Stars

I know I haven't posted in well over a month. I'm going to change that; and the following post isn't necessarily fun or light or perhaps even interesting. But I wrote it yesterday morning with the intent of it ending up here, and I think I need to air out my laundry so I can put it to rest.

It's long. I'm not sure who exactly will bear with the entirety of it. If you don't I understand, this is more for me than it is for you, to be honest.

So here we go:

I told myself when I started this I’d keep the emotional-venting to a minimum, but I have a head full of thoughts that have been pooling up for well over a month and I need to sort them out. Maybe I was kidding myself when I said this blog wouldn't get serious. But there you go, things can't always be how we intend them. 

A man close to me always said to write down the things that won’t leave your head; he said that it’ll do one of three things: Help you forget what you can’t, remember what you should, or make sense of what you can’t see clearly.

There’s a game I often play with myself when I visit art museums, especially in the painting galleries of sixteenth and seventeenth century art, where I always find myself a nose length away from some massive oil painting just trying to find the space between the brush strokes. I will literally do this for like ten minutes until I realize I probably look nuts or my carbon dioxide is probably hurting the paint and I should step back and look at the picture and not the oil.

I think why I play this game with myself is because, after staring hard at almost glass-smooth paint with only the vaguest hint of the ridges left by a brush, when I step back and look at the entirety of the piece I am always left incredibly breathless. I get so captivated by the smallest details that I forget how important- how beautifully genius- the whole of it all is. That moment of captivated awe is probably what has me repeating the cycle a handful of times whenever I can. I could totally ramble about why old paintings touch me so deeply for ages, but I’d lose the point I was trying to make here so I’ll avoid the urge to digress further.

The point is I think I get caught playing that same game I do in museums inside my own head. I throw myself face first into the thick of myself and don’t surface often enough for air to keep a tight watch on what image I’m really apart of. Today, this weekend, this whole last month even, has felt like a quiet and easy ascent far enough above myself to finally get an idea of the landscape I’m creating. And it’s strange to come out on the other end of the kind of year I’ve had and see how altered you are. How the mountains in your life are now foothills and the oceans you thought threatened to drown you are now puddles to hop over. How deep new canyons run and the challenges looming in the distance. Or how every small calculated- or maybe not so calculated- sweep of the brush contributed to the rest of the page. And you see what I like about looking at the brush strokes in those paintings is that they’re so hard to find. But they’re there. And no guise of reality can hide what in the end is simple paint on simple canvas with all the inconsistency the medium provides.

 I think I revel in my downfalls because the things I am proudest of usually follow them, and I am starting to learn to love my faults because they give me something to get better at.  I spent so much time in the past obsessed with perfection, to be left with nothing but dissatisfaction. I was stuck hating and beating myself up because I could never have been enough. It wasn’t until last summer I realized I was creating my own disasters by being so engrossed by what everything was not, and not enjoying what it is. I’ve let go of the parts of me that needed things in neat packages with clean labels and no bumps in the road and I’ve started learning to enjoy the ride and love the chaos. I don’t want things to be perfect; I just want things to be real and to be right. Even when they go wrong. I don’t want perfection; I want what’s perfect for me. And I truly believe that that makes sense.

And I think all of this is attached to three really important things I’ve experienced in relation to it- Love, loss, and hope.

I’m a passionate person. When I resolve myself into a situation I cannot back out until it’s clear the ship is going down and it’s dive or die.  But in love in the last year I was not paying attention to all the signals telling me to get the hell out of dodge. I spent the latter half of my summer convincing myself to remain in a relationship that wasn’t functioning and was tearing me apart emotionally and physically because I was caught up in the idea of what I was apart of. I wanted the love I’d been told about but never shown, and I thought that if I passively sat and quietly waited he’d come around to being the person I’d expected when we began two years prior. And come September I realized that he’d taken every promise and hope and dream I’d invested between us and folded them up like a receipt in his back pocket. Because that’s what I was— I was the girl in the corner. A convenience easily discarded and forgotten. The phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ never hit so hard.

It took a month or two of angry words and a lot of tears to quiet myself down enough to try and surface out of my hurt and piece together the story of what really happened. I will not remove any blame— what he did was unforgivable— but I came to understand that I owed a lot of my pain to myself. To my fear of shattering our relationship to a point that crippled me from handling problems, to my willingness to adapt to any desire he had no matter my own opinion. I made myself a doormat and I wondered why I got stepped on. And while I’ve resolved to never lay down for anyone- let alone a man in my life- ever again, I couldn’t help but wonder how I became a doormat in the first place.

Recently I’ve noticed that when I really fight with someone I shake- this kind of shivering that starts in my core and works all the way out to my limbs. I have trouble breathing and talking normally. I end up on the verge of tears. I equate arguments with endings; I think that when things have gotten bad enough that I’m fighting someone I’ve already lost them. And losing anything scares me down to my bones because when you’ve had more loss than consistency in your life you begin to crave stability like a drug. It’s why I try so hard to speak to people about things before arguments occur, because I’m no good in a fight. Not one with someone I care about. I give in too easily and will surrender to keep the peace no matter how much I know it’s the wrong option. Because I think that you have to love someone to be willing to really fight with them and not let it come to crippling blows, and I’ve rarely been loved in that way in either friendships or romantic relationships, and I used to make the mistake of saying brash things that were neither healthy or productive just because I was hurting. It wasn’t until the past few months that I began to find a voice and the nerve to risk loss over being stepped on. I can confidently say I’m no longer anyone’s punching bag, and the road to making that statement has been a long one.

I’ve spent a vast amount of my time idolizing people and looking for answers from them. I never felt sure enough to go about things alone so I looked to everyone around me for how to go about it all. I wanted a light in the dark, a hand to hold and a savior. Someone to keep the monsters out from under the bed and to take care of me. God I cannot even tell you how much I just wanted to be taken care of. It was so selfish and so silly, how badly I needed people to watch over me. I didn’t think I could handle myself, I wanted to be handled. I was so absorbed in my demons and my memories that all my relationships were built around what I felt that person could do to help me overcome it. I wanted people to fix me, like some awful teenage novel. I was sad and serious and self absorbed to a sickening degree. I would throw and thrash and cry and yell, I physically made myself sick. I was poison to myself. I lashed out at people when they didn’t give me the attention I wanted and then tried to resolve things after I’d realized my damage. I didn’t see people as people; I saw them as what they were able to provide me. And it wasn’t until I was faced with a vicious cycle of loss and resentment that I realized I was creating all my problems and making them worse as well. But sometimes you have to lose everything to gain something. And it wasn’t until I was left with nothing that I understood how I never had any of it to begin with.  

I started to realize that everyone is the same- we’re all just trying to survive and do it happily. We’re all crazy, lost, and attempting to find where we fit. And we don’t have to fit with everyone; we only have to fit with the people we’re meant to.  

But I also had to realize that no matter how close anyone is the only person I ever get to know completely is myself. And once I let go of the fear and loneliness this created in me, I started to understand more of what my place and what my point was. Realizing you don’t have to be everything to someone because it’s probably physically impossible is a sobering, almost disillusioning realization. But it’s allowed me to breathe easier understanding that while I may not be everything, I can still matter. And they can matter to me. That so much of the value others placed on me was going to be influenced by the value I place on myself.

I just needed to see that the reason no one could ever solve my problems was because no one can. Just me. All my insecurity, my fear, my confusion, and my crazy wasn’t going to be solved by some knight in shining armor who came to finally understand me and “get” me. That dude wasn’t going to show up and sweep me off my feet and tell me I was beautiful and adore me in spite of myself. That dude was going to never show up.  No boyfriend or best friend was going to save me. I was going to have to be my own Joan of Arc. Minus the dying at the stake, hopefully.

These are the kinds of realizations you make when you take a long hard look in a mirror and realize you have been bullshiting yourself for years because you’re too afraid you’ll hate what you see there. And I definitely hated my reflection. A lot of days I still do. I’m scared to death of being alone but I find that the fear gets more manageable everyday. I enjoy my own company and I’ve begun to trust my own talents and merits. I’ve also begun to really work to cherish the good things I see in the people and the world around me. I’m becoming my own person and I’m doing my best to find the best in it all and to reach out with positivity and value for the good there is in people. 

The last thing I mentioned a million paragraphs ago was hope. And I simply mean that I have hope that I can make a place for myself where I can love and be loved-- not in despite of-- but because of everything I am. I want to be a partner to someone and an asset. I want to give everything I have in myself to something, and eventually to someone. Realizing over the last year how important it was I learn myself before I attempt to understand anything else has made all the difference.  I’ve managed to establish as well as protect some of the closest and most genuine friendships I have ever had in my entire life. My life is littered with blessings in the shape of friends who love me for myself and I them. Shifting my focus in my relationships away from “what can you do for me” to “what can I do for me, and what can I do for you” has led me to people who do not always give freely but give with meaning. And appreciate what I have inside me to offer.

All I am left with when I put it together is a profound hope and prayer that what I am about to say is nothing but truth: My life is going to be full, and it will be full because I will valiantly love every moment I have of it and everyone I am lucky enough to have in it. I will not cut myself off emotionally and I will find the courage to be open to the love that I am lucky enough to have all around me. My past is not tying me down and I am no longer running headfirst into the night on a hope of escaping my nightmares.

Because now I only have dreams. And in my dreams the stars are bright.