Feelings: a love/hate relationship.

So often it seems that my life is spent attempting to understand what I feel about it. It's been a battle. A battle to use words that feel, words that explain, and words that bring transparency to my heart and mind. The trouble in it for me is that in actuality, I feel very deeply, and the inability to then identify, understand, and explain becomes the problem. Is there anyone out there who has an easy answer for me? I guess I don't really want an easy answer, I'd just like to be a professional describer of feelings in a way that allows people to know me without wanting to run in the other direction whilst I fumble over incorrect adjectives and descriptors. Eek.. that wasn't what I meant, again.

I bring this up again because I decided how I felt today. It only took me 2 days - that's progress, folks.

Detached. That is what I decided while I ate my frozen yogurt after a mediocre lunch that took up too much room in my stomach. For some reason it seems the world is moving to and fro, and I remain motionless. Something is not connected.

I flew home from Boston on Tuesday evening after a short dream of a week visiting historical sites, savoring delicious meals, trying new things, and spending time with and learning from one of the most amazing people I know. I'm fairly certain it's the culprit as the cause of my feeling the way that I do. For me, I've found I feel the most alive, the most myself when I am experiencing something new (or possibly something old in a new way). Maybe I'm addicted to growth, to knowledge, to broadening views or maybe the OC just doesn't cut it for me. It seems I've left a part of my spirit in Boston, because I feel only half of me has returned home. (Insert pity party here).

I suppose that all I am left with is a dilemma. I feel the social and personal responsibility to rise above the feelings I experience to complete tasks and move forward on commitments to my family, friends, and clients - I just wish feeling like doing those things came with it. Someone wise I know told me once to do what I need to do when I need to do it, and the feelings will follow. I think I will go with that for now, since I lack an epiphany of my own.

Cynic turned Realist: Love.

In Junior High I was obsessed with understanding what love really was. I’m not exactly sure what I was hoping to find, but I remember writing, reading, and thinking for 2 years and giving up a hopeless mess. I took the cynical route claiming that love was merely a choice - nothing more, nothing less. In hindsight, it was a little bit of a burden for a 13 year old.

Ten years later, I think I am finally starting to get the real picture.

Now I can see where I wanted to go with the idea of choice – I wanted it to be consistent and it seemed that if it was a feeling-based state of mind, it would be up, down, here, there, and gone before you know it. I knew that wasn’t right, but I didn’t have much else to go on. I sing a different tune these days.

Love is. It is. It takes care of, it takes interest in. It’s selfless, and remains without conditions. It sifts the unimportant and hurtful from meaning and poignancy. Love speaks, it touches. Love forgives and communicates. Love is quiet and it’s deep. It’s open and transparent. It’s grounded. It’s real.

I don’t know for sure if I thought in Jr. High that I’d find love to mimic a fairytale with a prince and princess, there were ounces of such thought, of that I am sure.

Now, I am coming to find that the beauty of the real thing is its lack of fairytale-ness in every sense of the word. Expectations are easier to meet and we are allowed to remain ourselves. Lord knows I’d make a terrible princess.

There was no amount of reading and thinking I could have done at age 11 that could have brought any sort of clarity. I needed to be taught, and more than taught, I needed to be shown.

It’s pretty wild what being loved can do to you. It’s challenging, humbling, calming, wonderful, and is worth all of the effort necessary.

To love perfectly, well, that’s a whole other story, and one I’m sure I will never be able to write. I should probably finish the one I started to write 10 years ago.

I think the 13-year-old me wouldn’t have a problem with the ‘me’ today and my take on that whole ‘love’ thing. Thanks, Whitney circa 2000, for your approval.