I'll save the usual opening after a long hiatus and trust that you know that it's been quite some time since I've posted.
What breaks the silence you ask? I think part of it is to help prevent the constant struggle that I have of living in my head. The other is that I genuinely enjoy writing and don't do it enough.
These past two to four weeks have been a pretty big struggle for me. I'm dealing with emotions that have long laid dormant. Ones that I thought I would never feel again.
I long ago resolved that I was (and still largely am) a
broken person; one unable (read: unwilling) to tread into that territory again in fear of getting hurt. I was content being a casual observer while my friends and their significant other's danced their dance and led their intertwined lives together. I was okay with being the consummate bachelor in the group, plus I'm pretty sure it's a law in most states that every group needs at least one. So when I started to feel said emotions rear their head again, I was genuinely frightened.
Frightened because I thought my heart had calloused over and I was incapable of feeling this way about another person, or rather letting another person feel that way about me. Let's face it, the last time I truly opened up to someone and let them in, they used it against me in the worst way possible. I wasn't willing to go back to that whipping post again. So I think one can understand why whenever someone would try and get close to me, it was met with extreme trepidation.
Enter someone new and completely unexpected; and slowly but surely I let my guard down. For some unexplained reason, I found myself letting this new person in, I was peeling away at layers of scar tissue that I had let envelop me over the years. Each time a layer would come off I felt like a new but familiar person, someone that I used to be years ago. So I think you can understand why it was such a frightening, albeit elating, experience for me. I remained cautious though, always keeping it in the back of my head that I was being used, or manipulated in some horrible way, but that too began to fade. I became an optimist, a moniker that if you labeled me with only months ago, I would have scoffed at you.
Then the other shoe dropped. I should have seen the signs, a casual hint of an ex here, a cutting remark there; it was my mistake for overlooking it. But could you blame me? I was forthcoming from the beginning with my feelings for her, and wasn't met with aversion. I thought I was on the precipice of, dare I say, something real? It had been so long that I didn't know what that felt like. But just as quickly as it started, it stopped.
Being judged is just something that you just have to deal with when you're in your 20's. You're constantly being assaulted with a litany of judgments from all angles from the time you graduate high school until you "get your shit together." Even then you're faced with the day-to-day judgments of life. But I feel that no one does, or ever should, get used to being judged on the things they're opening up about. To be judged on personal things about one's life is a horrible feeling. Being condescended to about the trials and tribulations of life is lower than low. It made me hate myself, not because of their judgement, but because I trusted this person and they hurt me. I should have known better.
The good thing about all this is that it made me realize that I
want to be happy. For the longest time I didn't think I deserved it, or even wanted happiness for myself. But to experience this small period of feeling genuinely good about things, made me want that for the long run.
I know I say I'll write more, and I always fail to do so, but I think it might stick this time.
