were without each other…still the inability to ever have found out for certain makes my heart ache.

I die a little on the inside when I think of what a mess I made of the situation. At the time, I completely lacked the ability to see past myself, my disease(s), and my own insecurities to understand how wrong my actions were. I lived quite a long time believing that I had been wronged when in-fact I was equally as guilty. In all those years, I was convinced that hearing the truth from his lips would be the vindication I needed to move on. As it would turn out, the truth was far more provocative and painful than I ever could have imagined. I probably could have had him, if only I had been smart enough to see my own mistakes.

As with most things in life, I’m not sure there really is anyone to blame. Not many people will admit it, but most of us learn through our fuck ups. I fucked up my relationship with the first person I ever loved. I’ve also managed to fuck up many relationships that followed after. One by one I have learned lessons from each heart ache I’ve endured. It may not have been the way I would have chosen to learn about myself, but I suppose no one gets to pick and chose exactly where their life lessons will come from. 

My anxiety disorder throws an interesting twist into the mix of it all. I am hyper aware of how I feel I am being perceived. I’m always terrified of what people think of me. A lot of times it’s just an over exaggeration in my head. Other times the terrible things that I fear people are thinking or saying are true. Not that long ago an ex-boyfriend told me that he believes I am a terrible person because of the way our relationship ended. He said there was nothing I could do or say that would sway that opinion. Despite the fact that our relationship ended quite a few years ago,it really stung. I hope I’m not this terrible monster that other people seem to think I am. I hope I’m not as heartless as I’ve been accused of being. I’m only human and I know I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done my best to apologize where I felt I’ve been wrong and make amends where I felt I could. Somehow, it never feels like enough. I don’t want to live the rest of my life feeling like I’m searching for some kind of atonement for the mistakes I made when I was young.

There are many days (like today) in which I live on the verge of tears. Increasingly, I’ve become isolated and alone as one by one, my friendships shut down and I have nowhere to go. I’ve often felt that I have a glass heart. I wear it so openly on my sleeve and it tends to get broken very quickly and easily. 

Love is such a tortured endeavor. If I could, I would find a way to avoid it all together. As much as could be said about the wonders of being in love…it’s falling out of love and the after-math of it all that I wish I could avoid for the rest of my life. My heart is heavy.

There was graffiti all over the wall and the only thing I could think of was how much I wished I had a marker so I would finally be able to say how much I love you. Keeping that inside has been killing me.
You are the love of my life and no one will ever know. All because I didn’t have something to write with in the bathroom of a crappy bar on the wrong side of town.

This can’t be how it ends. This ending hurts too much and there are no lessons to be learned here.
The sorrow never left, the desire never faded. Each and every memory is full of more questions than answers.
I never saw a happy outcome, but I wasn’t prepared for devastation. I couldn’t have ever guessed how alone I would be in this.
I’ve never been one to expect happily ever after, instead I had hoped to comfortably bow out in the end. This isn’t the ending I imagined.
I wish this were someone else’s story.

I will endure and I will overcome

Remember when we were young, nothing was more important than writing letters to your best friends. You’d spend hours talking about all the things that were most important to you. All your hopes and fears and desires. I don’t know why people ever stop doing that. I don’t know why at some point in our live we’re just supposed to flip off that switch that makes us feel things. I also don’t know how that’s supposed to happen. I’ve tried, but I just can’t seem to make it work. So, I just don’t know where to go from here. Fuck, I don’t even know who I’m writing this to. Right now, I’m simply writing this because I need to write it, and I hope that somewhere before I’m done, I’ll have that grand epiphany of who it’s supposed to be for. 

This week has been a week of weirdness all over the place.  It’s friday afternoon. I’m in between job one and job number two and I’m feeling all kinds of excess in baggage. I’ve felt over the week like I could literally feel the weight of my heart getting heavier and heavier, and now I’m feeling as though I can barely breathe. Not for any reason in particular, and not that I feel that I have all that much to be sad about, but just because I feel like I’ve just had enough. As I’ve sat and thought time and time again about who I should talk to, what I should do, or where I should go, I’ve found myself feeling speechless and lost. More often than not I feel lost in my own life and I just don’t know what to do. I can’t even count how many times in my life I’ve found myself uttering the words “I just don’t know what to do”. I’m not sure if I missed some pivotal life lesson, or if I was just born ill equipped to deal with the every day tragedies that is life. I’m not entirely sure, but some times the smallest of things is enough to send me into a downward spiral of epic proportions. Simple issues such as my hair refusing to curl in the right way will cause a hissy fit that any toddler couldn’t even compete with. I’m tired. More tired than I honestly have words to express. There are days that keeping my eyes open is painful. I think the mental exhaustion that I feel all the time eventually manifests itself physically and renders me completely helpless. 

(side note: I’m sitting at a Mcdonalds drinking my sweet tea and there is a table of three asian ladies sitting across from me. The oldest of the three has been staring at me the entire time I’ve been sitting here, maniacally chewing her burger as if she’s judging me with every bite she takes. I often wonder if other people have these experiences or if it’s just me)

I’ve been feeling home sick a lot lately. It’s an odd feeling for me. When I first moved out of my mom and dad’s house, I never really got that home sick feeling. It was so abrupt and I had so many other things happening at the time that I don’t think it even registered to me how different my life would be. For me now, it’s not so much the house, or the convenience of living at home, but it’s the feeling of being a part of a family, and belonging somewhere. Slowly, over time, the number of friends that I have has dwindled down so low. For a while, it didn’t matter because the few friends that I did have, were constant companions in my life. I saw them almost on a daily basis. Now I’m lucky if I get to see my best friends once a month. I think one of the hardest things is coming home to an empty house and waiting for someone to get home. I just wish I knew where I belonged. 

I keep looking back at all the past relationships in my life. The friendships that no longer exist. The love interests that are long gone. I keep getting this terrible stabbing feeling that I did it all wrong. I look back at certain conversations or certain memories and think to myself “Holy Fuck, that was bad” I don’t want to feel like that anymore. I wish I could get to a place within myself that would allow me to feel a sense of closure on the things that no longer exist and accept the things that currently are happening in my life. I don’t want to walk around feeling like my whole life, and every action is one huge embarrassment. 

Yesterday was one of the hardest days I’ve had in years. For no reason at all I just felt myself fall apart and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it. I tried reaching out to every person I could possibly think of, and in the end of it all, I found that I was left alone to deal with my thoughts. It felt shameful to know that I’ve managed to pushed everyone away. I don’t know how it happened…nor do I really know if I can do anything about it.

Simply put, I just don’t know who I am anymore.