This year I have been picking up lots of pieces of me. They are the threads of other people's lives that were part of the tapestry of my life over the last thirty-four years. Today I'm anxiously waiting, wondering if one of those ghosts from my past will reply to me and give me a chance to heal. I feel torn and broken where certain important people were lost to me. I sound like a drama queen, and so maybe I am. Here I am, almost twenty years past the trauma, and still love and fear and guilt gush forth when I check on the wound.
But say I manage to find my ghosts and reconnect. Can I put myself back together again? I'm a classic case of "fear of commitment", though I don't know if "commitment" is exactly what I fear. I am afraid of having to not be for someone what they need. I am afraid of having to reject what I love more than anything. I am constantly thinking of relationships as being a steady state of impasse. I wish for a dynamic relationship model, where all the people that I have loved are able to reciprocate my love and vice versa, where we can move through the universe finding new loves and visiting old ones without all the fallout.
Outwardly I'm trying to keep the machinery humming and barely making it. Inside I'm running away in tears, screaming that I am not what you need. I can't have what I need, because I need too much.
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written by Soapy Dishwater, December 21, 2008
Stand your ground, sugar, because it sounds like you know where you were and where you want to be - maybe you're not sure of all the details but you know enough to go with your gut.
Other people may have added their thread here and there but it's the tapestry of YOUR life. Give them their yarn back if it doesn't suit you. They've all got their own tapestries to worry about.
"Nothing's free from the flaws and claws of your family, free from obedient life that cuts like a double-edged knife." From Alice Cooper's Last Temptationhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OabTH9TDgng
Enough with the metaphors -just be good to yourself.
-Soapy
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You seem to have have reached a crossroads at which you can chose to change course or plod on toward misery. So many of us chose not to take the alternate route, because the sign pointing down that road reads "Limits Ahead," while the straight path boasts "Free Reign." The paradox is that the limits are what set us free, and these signposts speak not of our own liberty, but of that which we grant to others.
You must shed your fear and learn to place limits on what you accept from others, rather than giving them free reign. Sometimes it is difficult for us to impose limits because we are unknowingly nursing our wounds with a numbing social elixir that has itself eroded our flesh. Loving something or someone who causes emotional harm is antithetical to happiness, yet love seems like the very thing that must persist if happiness is to prevail.
And indeed it is, only this love is that which we use to nurture ourselves. If one continues to love like a child, entirely outwardly, the other children in our lives, the fellow wounded, will gravitate toward its deceptive comfort. If your light is bright, it will attract many moths, all bedazzled by its inexplicable allure. But such chaos could never bring happiness.
Realize that you might not be ready to reconnect with people of the past until you deal with emotions of the present. The fallout you speak of results not from the behavior of others, but from your acceptance of it in your life.
Joy comes from an inner glow, a personal sense of worth that attracts others with a similar protected light. These mutually welcoming fireflies can admire the beacons of others from near or far without creating chaos. By controlling your own spark, sharing it selectively, you can limit the intrusions from the suffocating moths, and you will find that there is happiness in paradox.