Of Resolutions

So the more I write this blog, the more I realize it is becoming more of a vehicle for verbal diarrhea and exploration of the parts of my mind that I rarely visit. I think overall, I am okay with that direction. I put the sub-title of this blog down as “A journey of Forced Acceptance” and I think my random musings are helping me with that part at least.

Today, I wrote this on the subway:

Be smart enough to know,

Strong enough to feel,

And wise enough to know which is right.

Understand your insignificance,

Never underestimate your value,

And be wise enough to know why it matters.

I love it. I love everything about it. I have not written any sort of poetry or prose in an extremely long time. That’s a lie. I have written, but so much if it is forced sentimental crap and a regurgitation of all of the topics, rhyming patterns and analogies that I have been using since high school. All of the writings that I am most proud of come randomly, without a lot of thought, and generally when I am at my weakest. This is one of those.

I am not really sure why I am at a weak point in my life. After She left me, I set out to try and reinvent myself and fix all of the things that drove Her so crazy. I went to Meetup groups to try and be more social, I started exploring New York on my own so that I could reconnect and begin loving myself again, I interrogated myself and wrote more than I have ever written. I have re-established and strengthened my existing friendships and tried to forge new ones. I tried dating.

So what have I learned to date? I think the most important thing I have been trying to convince myself of in the 4 months since She left has to be that I already know who I am. The real question is whether or not who I am is good enough. 9 times out of 10 I will sit here and preach about how since I know who I am, and that I am comfortable with who I am, I have nothing to worry about and I should be fine. However, I believe that it really is that 1 out of 10 times that matters. Bravado and false confidence are immensely easy to come by.

These last few days have been kind of a roller coaster for me. First and foremost, I did not really ever think how important it was to be with family for the holidays. Instinctively I always knew that people shouldn’t be alone for the holidays, but not until this year did I fully understand why. This was the first year that I have ever celebrated the holidays without my family, and the first in a long time without Her with me. I am trying very hard to be friends with Her still. I love her and I miss her terribly, and it kills me that I will never be the person that she needs me to be. To be fair, it also kills me that she is not the person that I need either. I wanted it to be her. But it’s not. And that is life. I have seen her maybe once a week the last month or so and it has been awesome. She was the only one I thought to call to celebrate my raise/promotion with. She was the one I wanted to call on New Year’s Day. I am scared I will never find someone that understood me as well as She did – even though I do not think that She ever fully understood me, or trusted me – and that kills me too.

I guess on top of that, my friend introduced me to one of her friends and I took her out a couple times. I was a little nervous about it and had some pretty serious doubts, but after hanging out with her basically all day one Saturday, I decided that I really liked being with her. She made me feel relaxed and happy (it is so hard for me to be happy these days that I really did cherish this. I don’t know why she made me happy, only that the second time we went out was the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time.) Anyways, I spend so much time in my head that I have a really hard time figuring out girls (and boys for that matter) and deciding how they feel about me. I can over analyze anything. I digress. As many of my close friends probably know, I can have a tendency to become a little obsessed and fixated on things, and in this case I supposed I fixated on her as a kind of last bastion of happiness in the island of hate and ugliness that is New York. I was too overbearing, now that’s probably a done deal. That, again, is life. It makes me sad, but I am not sure if there is any real way for me to salvage this. It really was only 2 dates so I am not even sure why I am upset about this.

This leads me kind of to what I wrote. Kind of. Not really at all, but that’s what I want to talk about now.

The thing is this, I KNEW that I was being overbearing. I KNEW that I was pushing too hard and being too aggressive. I KNEW that I was latching on to her because I was too scared of being alone. I have never been strong enough to be alone. To just accept the loneliness that can be a part of existence. There is a very fine line that I feel obligated to point out now and that is this: I absolutely have no problem being alone in the physical sense. Hell I prefer it most of the time. But there is a very, very large difference between being alone and being alone when you KNOW that there is that one other person out there who you feel perfectly safe with and who will never judge you. For me, for the longest time, She was that person. We used to joke that I was the center and rock, while She was the wind and the spirits who used me to always bring Her back to Herself. She knew me better than anyone. She is the closest I have ever been to being with someone who loved me for almost all of who I am.

My friend came up with this rule she uses to sell houses to people, that she has begun applying to her dating life. I’m probably going to get this a little bit wrong, but she calls it the 80-10-10 rule. When you are buying a house (or gauging significant others) you need to be in love with 80% of the house. You need to take that 80% exactly as it is, love it, and embrace it as yours. The next 10% is shit that bothers you, but that you are confident you can fix through remodeling (or education and guidance in the case of a significant). And the last 10% is shit that bugs you, but that you are willing to live with because the rest of the 90% is so good. But under no circumstance can the part that you are willing to live with exceed the final 10%.

The part that kills me is that for both Her and me, I am almost positive that the 80% is there and the last 10% is there as well, however it was the middle 10% that we got fucked on. There were things about Her that I was willing to love as a part of Her, and then there was that 10% that I was really going to try and “remodel”. I am positive She feels the same way. Turns out though, neither of our middle 10% was all that malleable, so when that 10% of shit that you need to accept and live with, turns into 20%, things get much, much harder.

We both must have known that things weren’t going to work out for a long time. It wasn’t until the very end that I began to feel Her pull away from me. I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t. But it was true, and if I had paid a little more attention, I could have caught it and tried to fix it, or I could have let it go a lot earlier. And thus the importance of knowing and feeling, but also the importance to know which one you need to listen to regardless of what the other one says.

This again, is another really sloppy transition to the second part of what I wrote. BAM ENGLISH.

I am terrified of being alone. I am sure that this is not an uncommon fear. The fear of being alone unmans me. It makes me behave erratically and irrationally. It makes me fixate on anything that I perceive to be a lifeline. It is my friend who I was initially too scared to talk to outside of a group setting, that I now talk to all the time. It is walking Smurf into Manhattan so that I can pretend that I am doing something. It was my passing obsessions with Tinder and Match in a mad attempt to find partnership. It is the girl that I threw myself at hoping against hope that I could find solace again.

I do not know how to be alone. I do not know how to be comfortable with who I am without a significant other next to me from whom I can assume a tacit approval for who I am. I constantly seek validation and approval for what I do and who I am. And this is the 1 of 10 times that I cannot justify with myself.

I do not know how to stop. I fucking wish I did.

The best way for me to describe it, is that being lonely and alone makes me feel insignificant. Like my life doesn’t matter. But it is a completely different insignificance than what I felt when I was at The Intrepid. There is feeling insignificant because there are greater things that you should try to be a part of, and then there is insignificant because nothing you do matters to anyone. One of the most damning things I used to say about people is that they were ‘wasted piece of organic material and DNA’ and that ‘they had no redeeming value’. It is much, much worse to be the second kind of insignificant, and I believe that is why it terrifies me so much.

By all accounts I am a significant person, and there is a significant amount of value that I can add to many, many situations. But it is so hard to convince myself of that fact when I am alone.

My favorite part about what I wrote, is that it is one of the only things I have ever written that did not end up preaching, or have some cliché’d love sick puppy ending. I find it deeply personal, yet expansively open to interpretation. I am definitely tooting my own horn, but those simple 6 lines of prose amaze me.

They amaze me in that with 33 words, I was able to summarize everything that I need to improve about myself.

In 6 lines of prose, and 33 words, I have given myself a framework to build my life in 2015. Only ballers write their New Year resolutions in prose.

Here’s to hoping it works.

Happy New Year.