Heartache
This is a bit of an unplanned entry, but it's something I think I need to get out and said in a public sharable way as it's been inside me for a long long time, and based on how I'm reacting confronting it it's clearly, an issue to me. So I'll just drop an LJ Cut and dive right in.
I am not sure quite how to start, but I have a tendency not to talk in excess about my life, normally, this journal is kind of the inverse exception being what it is. I have, very wide-ranging interests and I'm into a lot of things such that various social circles I share some of them with would likely have no interest in others, and with regards to my personal life or my problems I don't feel like I should push them on people or expect them to listen to all my tribulations like some kind of endurance test to being friends with me, I'm not a here's-my-baggage kind of person. I'm very happy to listen to other people's problems, I even value it, but that's my decision, to want to do that, and it's their decision to want to hear anything I might share, and I don't ask or need that, investment in something fundamentally negative to bond with someone. Friendships are built out of positive things, helping one another through the bad is good too, but I don't feel like if nothing went wrong we should have no way to get close to one another. So I present a positive and unburdened self to others, and it's genuine, because even though I have problems it's rarely if ever something so bad it's weighing on me all the time, and it's not what I want to be about, even if they get to me now and then I'm a lot more than that, and all the things I feel good about, everything I like, is a much bigger part of my identity than those minority dislikes/pains.
This is kind of a long intro, and I guess that's because I want to say something very important to me but I also don't want to dwell on it or take it to lengths, yet I want to make it clear how crucial it still is to me. So here goes. As some I'll show this to know and there's evidence of spread here and there in my LJ, I was once in love. I've probably mentioned her real life name before in this journal or in comments, I forget, but just in case I haven't, I won't now. I met her I think 6 and a halfish years ago, and for 2 and a half years we were together. I discovered a love that I, well I kind of thought of it like something from a computer game or fantasy novel. I could imagine such love, in my head, but I didn't think that it actually could really exist until then. I developed an intense love for this person, and it was so much more than a guy and a girl, I shared the things I did, so many of them, from so many diverse ranges of my interests, and that more than any gender-based attraction, and all the stuff that mattered to one another we shared, made her the most important person in my heart, whom I earnestly intended to marry and share my life and as much of my soul as possible with. She lived in America and I live in England and I was still going through university when I met her, so it was kind of a goal I was working towards, bringing us actually together in the flesh, it'd take work, but it was my aim. That did not work out and she broke up with me, and I don't want to dwell much on the details. What I have dwelt on though is that I still wanted to be friends, I still, I still loved and probably do still love her more than anyone else I ever have, or pretty much equally as much. And without drawing it out to the extent it was drawn out in reality, it took us 4 full years and a bit to, to finally talk things through. And that didn't go the way I wanted either, she has chosen not to stay in contact with me, which isn't that different in practice from how those 4 years went but in principle it's a big difference.
It's a little hard to explain this because I know it's been pathetic of me, but when the thing that mattered most to me in a personal way, lingered for so long, and I had to wait so much and try so hard not to push or demand for how badly I felt I needed it to move, and for having no idea if or when it would get anywhere... I just kind of hibernated emotionally in a small way. Everything else I wanted to do I couldn't throw myself into doing fully, because it increased the contrast with how what I wanted most, I was holding my breath for for so long. It just drained me, in every venture, my friends, my creative writing, it wasn't always on my mind but distantly it was always, there, I was in its gravity. That's pretty sad, I'm aware, but I hoped if I endured enough and didn't give up early we could still be friends, I thought or maybe wanted to think I had some say in that and, and that it was possible for me to reach that if, if I was brave and patient and understanding enough. It would've been worth it to me.
This has already gotten longer than I meant it to, heh. What I wanted to say was that, as my last LJ entry alludes to, while it didn't end the way I wanted, it did end, and since then these last 3 months I've been processing that emotionally and catching up on all the things that flagged in that time, things and people I neglected. This is a bit abrupt, but some people may not know this about me, I actually formally have ADHD, and also Asperger's Syndrome. I was diagnosed before it was trendy, heh. I don't really talk about it because I believe I've overcome most of what those conditions entail, much as any other person can overcome tendencies in their personality if they try hard enough, and if you didn't think I had them without me saying it then, well that's evidence, mentioning it up front will mean nothing at the best or colour people's perceptions at the worst, so it's a bit fruitless. There is one trait Autistics have that applies to me rather well though, which is that while they tend to be kind of socially blind, in terms of picking up signals, they actually have a higher than usual empathy for the feelings of others they can grasp. That is, without meaning to sound like some kind of strange boast, very applicable to me. I am almost pathologically compassionate, to be honest, and I think it takes more discipline and self-regulation to keep that in check than anything else my condition may have given me, because while it's obvious for example, getting angry too easily, or failing to understand other people's feelings, are bad things, caring about others is not, it's a good thing, and I daresay in a way the most important thing, philosophically as well as how much weight it has to me emotionally. What's made me sit down and write this now, is I was going through old messages I had left on another website, PMs, so personal messages, and over time I've accrued a number of "marked as unread" ones I meant to reply to when I had more emotional space to do so properly. And with how I was trying, for the last four years, not to acknowledge just how much time was passing, some of them are a year, 2 years or more old. And some of them, now I'm finally getting around to clearing them out and replying in some cases, are from people who mean a great deal to me, and I... It, I just started crying, right this moment. I had put taking them all on off not cus of the workload, but because I knew and I expected it would get to me emotionally. But I didn't expect to be affected this much. I had to go out to the kitchen and get something to eat and I was physically in a real tangible pain, my throat was tight and my chest ached like I'd been thumped with boxing gloves and I'm not trying to do this. This is not a, well a healthy reaction, I think, certainly not normal, but it's happening to me involuntarily, although I want to feel, I want to care, but I think this is maybe going too far, I dunno, I do mentally as well as emotionally place immense value on these relationships I have but, this is an issue of some kind, clearly, so I need to face it and come to terms with it, so it won't literally wrack me if I think about it fully, which is what I'm doing now.
So I guess this is something of an admission of a mild phobia of mine. I'm a very thinky kind of person and I've known, not just in the far away sense but in a real, faced up to it one that eventually everyone I love and everything I care about will die and fade away and be gone, me as well. I don't really like that but I understand it, I understand that all success and acclaim and material gain aren't going to last no matter what I do, how much I succeed, and nor in one sense are friends because we're all mortal. I've built my personal values around those ultimate facts and the transience of life, which means that if anything can have value it has to have value now, in the present, something that will one day be gone but still has worth for having been. If anything I do at all, or anyone does, matters, that has to be independent of it lasting, and things, I mean like, money and stuff, it's just a means, it has value but not inherent value, only the value of the ends it can help to realise or further. I'm not really that interested in it, money's there, it exists, it was there before me and it'll be there after me and though I may have a microcosmic affect on its distribution I'm not really doing anything. What I want from life isn't really to be rich and famous, because I've sat alone at night in my bed and quailed in sadness and fear and despair at my own impending death, which is far enough away now that I and most people about my age can comfortably ignore it, but it's real and I'm a chronic thinker, and I have faced it. I still don't like it, but I've started early on coming to terms with it, and since ultimately if anything is lost it is me as a self, and my self is my thoughts and emotions and so on, then if I can reach a state of comfort with it then that really matters, not suffering from fear or despair over it is what counts. That's the kind of logic I think out when I go diving into my own mind like this. So while once in a while it'll get the better of me, on the whole I'm not afraid of dying, not just all by itself.
What I'm afraid of is closer and different, and I've been talking myself up to it because it does shake me up, so I'm sorry this has been as is a tendency of mine, a long-ass post. I have met a great many people in my still relatively young life, and a lot of them remarkable and awesome, and just, good souls, overall. Some of them I love, not in a marriage-and-kids way but just as sincerely, still very very strongly, like, discovered brothers or sisters, and some I wouldn't say I love, but I still value the friendship of deeply. These bonds are the most important things I have, they're what mean most to me personally in my entire life. Fundamentally, I derive worth from the connections I form and memories I build with other people, I have other interests, I like to read, to write, to play games, but making a positive contribution to another person's life, creating a bond through something shared, an experience or thoughts or feelings expressed, that is what allows me to think about the never-pausing dwindling of my remaining existence and be alright with it. If I make other people happy, especially ones I've come to value and even love, if I enrichen them, even in small ways, even little things like funny situational jokes or memorable moments in conversation, things that they'd not have had otherwise, and in some small but meaningful way contribute to the richness of their lives, then I'm happy. I find my worth what others think of me and get from me, most of all. And that's where my fear comes from. What scares me, quite earnestly, more than death itself, is this worry. I worry that, if I fall out of touch with people, if I just, can't keep up with, everything I'm meant to do, like get a job and, well I tried to keep my friendship with the person I loved most, I worry that, due to fallibility in effort, in just getting worn out, and not managing to stay in touch for prolonged periods even though I want to, some of my friends may come to believe I don't want to, or that I just... Stopped caring. That terrifies me, it really does. I don't want to be desperate, I don't want to be some flaky person who, who says a dozen times they'll try to stay in touch or who only sporadically talks with you and constantly says they want to connect more regularly until it rings, hollow token and false, because it's not. I earnestly cherish these friendships and their well-being and opinions of me as much as ever, in some cases more for having just grown in life and come to better appreciate them retroactively. I know I can't spend as much time with everyone as I want by raw force of pragmatism, I love some people enough to spend all day with them and there's more than one, it just doesn't add up. And although I don't want it, or like it, and I feel guilty over it even, I don't want to fall out of touch, temporarily or for keeps, with anyone I've grown close to, I could accept it just as, as limitations of what can happen, the same way I know one day we'll all be gone even though I don't want or like it. But what I can't handle, in a... Clearly even greater way than I realised, is the idea someone I love or hold dearly thinks I stopped caring about them, because I stopped talking to them, or even that I care less than I did. I don't, I swear I don't. It means more to my soul than I can articulate that anybody I cherish, anyone reading this who I've neglected, not think that, that you know and believe that even if I fall out of touch with you and I fail to reconnect until we both die and all chances have past, it's vital to me that you know I never stopped wanting to, I never stopped caring about you. This is not... A level of feeling that can fit into normal social interaction, I don't have dynamics with all of you that allow me to say this normally, it'd be uncomfortable for you and as I said before, I don't like to push my, my needs on people, to be demanding, to throw around my baggage. So I won't name names, but I'm writing this, here, and I'll try to share it around, and just, no matter what I do, or fail to do, no matter how bad I fare at staying in touch with you because things get on top of me, if I ever told you I cared about you, if I ever called you a close friend, if I've ever said I love you, please know that doesn't fade. Even if you stop thinking of me, whenever you do as rarely as it is, please believe you're in my heart still, no less than when we spoke the most regularly and closely we ever did. It's the most important thing to my soul, that you know that.
So I just had to get this off my chest, it was clearly, doing a number on me. Thank you to anyone that reads it, and I'm sorry for my baggage :).
I'm also gonna try to be different, I have been trying, and I'm picking up speed. Having what lingered in my heart and made me so pathetic laid to rest, I have felt freer to do any one thing and not, worry so much about the other things I'm not doing. So hopefully, though I want to share it with everyone I can, hopefully this message is safety net that won't see much use, and hopefully most of you know I still care already too, I just get worried in the silence that is my own fault, since it is out of my control then. Here's a pretty song to end on though, for an uplifting note <3:
Heh, 13:37 GMT.
I am not sure quite how to start, but I have a tendency not to talk in excess about my life, normally, this journal is kind of the inverse exception being what it is. I have, very wide-ranging interests and I'm into a lot of things such that various social circles I share some of them with would likely have no interest in others, and with regards to my personal life or my problems I don't feel like I should push them on people or expect them to listen to all my tribulations like some kind of endurance test to being friends with me, I'm not a here's-my-baggage kind of person. I'm very happy to listen to other people's problems, I even value it, but that's my decision, to want to do that, and it's their decision to want to hear anything I might share, and I don't ask or need that, investment in something fundamentally negative to bond with someone. Friendships are built out of positive things, helping one another through the bad is good too, but I don't feel like if nothing went wrong we should have no way to get close to one another. So I present a positive and unburdened self to others, and it's genuine, because even though I have problems it's rarely if ever something so bad it's weighing on me all the time, and it's not what I want to be about, even if they get to me now and then I'm a lot more than that, and all the things I feel good about, everything I like, is a much bigger part of my identity than those minority dislikes/pains.
This is kind of a long intro, and I guess that's because I want to say something very important to me but I also don't want to dwell on it or take it to lengths, yet I want to make it clear how crucial it still is to me. So here goes. As some I'll show this to know and there's evidence of spread here and there in my LJ, I was once in love. I've probably mentioned her real life name before in this journal or in comments, I forget, but just in case I haven't, I won't now. I met her I think 6 and a halfish years ago, and for 2 and a half years we were together. I discovered a love that I, well I kind of thought of it like something from a computer game or fantasy novel. I could imagine such love, in my head, but I didn't think that it actually could really exist until then. I developed an intense love for this person, and it was so much more than a guy and a girl, I shared the things I did, so many of them, from so many diverse ranges of my interests, and that more than any gender-based attraction, and all the stuff that mattered to one another we shared, made her the most important person in my heart, whom I earnestly intended to marry and share my life and as much of my soul as possible with. She lived in America and I live in England and I was still going through university when I met her, so it was kind of a goal I was working towards, bringing us actually together in the flesh, it'd take work, but it was my aim. That did not work out and she broke up with me, and I don't want to dwell much on the details. What I have dwelt on though is that I still wanted to be friends, I still, I still loved and probably do still love her more than anyone else I ever have, or pretty much equally as much. And without drawing it out to the extent it was drawn out in reality, it took us 4 full years and a bit to, to finally talk things through. And that didn't go the way I wanted either, she has chosen not to stay in contact with me, which isn't that different in practice from how those 4 years went but in principle it's a big difference.
It's a little hard to explain this because I know it's been pathetic of me, but when the thing that mattered most to me in a personal way, lingered for so long, and I had to wait so much and try so hard not to push or demand for how badly I felt I needed it to move, and for having no idea if or when it would get anywhere... I just kind of hibernated emotionally in a small way. Everything else I wanted to do I couldn't throw myself into doing fully, because it increased the contrast with how what I wanted most, I was holding my breath for for so long. It just drained me, in every venture, my friends, my creative writing, it wasn't always on my mind but distantly it was always, there, I was in its gravity. That's pretty sad, I'm aware, but I hoped if I endured enough and didn't give up early we could still be friends, I thought or maybe wanted to think I had some say in that and, and that it was possible for me to reach that if, if I was brave and patient and understanding enough. It would've been worth it to me.
This has already gotten longer than I meant it to, heh. What I wanted to say was that, as my last LJ entry alludes to, while it didn't end the way I wanted, it did end, and since then these last 3 months I've been processing that emotionally and catching up on all the things that flagged in that time, things and people I neglected. This is a bit abrupt, but some people may not know this about me, I actually formally have ADHD, and also Asperger's Syndrome. I was diagnosed before it was trendy, heh. I don't really talk about it because I believe I've overcome most of what those conditions entail, much as any other person can overcome tendencies in their personality if they try hard enough, and if you didn't think I had them without me saying it then, well that's evidence, mentioning it up front will mean nothing at the best or colour people's perceptions at the worst, so it's a bit fruitless. There is one trait Autistics have that applies to me rather well though, which is that while they tend to be kind of socially blind, in terms of picking up signals, they actually have a higher than usual empathy for the feelings of others they can grasp. That is, without meaning to sound like some kind of strange boast, very applicable to me. I am almost pathologically compassionate, to be honest, and I think it takes more discipline and self-regulation to keep that in check than anything else my condition may have given me, because while it's obvious for example, getting angry too easily, or failing to understand other people's feelings, are bad things, caring about others is not, it's a good thing, and I daresay in a way the most important thing, philosophically as well as how much weight it has to me emotionally. What's made me sit down and write this now, is I was going through old messages I had left on another website, PMs, so personal messages, and over time I've accrued a number of "marked as unread" ones I meant to reply to when I had more emotional space to do so properly. And with how I was trying, for the last four years, not to acknowledge just how much time was passing, some of them are a year, 2 years or more old. And some of them, now I'm finally getting around to clearing them out and replying in some cases, are from people who mean a great deal to me, and I... It, I just started crying, right this moment. I had put taking them all on off not cus of the workload, but because I knew and I expected it would get to me emotionally. But I didn't expect to be affected this much. I had to go out to the kitchen and get something to eat and I was physically in a real tangible pain, my throat was tight and my chest ached like I'd been thumped with boxing gloves and I'm not trying to do this. This is not a, well a healthy reaction, I think, certainly not normal, but it's happening to me involuntarily, although I want to feel, I want to care, but I think this is maybe going too far, I dunno, I do mentally as well as emotionally place immense value on these relationships I have but, this is an issue of some kind, clearly, so I need to face it and come to terms with it, so it won't literally wrack me if I think about it fully, which is what I'm doing now.
So I guess this is something of an admission of a mild phobia of mine. I'm a very thinky kind of person and I've known, not just in the far away sense but in a real, faced up to it one that eventually everyone I love and everything I care about will die and fade away and be gone, me as well. I don't really like that but I understand it, I understand that all success and acclaim and material gain aren't going to last no matter what I do, how much I succeed, and nor in one sense are friends because we're all mortal. I've built my personal values around those ultimate facts and the transience of life, which means that if anything can have value it has to have value now, in the present, something that will one day be gone but still has worth for having been. If anything I do at all, or anyone does, matters, that has to be independent of it lasting, and things, I mean like, money and stuff, it's just a means, it has value but not inherent value, only the value of the ends it can help to realise or further. I'm not really that interested in it, money's there, it exists, it was there before me and it'll be there after me and though I may have a microcosmic affect on its distribution I'm not really doing anything. What I want from life isn't really to be rich and famous, because I've sat alone at night in my bed and quailed in sadness and fear and despair at my own impending death, which is far enough away now that I and most people about my age can comfortably ignore it, but it's real and I'm a chronic thinker, and I have faced it. I still don't like it, but I've started early on coming to terms with it, and since ultimately if anything is lost it is me as a self, and my self is my thoughts and emotions and so on, then if I can reach a state of comfort with it then that really matters, not suffering from fear or despair over it is what counts. That's the kind of logic I think out when I go diving into my own mind like this. So while once in a while it'll get the better of me, on the whole I'm not afraid of dying, not just all by itself.
What I'm afraid of is closer and different, and I've been talking myself up to it because it does shake me up, so I'm sorry this has been as is a tendency of mine, a long-ass post. I have met a great many people in my still relatively young life, and a lot of them remarkable and awesome, and just, good souls, overall. Some of them I love, not in a marriage-and-kids way but just as sincerely, still very very strongly, like, discovered brothers or sisters, and some I wouldn't say I love, but I still value the friendship of deeply. These bonds are the most important things I have, they're what mean most to me personally in my entire life. Fundamentally, I derive worth from the connections I form and memories I build with other people, I have other interests, I like to read, to write, to play games, but making a positive contribution to another person's life, creating a bond through something shared, an experience or thoughts or feelings expressed, that is what allows me to think about the never-pausing dwindling of my remaining existence and be alright with it. If I make other people happy, especially ones I've come to value and even love, if I enrichen them, even in small ways, even little things like funny situational jokes or memorable moments in conversation, things that they'd not have had otherwise, and in some small but meaningful way contribute to the richness of their lives, then I'm happy. I find my worth what others think of me and get from me, most of all. And that's where my fear comes from. What scares me, quite earnestly, more than death itself, is this worry. I worry that, if I fall out of touch with people, if I just, can't keep up with, everything I'm meant to do, like get a job and, well I tried to keep my friendship with the person I loved most, I worry that, due to fallibility in effort, in just getting worn out, and not managing to stay in touch for prolonged periods even though I want to, some of my friends may come to believe I don't want to, or that I just... Stopped caring. That terrifies me, it really does. I don't want to be desperate, I don't want to be some flaky person who, who says a dozen times they'll try to stay in touch or who only sporadically talks with you and constantly says they want to connect more regularly until it rings, hollow token and false, because it's not. I earnestly cherish these friendships and their well-being and opinions of me as much as ever, in some cases more for having just grown in life and come to better appreciate them retroactively. I know I can't spend as much time with everyone as I want by raw force of pragmatism, I love some people enough to spend all day with them and there's more than one, it just doesn't add up. And although I don't want it, or like it, and I feel guilty over it even, I don't want to fall out of touch, temporarily or for keeps, with anyone I've grown close to, I could accept it just as, as limitations of what can happen, the same way I know one day we'll all be gone even though I don't want or like it. But what I can't handle, in a... Clearly even greater way than I realised, is the idea someone I love or hold dearly thinks I stopped caring about them, because I stopped talking to them, or even that I care less than I did. I don't, I swear I don't. It means more to my soul than I can articulate that anybody I cherish, anyone reading this who I've neglected, not think that, that you know and believe that even if I fall out of touch with you and I fail to reconnect until we both die and all chances have past, it's vital to me that you know I never stopped wanting to, I never stopped caring about you. This is not... A level of feeling that can fit into normal social interaction, I don't have dynamics with all of you that allow me to say this normally, it'd be uncomfortable for you and as I said before, I don't like to push my, my needs on people, to be demanding, to throw around my baggage. So I won't name names, but I'm writing this, here, and I'll try to share it around, and just, no matter what I do, or fail to do, no matter how bad I fare at staying in touch with you because things get on top of me, if I ever told you I cared about you, if I ever called you a close friend, if I've ever said I love you, please know that doesn't fade. Even if you stop thinking of me, whenever you do as rarely as it is, please believe you're in my heart still, no less than when we spoke the most regularly and closely we ever did. It's the most important thing to my soul, that you know that.
So I just had to get this off my chest, it was clearly, doing a number on me. Thank you to anyone that reads it, and I'm sorry for my baggage :).
I'm also gonna try to be different, I have been trying, and I'm picking up speed. Having what lingered in my heart and made me so pathetic laid to rest, I have felt freer to do any one thing and not, worry so much about the other things I'm not doing. So hopefully, though I want to share it with everyone I can, hopefully this message is safety net that won't see much use, and hopefully most of you know I still care already too, I just get worried in the silence that is my own fault, since it is out of my control then. Here's a pretty song to end on though, for an uplifting note <3:
Click to viewHeh, 13:37 GMT.