You Have To Admit It's Getting Better

Sometimes inspiration comes in the strangest places. Like a friend's IM status. At the height of my wallowing the other day I logged on to check my email and out of the corner of my eye saw:

It's easy to suffer when you make the world hard. Make your world easy and you will suffer less.

So simple and yet probably the hardest thing for me to do. I like control down to controlling how I respond to the world and how it responds back to me. And then when I set myself up for failure and heartbreak I'm left with the truths that have been in front of me the whole time.

I told a friend the other week that no one will ever love you back the exact same way you love them and I don't think I completely realized that until I said it. It's true for everything though and I think for 28 years I lived thinking that the universe would respond to me exactly how I responded to it even if my own responses were often time disingenuous and born out of distrust and fear.

So that's where I am right now at 1:06PM on January 21. Trying to make my world easy. And listening to Fleet Foxes who might just be the best band ever.

Aldous Huxley (read Brave New World if you haven't) and Wildmind have even more to say on love and much better then I could.

“We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love.

I think I write about love so much because it's the part of my life that I understand the least and have had the least success with. I can be a student, a teacher, a boss, an employee but being a daughter, sister, friend and girlfriend have been things I've always struggled to feel like I'm good at.

Here I Am Again

Journals and me go back a long way. I can remember being in first grade and trying to keep a diary. It was hard at the time and I realize now it's because not many first graders have all that much to journal about in depth. I certainly didn't. Journaling for me has always been about taking the pieces of my soul that I can't figure out and attaching words to them. Not to say that I was particularly uncomplicated six year old because I wasn't. But the scope of my complications and the words I knew to describe them were much smaller.

These days every time I sit down to write I'm struck with a million conflicting thoughts and issues and things to say about them. It becomes easier to just talk because anyone who knows me knows that talking is not an issue for me. Shutting up and getting to a point maybe but not talking. Except talking means having to listen and not so much to what the other person is saying but to myself. That's when everything becomes real. That's when I have to stop pretending that I honestly feel like my life is alright.

So I've become something of a mute these days with the words I do use usually meaning nothing. This is my attempt to get the better of that urge. To stop ignoring and hiding and pretending like what I watched on TV is the most important thing I have to talk about. It's so I'll stop waking up every morning and asking myself "How?" and "Why?" and "Seriously universe?" and start coming up with answers to those questions.

Something about blogging has always felt a bit self indulgent to me but I think I've reached that point where I need to indulge myself. I need to have long conversations with myself where I figure what the last ten years of my life have really been about and what I honestly want to happen now. I can't promise that I'll always make sense and I can only fervently promise that I hope to be entertaining. I tend to cry and laugh in equal measures and sometimes at the same time.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

- Elizabeth Gilbert