Friends

I was going to whine, but really what I need to say is: I'm in completely new territory. I'm losing or unable to attain what I always assumed "love" looked like, and it's replaced with a very peculiar type of friendship. There are strong, maybe unbreakable, bonds, everywhere around me. Even when I'm at odds with someone, there isn't anyone I currently love that I think would actually vanish from my life, or from whose life I would entirely vanish. But I live in constant fear that these people will have "real love" with someone else - that they're basically holding out on me, that I'm not well-suited for love, blah blah blah. Basically I'm afraid that someone else is going to get the "real thing" and I'll be out in the cold.

But is it really the men of the world (or bisexual women, for that matter) who long for that one perfect romance? Thus far, even the ones I knew who used to feel that way, seem to have gotten over it. Is it just female-hormone driven?

Whatever it is, it still takes up too much room in my brain. I'd like a Relationship-Obsession-ectomy, please. Just remove that whole portion of my brain, thanks. What the fuck do animals do? Eat, poop, screw, run, kill, die. It's frigging language that's the problem. Labels, calendars, the illusion of control and mastery of time and ideas. Nobody knows what is going to happen, and especially nobody knows whose gonads are going to surge in the next minute and fly off into "true love," abandoning everything they knew before. If it's really like that, then why on earth count on love as some kind of absolute?

As near as I can tell, the closest thing to an absolute is a really, really good friend. Maybe that's good enough.

Unattainable

I have to admit, I have never been contented with anything that came easily. Grades, love, sex, material things falling my lap - I worked as hard as I could to destroy them. It is only the things I could not reach, did not have handed to me, that I struggled to attain.

It's fatal to relationships, I need to acknowledge that. I think at this age, this feature of my personality probably isn't going to change much. I may have been able to shift things some, so that the quality of what I do get, while I'm not really getting what I say I want, has improved. I don't engage with truly backstabbing people, I don't get bad sex, and I seek out objective standards to measure myself against. But the fundamental aspect of myself is not much different than it was 25 or 30 years ago. I still hunger for the same feeling of longing and denial. I still fight what is handed over to me and search for what is difficult to get.

I want to want. Maybe I want to be forced to exert effort. Maybe I want to be put into situations where I have to find resources I did not know I had. Consistently I have returned to the scene of the crimes against myself, sought the demons from my past, to conquer one by one. Doing math. Living alone. Moving to a strange town. Losing people. Being assertive. Taking leadership. Lots of life skills I never felt quite competent at before.

Do I just want to suffer, or do I want to build myself from the inside, by forcing a sort of deprivation on myself from the outside? I do not act in a way to keep people close to me, to encourage them to shower me with emotion. I drive away love wherever I find it. I prefer friendly rivalry, and companions who are more battle-ready than most. I prefer them a little distant. If they aren't, I eventually defeat them, not through maliciousness, but simply through my own repulsion of vulnerability.

I need to accept what I am, try to find happiness as I am. I look less and less like other people, and am forced to admit my aloneness more and more. But there has to be a way for me to be who I am without disliking it.

I don't think I want to seek out opportunities to be denied anymore. Seeking anything simply communicates to others a drive I don't really have. I don't want to mislead. I do want people in my life, yes. But I don't want to be loved too much.

Change

I have made changes in my life before - obvious, easily defined changes. I set a goal and I stuck to the path. I changed what I put into my body, I changed the types of people I spent time with, I changed my career pursuits, I changed my upper limit for what I thought was possible for myself. But something still needs to change, and it's much harder to visualize.

Change always begins with what is unpleasant for me. Sometimes it has been physical discomfort, but more often it's a sort of psychic discomfort where I feel like I'm just "not right with myself." That means I'm not completely contented with my own level of effort at something. This is what I'm experiencing now. I know why, of course. I'm finally up against an objective standard. That's something I've been after since I went back to school seven years ago. But, particularly for the past two years, I've been faced with favoritism, squeaking by even though I wasn't performing well compared to the competition.

That kind of experience, perhaps a dream come true for some people, is deadly to me. In some ways it wiped out the confidence I felt going into the experience. But I'm starting fresh now, with a new goal which I set completely for myself, with no inspiration from anyone else. And frankly, there's no guarantee I'll succeed at it.

However - my success depends completely on my amount of work. And my amount of work depends on what I'm willing to sacrifice. That's where the change comes in. I have to sacrifice time spent having fun, time spent feeling warm fuzzies, for time in a quiet room studying math. I have to do this to a degree most people would balk at. And yes, I balk, too. But the rumbling in my guts is getting louder. It's saying, "You can do more, but you will have to give something up."

I'm the only one who knows what this means to me. Nobody else has been with me since the beginning, since I initially disappointed myself, through the years of slowly realizing the damage I'd done to my self-esteem by slacking. Nobody else can completely understand what drives me.

There are many fears operating in me - fear of loss, fear of abandonment. And things are happening in my life right now that are forcing me to face them. But it's not enough. I have to run headlong into fears I have not conquered. I'm still terrified of saying "no" or making someone wait. I'm still scared of someone just leaving me because I'm not around enough. But the bottom line is that I have to know my priorities, and I can't have two highest priorities. There can be only one.

I know I'm getting closer to realizing my dreams for myself, but I'm not close enough yet. The crunch is coming and I need to be prepared. I need to integrate these changes into my personality permanently.

I need to know exactly how it is that I want to be, what are the actions that would define this state of being, and what are the actions that are hostile to it. I need to keep the list in my brain and refer to it at frequent intervals. I need to have an objective standard for myself and stick to it.

Am I going to become a robot? I might. There is no way to do this without obliterating some of the natural workings of my mind. Progress is always from resisting the pull of inertia. It's just like Dawkins defines "aliveness" as resistance to falling into equilibrium with one's environment. I need to get out of equilibrium and be alive.

Feelings... or not?

On the other hand, since all those feelings I'm "ignoring" are very much coloring my mood and posing enough of a distraction to wake me up at 3am, maybe a little exposure is ok.

I basically had a small window in which a married man I'd been seeing for three years (with the knowledge, if not the sincerest blessing, of his wife) was willing to move in with me - without any warning, and while he was an emotional wreck. I passed on it, and not in any kind of graceful way. I wasn't sure at all that I wanted to *bang* live with someone, even someone I cared about and had often wished I'd be able to see more often. So I thought (and distanced) myself right out of an impulse decision.

Did I know the window would close within a few months and that he'd find another woman to move in with? Uh, not really. I think I was assuming he'd eventually move out on his own and try to piece his life back together - something he'd said he needed to do. Something I certainly thought he needed to do. Was he lying, or did he just overestimate his ability to live alone? I'll never know.

My feelings? It's still hard to identify them. It might be worse because the other woman is a good friend of mine I introduced him to early in our relationship. It might be still worse because she lives a couple thousand miles from me. On one hand, if living with someone is so vitally important to him, it's better that he found someone quickly. On the other hand, I guess he didn't experience a particular internal development I was counting on to give me time to think about what I wanted. And does anyone ever experience internal developments just because someone wants them to? I am a little dismayed that I feel I am essentially replaying a stupid relationship faux pas I committed twenty years ago: trying to manipulate someone into changing by withholding my attentions. Bad idea! Can't believe I fell for that temptation again, when it worked so spectacularly badly before.

I have behaved much in the same way that he has, in the past. Operating on feelings, needs, desires, willing to cast moderation and propriety to the winds as I forged my way into a new life. In fact it was one of the best things I ever did. How can I fault someone for that? But I have changed in one way. I have a clear sense that, in the scheme of my priorities, love is actually rather low. It'd be nice to have the amount of feelings I have on the subject correspondingly low as well, of course, but I think with proper actions that will happen in time. I'm aligning myself with perhaps the strongest feelings I have had, for most of my life: the desire to push my mind as far as humanly possible, to drag myself out of this financially trapped dead-end situation and give myself a new way of existence.

Maybe many women are still content to do this through marrying well. But I feel sick to my stomach at the prospect of sharing finances with a man again. And I feel so very hostile to the idea of getting money from a man purely because of being in a relationship with him. So I'm pursuing financial independence with a vengeance, and remembering the one piece of advice I got on the subject from my father, many years ago. "You don't need a man."

Since the time I was 18ish, when those words were spoken, I had never given an ounce of credence to them - until last night. Then I realized that my father was right. I don't need a man. And I don't want a man to need me, either. So apparently I'd rather heartbreak myself right into self-sufficiency than experience "need" again. Dive right in, endure repeated exposure to not having romance work "the way it's supposed to" (which is probably horseshit, and a fine topic for another blog) and have the one and only thing remaining to me to focus on: myself.

Guess I'm still not sure that spilling out emotions is the best use of my blogging. I seem to think before I feel. I'm just going to go ahead and call that a good thing.

Character

I seem to have moved out of the blogging phase of my life. It's been months now, I think, since I regularly put my thoughts on the screen. Not only that, but it's been months since my primary source of human contact was computer-based in any way. Truthfully, I don't want to go back to what I had. Knowing people in real life, talking to them with words, face to face, or by telephone - this is how I enjoy relating to the world now.

I don't feel lonely most of the time like I used to. I take up the entire bed now, after a long time of sleeping on "my side." When I putter around the apartment, I don't seem to feel an aching longing to have someone here. I don't catch myself brooding about an unhappy future very much anymore. I appear to have hope and direction.

There are things I still want to change - big time. Those are things I am working on now: spending less time thinking about "relationship" things; feeling more confident about taking time I need to study; dispelling the mental "distractedness" that eats up my productivity when I'm trying to work. These are things I'm only making small headway on, but all things are a work in progress.

I have more self-discipline than I thought was possible for me. I have actually done many things I thought were not possible for me, so I am now able to actually visualize doing something I think is not possible. The current dream I have for myself is so far outside the realm of attainability I originally imagined for myself that it's particularly difficult to maintain the mental picture. But I'm still doing it every chance I get.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that spending my life worrying about who is in it is fruitless. Connecting to people is good, but people also do what they want, go where they want, sometimes with little warning. It's not as if I haven't done the same thing myself. The only thing I really possess is my own ability to make myself happy. That's either in good shape, or it isn't. The list of things I can do to make myself happy without waiting for someone else to do them is increasing. This, of course, makes me generally happier. It goes against the view of life I used to have, that dependence is right and good, that women ought to be a little more dependent than men. I have sexist views and I often find them pretty tenacious. But I do see headway.

More than anything, I am trying to learn to make my emotions less important in the grand scheme of things. Becoming a stoic? I don't think that's really possible. But ignoring my emotions and getting stuff done - that's a worthy goal. Why? Purely for the sake of my own well-being. Emotions have been my bane, and it's time to put them in a place they belong.

Once in a while I realize I have made progress in my ability to step back and be objective. I feel really good when that happens. But honestly, the last two years have kicked my ass in a way nothing had before. This is probably a good thing, and a byproduct of my own willingness to throw myself out into the world just to see what happened. Sure enough, hard things happen, changes happen. The world never looks the same again. But for once I want to be in control of how it looks, for myself, because of my own choices, my own determination, my own character.