I Believe In Love

As Elton John Sang. And Billy Joel's Honesty keeps me alone, in spite of the desire to share love. Because the two songs speak the truth. I believe in love, it's all I've got.... and honesty is such a lonely word. I don't want to believe everyone is so untrue, at least not because people want to be. I want to believe people are just confused by fear, fear that they empower more than love. Fear is easier. It comes with fewer responsibilities. In fact, fear allows the shirking of most responsibilities. Being afraid is an excuse for getting away with almost anything. Maybe anything.

Love comes with serious responsibilities. It requires action. Follow through. Consistency. Love requires paying attention. Love is commitment to caring, to sharing, to being honest and open and true to yourself and someone else. Love requires open eyes, an open heart, and an open mind. Scary stuff for most, so fear grows and becomes much easier to nurture. Fear takes away all the responsibilities of love. Easy, or at least easier.

Loneliness becomes comfortable. Nobody to account to. Nobody to take a shower or bath for. Nobody to care if we care about anything. Lonely is so much easier than love for the same and similar reasons fear is so much easier than love. Lonely requires no responsibility for anything. No need to keep an appointment. No need to share. The freedom to choose to do, to wear, to eat, to be anything you want to be at any given moment. That's the freedom loneliness provides.

No wonder so many people are lonely. No wonder so many people live in fear.

I'll still choose love, to live in love, and my door is open.

This is my love song to loneliness...

this is my love song to loneliness
this is my love song to fear
to the darkness of depression
to the emptiness of hopelessness
this is my love song to the pain of despair

this is my love song to loneliness
and to those who empower fear
you make choices every day
every moment you can play
any game in your mind if you choose to be aware

giving up is just a choice
silence is just an unused voice
low self esteem
is just a bad dream
that you can rise above
if you just choose to love

this is my love song to emptiness
to the hollow feeling that is fear
all the pain, all the strife
all the cruelty in life
can be powerless when it's out there

this is my lone song to loneliness
the path to overcome fear
all alone in my mind
I can choose to be kind
and create paradise for me here
if I just choose to love...

giving up is just a choice
silence is just an unused voice
low self esteem
is just a bad dream
that you can rise above
if you just choose to love

the different between
agony and ecstasy
is so clear to see
if I just choose to love...
me

And a love song to you, my precious blog family.

34. Would a mid-life crisis seem appropriate at this time? I'm stuck feeling 19. But I have grown all these layers of years on the 19 year old me. But they are but flaky scales. And beneath is still the same old insecure and anxiety-driven me. Waiting for that magical moment that was promised to me by my own, confused and hazy little mind. 

Supposedly, I only need to make friends with myself for everything to fall into place. But I know myself too well to be friends with someone like that. Because, how to be friends with someone who can't even be friends with themselves. Um..

My next lesson has arrived. 

Seems a tough and moody one. 

But those are my favourite kind of lessons. 

Though they leave me detesting myself at the end of each day. 

Oh God.. I wanna go home. 

Wherever that is.. 

Tired of feeling so much. So strongly. And for no explainable reason. 

Seems I can only feel magical and mystical when I am miserable. 

Sadness has a strange beauty and depth to it. Like the sea on a stormy day. 

Happiness doesn't do it for me. 

Wish I could be happy being sad.. 

Done With Intent

Well, well, well... seems my years of recreational reading of psychology articles has finally brought its result, where I could finally self-diagnose what the hell my problem has been all these years. The answer is, of course, very boring and trivial. All I am is a love addict.

If you read what it feels like to get high on amphetamines.. you will get the idea of what I, so cleverly, can achieve by getting constant.. chronic..painful.. illogical crushes on unavailable people.

Childhood abuse trauma. Check.

Craving attention from father but never getting it. Check.

Getting myself into abusive relationship. Check.

Finally getting myself sorted out and getting into a healthy, normal relationship...but! Not being able to be satisfied with it nor knowing how to process it properly. Check.

Drift off into a fantasy world built up on crumbs of reality just to get my next fix from. Check.

It's all very sad really.

But at least I finally know and can explain all of my stupid-ass behavior and feelings so far.

Now, I'm trying to take every step as a lesson and do my best to learn from it..but it takes so much self control that sometimes I just don't have the power to fight it.

Wow.

I got my explanation to everything. 

All I have to do now is.. QUIT.

Hm, the only time quitting wouldn't actually make me a loser. Riding this feeling gives so much meaning and inspiration though.. if only I could find a way to turn it into art. 

And then I get angry. 

Why, all these amazing feelings.. no need for sleep.. elevated energy... creative inspiration..have to be dismissed as psychological disorder. 

Sure they are painful. But they make me feel so much. Make me so inspired. Gosh. 

And then comes the crash.

The worst was last year. Everything was so trivial. So gray. Every moment felt like I was suffocating from the overwhelming, boring, thick flowing reality. 

Mundane. Mundane. Mundane.

So, so, so thankful for the mundane.

But oh-so-curious for the extraordinary. The unknown. The unavailable. 

These two people just don't get along inside my head. 

Oh, The Precious

The Blog Family. Perhaps just two as others do not want to be online anymore, at least for now. They are always welcome and there is always hope we will share words again. Hope we will create something permanent. How to bond with someone who deletes everything they create, that is the question. Fruit falls from a tree and to the tree it is gone, but fruit returns. We eat the fruit and to us it is gone, but then, more fruit grows and falls. The cycle of existence, non-existence, and back to existence again. Or is it Non-existence, existence, then back to non-existence again. Which is the permanent state? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

In the comment I just left on the previous entry, I identified with impermanence as the reality and permanence as the illusion. I suppose that correlates with my perspective that alone is reality and sharing brings an illusion of not being alone Caring brings depths and emotion to the illusion. Spending time together builds references to support the illusion. Sharing on different sensory levels brings still more memory of more tangible evidence that the illusion is real. Is it? The answer to that question is exploring a definition for alone.

Illusion or not, the sharing, the caring, the belief that we are not alone is so precious to us humans. At least it is to me, but then, I am not like anyone I know. I am probably like others in this world of almost eight billion people, but I've yet to meet anyone like me. Then I read your words and feel like you are a lot like me in some essential ways. Sister of another mother, blog family.

I keep trying to share the experience, the precious...

still, alone.

Temporary

I read some time ago of someone's experience being a third culture kid or someone that moves to different places often. "I'm temporary in everyone's permanent existence."

No matter how exciting it is to discover new places, meeting new people, tasting new dishes or experiencing new cultures, I think I'm tired of being temporary. 

The settled feeling. 

Tinnitus waking you up at 3 am must be a sign that something is off. 

I want to be positive. I try to be thankful. I see my blessings. But can't help but feel the fog setting in once again. 

I don't want change. I used to smirk at those giving 30 years of their life to one job.. City.. Whatever that is. 

And now. 

I want to grow roots. 

I don't want to be a one season plant anymore. 

It gives you a fake sense of freedom where you are excused not to make a commitment to any one job or home or community.. But each time you leave, you realize it feels like a small death to a life you will never be able to have again. 

I'm tired of dying and resurrecting. 

Drama queen much? 

Possibly. 

But I get attached easily. 

To the place. 

To the tree. 

To the stroll in a park on a sunny autumn day. 

To the bakery lady. 

To you. 

And moving once again feels like walking in iron shoes. 

I can't let him see the tears.. He has enough on his plate. 

Will I ever learn to be satisfied and thankful for my current state? Is this why this lesson keeps on repeating itself? Because I flunked once again.. 

in my reply (to your last post here)

once again my words were too many to fit into the comment box so rather than extend the babbling you inspired with this post into three or four or more comments (and trying to keep the parts in the right order), here it is here (with this introduction in case we both seek reference some time down the road when time lets us forget :)

coincidence?... so i've been away for a week or more and you find your way here after more than a year of being away (373 days) and me, sven longer (449 days), but then, who's counting? :)

and it just so happens that i paused in my daily writing two days before you posted this entry until now, a week after you posted these words, but again, except for the potential irony that i am desperately seeking something (communication, validation, appreciation, reinforcement, ego-stroking, more genuine meaningful deeper praise, comfort, caring, love, attention, and most of all distraction, or some combination of the lot) and here you are communicating and i am not even here to read and respond as immediately as i ordinarily would have had i been checking in and blogging daily as i had been for most of the last thousand years, or bakers dozen, at least...

whatever, right?... i mean, time is meaningless and i found your words moments ago so for me, they were written moments ago and i shall respond to my perception of your words because that is the best any reader wishing to communicate can do, respond to the perception of the meaning of the words a writer writes...

i am so happy to see words from you here :)

what did you say again? (laughing at the folly of my babbling and my self-soothing, however egocentric, babbling from excitement and distraction-seeking and excessive mental fatigue as i am just getting home from lunch with a friend after not sleeping at all last night so aware going on thirty hours or more now... can i find a cohesive response at this point?... well, i promise i shall try and if i don't i shall respond again after sleeping and being more certain i have more than a few brain cells working together)...

lives lived...

somewhere in my writings i pondered this many times and at least more than a few times rather analytically in terms of chronology... birth to adoption (patterson to brooklyn), adoption to divorce-single-mom-grandma (to east ny), second dad new world (to canarsie), down the block, changing friends, changing names and the sp, disillusioned with education (waltzman kills algebra), finding love and falling (high school), community college and work, the end of the innocence (dec 1), the army (and the changes), wasting away everywhere (drug, sex, and rock and roll years), the professional begins (bdc), moving up - moving out, back to school, following the dream (lake buena vista), early retirement (new house), the dream of love and family (toronto), the street (buffalo-orlando), starting over (ubc), bff (jackson), the softball years, unplanned vacation (pine harbor), almost ideal job (the quest), and now (yet to be named)... reviewing that in more detail i left many chapters out, but not tooo many lives, so how many is that? (laughing at myself as i review the outline of the life i recall)...

yeah, so i guess it's time to move on to your third sentence, second thought...


another thought i've given much time to over the years and with lament and accepting the same responsibility, but hopefully with more hope than i have at this moment (it's a sad month, this november, but this mood is not where i've lingered long in this life in spite of never leaving the sensitivity of it) and just pondering that i am certain with all the positivity left in me that i am capable of reaching out with an optimistic smile to anyone i've cared about because the caring was always genuine and remains as genuine today...

still i do see the meaning in your words and i do and feel the feeling of watching the online world pass me by (and the physical world as well, but that is another pondering for another time)... in the past two weeks i have reached out to at least a dozen people offline via text and phone and a few online through personal messages and many more online through public facebook posts... and four people i've not seen in many months or years shared fun time and i will see more at a thankgsiving dinner this week and a party thrown in honor of my return to socializing next saturday... so i have reason to raise my optimism in spite of the current events in life near (see (e)thereal blog)and far (facebook) this month and last (casey), for that matter...

keep trying to connect... are we connecting?... i offer my experience as it directly relates to your words, but can i do more than focus on me?... ask you what you mean, perhaps?... ask you if you want to share specifics?... if you want to talk?... just this week i learned facebook has a phone call aspect to it's chat feature and i wonder how far it reaches (sure would save money on international calls... unless there's some unmentioned charge i'll find out about next month)... wanna talk?...

you matter to me... i know in my experience that is not true for many people as many people allow detachment and even dismissal of others due time passing between communications but once my heart cares about someone, my caring does not diminish over time... and while i take responsibility for letting silent time pass, i do not take responsibility for other people who diminish their caring (or who simply dismiss others) due to time passing between communications... this is how i see it (and live it)... as awkward as some make it, if they ever really cared, they still care... if they don't care now, they never really did...

so what happened?... is the 'this' you refer to the emotion of __________ (up, down, depression, loneliness, hopelessness, desire for me, excitement, wishing you were somehow here again, wanting more connections that last, something else?)... any changes in your mother and wife status?... share what you wish to share in response to my questions...

perhaps this post you wrote was a momentary release of excess emotions and the writing and posting was enough to bring you back to your smile (i am hopeful, remember?)...

I gave up trying to not walk around with my mind, heart, soul, whatever) wide open... trying to close up or shut down just does not work for me... i just absorb the pain and rain and turn it into hope and rainbows... ok, so it doesn't always work, but that's the plan :)

distraction helps a lot :)

How many lives have I lived in my 31 years, let's see.. This would be the 7th, not sure based on what I came up with that number but it feels about right. The strangest feeling is seeing posts of people I once knew on social networks, some were even close friends, but now I'm no longer involved in these lives.. Watching the posts like a ghost watching the lives of those still alive.. Trying to connect.. But remain unheard and disconnected. Probably it's my fault. Didn't put enough effort and time to keep these relationships alive.. To remain as someone who matters to these people. So go and build myself a new life, with blackjack and hookers.. Erm.. I mean, with new set of people, new country, and wonder if I learned anything along the way. I'm sure i went through some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but not sure what exactly this light is shining on. Empath. Hypersensitivity. Stop walking around with your soul wide open. These are not your thoughts or feelings. And mine are not  mine either. Just a drip of chemicals in my brain. And now this? I so don't need this now. There's no place for these messed up, teenage thoughts and feelings in my newely built life of an adult mother and wife. Haha. Mother and wife. Read into these two terms. What am I supposed to do with these two? They are larger than me, like a toddler daughter wobbling in her mommy's high-heels. When will it fit?

Such an emotion junkie..