Building blocks, or "Choose the form of your Destroyer!"
I came back to the early summer noodlings on fear and shame yesterday. (I could tell you how I got back to them, but it's a regular, recurring process rooted in hormonal surges that I recognize and understand, and while I don't exactly welcome the process or what it portends biologically, I have in the past year or so taught myself to listen underneath the rampaging hormones to what is actually seeking my attention). Coming back to where I started is a good exercise after almost half a year spent spiralling around in dark places and rabbit holes punched through once in a while by brilliant shafts of light leading almost back to the surface. But in spite of ingesting a lot of reading, making space for a lot of self-reflection and self-care, I have been having a really hard time making sense of all of the pieces - considered individually, the blocks of experience lived, history re-examined, new perspectives, book-learning, options for ongoing management, are all good and useful components of personal development. Taken together, I'm certain they are pointing to... something. I just don't know what.
It occurred to me yesterday that maybe the point is that there is no one great unifying picture here. There is a past; there is a present; there is a future. There is a Self who exists in all three, but the Self is not a static entity. There are others who likewise live in all three, but they are not static either. Nor are the bonds between them. The nature of the human mind is that we are great organizers of experiences, and part of that organizational methodology are the stories we tell ourselves around those experiences, so that we can link commonalities between experiences past, present, and future, and learn from those experiences. Experience, or at least our interpretation, can become ossified, though, into immutable truisms - subjective truths we cling to and cannot (will not) relinquish even in the face of conflicting facts or truths.
Maybe the point is to NOT stitch these things together, but to let them float as they will. There's a great scene toward the end of of the movie Labyrinth, after Sarah has confronted to Goblin King and the castle dissolves around them, random and increasingly jagged pieces of masonry and whatnot floating past them; once part of a cohesive whole, they have become separated components of what proved to be an illusory truth. Or, to put it another way, tools in a toolbox can be taken as a collective whole, but they are not themselves meant to be fitted together. Perhaps what I have been given over the summer are tools AND raw materials, not all of which are meant to be compressed into anything other than what they are. Maybe I'm not meant to swap one narrative with another. It's a heady thought: What if I could just accept all of this as what it is *now*, jumbled and as groundless as I am?
So I came back to the beginning, eventually, to look at what I have learned:
I am a product of my upbringing, and without understanding the extent of what that means, I have been fighting upstream against that all my life.
I have lived in fear of being abandoned or emotionally neglected all my life.
I have learned to use emotional manipulation and neglect, specifically through the attack/withdrawal patterns, as a self-defensive mechanism to "hurt you before you hurt me".
I have often believed I am not loved *enough* to be worth keeping.
I never learned healthy and effective means of communicating *anything* (until far, far, FAR beyond the point where I needed them).
I never had healthy and effective intimacy modelled for me.
I learned to believe that the people who care about me are inherently unstable and unpredictable.
Matthew is also a creature of his fears, for all that his are rooted in different places than mine are.
His reactive capitulation stems largely from those fears; his need to be the White Knight is seemingly tied in with a need to keep things calm to avoid being anxious himself; that need to keep things calm frequently meant yielding to my fears (especially when manifesting as anger) instead of effectively defining and defending his own boundaries. As a result, I learned that his boundaries were permeable, sometimes completely invisible; he learned to twist in fear rather than confront. In the end, we both lost respect for each other, at least in that regard.
Matthew's fearful capitulation was an enabling factor in my own negative behaviours, but the more ashamed of my own lack of control I became (and the more convinced I was unlovable because of my behaviour), the more I overcompensated for that shame and fear with anger and distance as a protective measure to keep from feeling flooded by my own "proven unworthiness".
I wanted (and have always wanted) my partner to see past the anger and distance to the hurt and fear inside; these are the parts that have always hurt, all my life, and never been given a voice.
More than I wanted my partner to see past them, I want my partner to rescue me from where I feel most trapped.
Anger and distance are insurmountable barriers to intimacy from either side.
There's very little in my own patterns that doesn't map to what I've learned about adult children of alcoholics and the problems with intimacy we have internalized.
Processing the grief of the breakup with Matthew and separating out the complex issues of fear, anger, abandonment and trying to NOT slot these into the internalized narrative that I am NOT good enough to be loved, as proved-to-the-Narrator by the history of failed relationships (through which I am the only consistent factor).
Processing the shame of admitting emotionally abusive patterns in my intimate relationships, the shame of admitting emotional neglect in my family.
Recognizing that Matthew and I both remained highly reactive in fear right to the bitter end, and afterwards; I punished him for my unidentified/unarticulated fears throughout the relationship by withdrawing emotionally and physically, I perceive he punished me at the end for his fears by withdrawing *FROM* the relationship completely. If this is how it felt for him all the way along... I understand, now. That same fear (compounded with new internalized hurts) also drove the confrontational episodes afterwards, for which I also remain ashamed. Understanding does nothing to mitigate that deep sorrow and shame.
Choosing to confront the ancient internal narratives by creating space for new voices, or for silence. Those confrontations, that space-making, are still formless and undisciplined efforts, but they are happening, and they already bring peace.
Realizing that "daring greatly" is going to mean learning to bring those fears into the daylight and walk alongside me when I change how I put myself into new, or emotionally similar situations of self-challenge. Authenticity is going to have to account for those fears that I am unlovable, and acknowledge that my fear of deserving to be abandoned is a factor driving my unconscious behaviours into that self-fulfilling-prophecy mode of attack/withdraw. Radical acceptance means including this understanding within a change framework: not so much changing the history so much as changing how the behaviours are managed in an effort to reduce them over time. Facing down those fears every damned time is going to be a bitch; use Welwood's book Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships to improve the compassionate handling of the backsliding episodes.
Articulating in future relationships that there are known patterns, [X, Y, Z] are the voiceless and unvoiced fears they indicate; and providing effective, mindfully-interactive safeguards for engaging myself and those fears respectfully in the moment, whether I have to face them down alone or with a partner's help. I'll probably learn to make free use of Loving an Adult Child of an Alcoholic as a handbook with future partners/lovers, if only because using a book published by people living OUTSIDE my head offers a great deal of validation for the idea that I'm NOT just making this stuff up.
Accepting that sometimes things just change because they change. Sometimes I will fail. I will learn more about myself through being open to failure than through clinging to the Narrative - no matter how much it hurts in the moment. I'm not better for coming through the flames, only... different.
Having and pursuing desires does not make me weak, a bad person, or a failure; nor does it make me less spiritual in my Self. Clinging to something beyond its usefulness in my life, whether a pattern or a person or a place, is where I start to close off my heart. When I hear only the Narrative, I am closed. The love I know now that I want is the love I will only find by opening up and setting my heart in the flame every time I am afraid. And I am always afraid.
I will make some of the mistakes again. Some of them I will even make again and again. What has changed is my understanding of where they come from. What will change is my tool set for mitigating them in advance and managing them afterwards.
My greatest strength lies in my words. My sharpest discovery is that my words and my voice are not the same thing. I've been using my words for years; I've been failing to hear my own voice; or rather, that which has not had a voice. I want my greatest power to lie in my voice, and let the words be just the tools of my voice. To do this, I need to trust the voice, and trust the space into which I speak it. Right now, I really have neither, but this will come in time, with practice and patience, and hopefully with a partner.
How I have used polyamory has been forever tied up in all of this: it has been a fear-based pursuit designed to provide additional mirrors and avenues of validation when I feared my primary relationship would fail me in the way all relationship have always (I believed) failed me. When things with Ben failed the way they did and I completely changed how I approached those corollary relationships, I did myself significant damage because I did not understand how I was further weakening an already flawed support system. Grad school further exacerbated all of my abandonment issues because of my chosen shift in focus and the ways in which we dealt with that. I didn't know that then, but these are all the underpinnings of the catastrophic change that happened in June: I systemically tore away the foundations of what I needed without seeing what I was doing or why I couldn't emotionally survive my own decisions, any more than I understood well enough to either ask for what I *really* wanted (which was for Matthew to be willing to love me no matter what) nor trust that even if I *had* asked, he would actually deliver what I needed in the face of my own perceived unlovableness. Yes, it's a tangled mess. The ACoA readings have taught me this Gordian Knot-ism is a part of life for us until we start to get shit sorted out. So without Matthew **OR** significant others/lovers to offer me the reflections I needed, I got caught in the broken mirror distortions and started to thrash. Most of that part of the story is well-documented elsewhen in this journal.
How I have used kink has also been forever tied up in all of this, but most especially with Matthew: over-promising and under-delivering in the context of using intensity of focus that comes with the lens of a D/s relationship to feel connection that true intimacy didn't have (in the early stages of the relationship especially, I accepted intensity in lieu of intimacy; convoluted relationship with BDSM on many pre-existing levels got complicated because I used the D/s relationship to help cement Matthew's focus, but as we settled and my insecurities began to rise back to the surface, I returned to doubting that I was loved the way I thought I wanted to be, and the withdrawal reflex manifested as resistance and disinclination in the D/s context: I felt I had lost the connection because I felt I had lost his interest, so not trusting in the existence of stable love, I withdrew from him and didn't trust his interest even when he did offer it. My resistance and withdrawal fueled his fears of being unattractive and undesired, and as he withdrew to nurse *his* wounds, I could only see his retreat, which I took as a sign that I was, in fact, unloved and unlovable... and that cycle perpetuated *constantly* all through the final years of our marriage, each of us seeing only the other's retreat, each of us only wanting the other to come after us and pull us back into love. The heartbreaking truth is that the love was always there on both sides, but in such intensities that neither of us could look at it directly, and at least in my case, that made it tragically easy to not look at it at all, and forget it was there when I needed it most.
Many things are broken, but nothing is "wrong". Many things are mutable, in that change is encouraged and possible, but "fixing" is an approach that "broken" = "bad" and "fixed" = "the problem goes away forever" = "good". This is not a realistic system of belief, but I don't know (yet) how, or even if, I can unhook from it. I'm reasonably certain it will be impossible to find partners who are not hooked into it; even Matthew at the end was hung up on wanting to know how I was going to "fix" things. I understand the assurances he wanted, but I cannot provide them, and anyone who believes they can is either completely unflawed as a human being, or just has some serious blindspots around human behavioural patterns. Doesn't stop any of us from WANTING to fix things, in the way my early work with Gloria was fixated on WANTING to completely eradicate weasels. Those weasels are a part of me; they are the minions of the Narrator. I know this now. I have an incredible power now to change my world in hugely significant ways, but radical acceptance means ALSO accepting with serenity those things I cannot change, and adjusting around them the coping mechanisms that CAN change. this is not an issue of right or wrong, broken or fixed; this is improving my stance of being imperfect.
Acknowledging and accepting my grievances, past and present, and learning to relinquish those in order to soften my stance within the world at large and my relationships in general.
Transmuting shame, especially around those thoughts, decisions, and actions I believe render me unlovable, into something easier to live with.
Improving my ability to stay in the moment by staying in and with my body and observing the emotional tides without necessarily succumbing to them (...some days remain better than others here).
Continuing to make space for the voice I have never heard before.
Continuing to be (mostly) open to whatever is falling into my lap in terms of learning or perspective development, and listening to my emotional tides... as well as the murmurations of whatever stirs beneath those tides.
Continuing to stay in place, for the most part; not as a recognition of stagnation, but as a practice of staying where I am, staying with what I'm feeling and doing in the moment (the job of Now is learning to be still and open and listening), staying rather than yielding to the compulsion to either move toward something, or away from something. I have been running away from my fears all my life, and running toward the distractions du jour; I still do enough self-distracting to be problematic, I can afford the time now to calm myself in new ways.
These are the big pieces, compiled in one place here for the first time. Some of this has been skirted or covered before, some has not. But these are (most of) the Self awarenesses that are new to me since the summer started. these are the pieces that have been rattling around in my head for nigh-on six months. These are pieces I have been struggling to integrate into some kind of cohesive understanding of what's happened or happening or will possibly happen in future. Maybe now it's clear why the past half-year has been a struggle to make sense of everything falling into place or falling into my hands: it's a major archaeological dig inside my head these days that is also trying to apply new or changed understandings and perspectives to the question, "Who do I choose to be, going forward from here?" I want to be someone who can see and ask for love even when - ESPECIALLY WHEN - I am in the middle of feeling dangerously disconnected from the belief in love, or that I am lovable. I want to be the partner who learns to trust that love is there for me, that my partner loves me and accepts me with no expectations of being perfect (and knows how to help me let go of my own expectations of everything being "perfect"). I want to be the partner who doesn't have to withdraw to nurse my hurts, nor set in motion the cycle of abandonment, time after time. My having been abandoned does NOT make it okay to abandon someone who needs and wants my love as much as I need and want his. I want to be a bridge builder, even if this means having to climb down into the darkness now and then to lift up the broken pieces. Sometimes things just break; that doesn't make them wrong. It means things can be rebuilt, not abandoned.
I want to be someone who understands how pieces work together without needing to construct them into rigid things they are not meant to be, and stop stressing about how all the good and useful and beautiful things in my life don't always fit into one single, cohesive, tidy, *CONSTRAINED* form. This does not need to be perfect either; imperfect does not mean wrong. Sometimes it doesn't even mean broken. It just means, "done by human hands". I want to be someone who is better at letting go of uncompromising expectations, who can handle being surprised without exploding.
I choose to be these things and more, and I accept that I am imperfectly in all of them, and will remain imperfectly in all of them. But I choose to move within all of these elements as best I may, and as I may continue.
These are just building blocks. From here, all things remain possible.
It occurred to me yesterday that maybe the point is that there is no one great unifying picture here. There is a past; there is a present; there is a future. There is a Self who exists in all three, but the Self is not a static entity. There are others who likewise live in all three, but they are not static either. Nor are the bonds between them. The nature of the human mind is that we are great organizers of experiences, and part of that organizational methodology are the stories we tell ourselves around those experiences, so that we can link commonalities between experiences past, present, and future, and learn from those experiences. Experience, or at least our interpretation, can become ossified, though, into immutable truisms - subjective truths we cling to and cannot (will not) relinquish even in the face of conflicting facts or truths.
Maybe the point is to NOT stitch these things together, but to let them float as they will. There's a great scene toward the end of of the movie Labyrinth, after Sarah has confronted to Goblin King and the castle dissolves around them, random and increasingly jagged pieces of masonry and whatnot floating past them; once part of a cohesive whole, they have become separated components of what proved to be an illusory truth. Or, to put it another way, tools in a toolbox can be taken as a collective whole, but they are not themselves meant to be fitted together. Perhaps what I have been given over the summer are tools AND raw materials, not all of which are meant to be compressed into anything other than what they are. Maybe I'm not meant to swap one narrative with another. It's a heady thought: What if I could just accept all of this as what it is *now*, jumbled and as groundless as I am?
So I came back to the beginning, eventually, to look at what I have learned:
I am a product of my upbringing, and without understanding the extent of what that means, I have been fighting upstream against that all my life.
I have lived in fear of being abandoned or emotionally neglected all my life.
I have learned to use emotional manipulation and neglect, specifically through the attack/withdrawal patterns, as a self-defensive mechanism to "hurt you before you hurt me".
I have often believed I am not loved *enough* to be worth keeping.
I never learned healthy and effective means of communicating *anything* (until far, far, FAR beyond the point where I needed them).
I never had healthy and effective intimacy modelled for me.
I learned to believe that the people who care about me are inherently unstable and unpredictable.
Matthew is also a creature of his fears, for all that his are rooted in different places than mine are.
His reactive capitulation stems largely from those fears; his need to be the White Knight is seemingly tied in with a need to keep things calm to avoid being anxious himself; that need to keep things calm frequently meant yielding to my fears (especially when manifesting as anger) instead of effectively defining and defending his own boundaries. As a result, I learned that his boundaries were permeable, sometimes completely invisible; he learned to twist in fear rather than confront. In the end, we both lost respect for each other, at least in that regard.
Matthew's fearful capitulation was an enabling factor in my own negative behaviours, but the more ashamed of my own lack of control I became (and the more convinced I was unlovable because of my behaviour), the more I overcompensated for that shame and fear with anger and distance as a protective measure to keep from feeling flooded by my own "proven unworthiness".
I wanted (and have always wanted) my partner to see past the anger and distance to the hurt and fear inside; these are the parts that have always hurt, all my life, and never been given a voice.
More than I wanted my partner to see past them, I want my partner to rescue me from where I feel most trapped.
Anger and distance are insurmountable barriers to intimacy from either side.
There's very little in my own patterns that doesn't map to what I've learned about adult children of alcoholics and the problems with intimacy we have internalized.
Processing the grief of the breakup with Matthew and separating out the complex issues of fear, anger, abandonment and trying to NOT slot these into the internalized narrative that I am NOT good enough to be loved, as proved-to-the-Narrator by the history of failed relationships (through which I am the only consistent factor).
Processing the shame of admitting emotionally abusive patterns in my intimate relationships, the shame of admitting emotional neglect in my family.
Recognizing that Matthew and I both remained highly reactive in fear right to the bitter end, and afterwards; I punished him for my unidentified/unarticulated fears throughout the relationship by withdrawing emotionally and physically, I perceive he punished me at the end for his fears by withdrawing *FROM* the relationship completely. If this is how it felt for him all the way along... I understand, now. That same fear (compounded with new internalized hurts) also drove the confrontational episodes afterwards, for which I also remain ashamed. Understanding does nothing to mitigate that deep sorrow and shame.
Choosing to confront the ancient internal narratives by creating space for new voices, or for silence. Those confrontations, that space-making, are still formless and undisciplined efforts, but they are happening, and they already bring peace.
Realizing that "daring greatly" is going to mean learning to bring those fears into the daylight and walk alongside me when I change how I put myself into new, or emotionally similar situations of self-challenge. Authenticity is going to have to account for those fears that I am unlovable, and acknowledge that my fear of deserving to be abandoned is a factor driving my unconscious behaviours into that self-fulfilling-prophecy mode of attack/withdraw. Radical acceptance means including this understanding within a change framework: not so much changing the history so much as changing how the behaviours are managed in an effort to reduce them over time. Facing down those fears every damned time is going to be a bitch; use Welwood's book Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships to improve the compassionate handling of the backsliding episodes.
Articulating in future relationships that there are known patterns, [X, Y, Z] are the voiceless and unvoiced fears they indicate; and providing effective, mindfully-interactive safeguards for engaging myself and those fears respectfully in the moment, whether I have to face them down alone or with a partner's help. I'll probably learn to make free use of Loving an Adult Child of an Alcoholic as a handbook with future partners/lovers, if only because using a book published by people living OUTSIDE my head offers a great deal of validation for the idea that I'm NOT just making this stuff up.
Accepting that sometimes things just change because they change. Sometimes I will fail. I will learn more about myself through being open to failure than through clinging to the Narrative - no matter how much it hurts in the moment. I'm not better for coming through the flames, only... different.
Having and pursuing desires does not make me weak, a bad person, or a failure; nor does it make me less spiritual in my Self. Clinging to something beyond its usefulness in my life, whether a pattern or a person or a place, is where I start to close off my heart. When I hear only the Narrative, I am closed. The love I know now that I want is the love I will only find by opening up and setting my heart in the flame every time I am afraid. And I am always afraid.
I will make some of the mistakes again. Some of them I will even make again and again. What has changed is my understanding of where they come from. What will change is my tool set for mitigating them in advance and managing them afterwards.
My greatest strength lies in my words. My sharpest discovery is that my words and my voice are not the same thing. I've been using my words for years; I've been failing to hear my own voice; or rather, that which has not had a voice. I want my greatest power to lie in my voice, and let the words be just the tools of my voice. To do this, I need to trust the voice, and trust the space into which I speak it. Right now, I really have neither, but this will come in time, with practice and patience, and hopefully with a partner.
How I have used polyamory has been forever tied up in all of this: it has been a fear-based pursuit designed to provide additional mirrors and avenues of validation when I feared my primary relationship would fail me in the way all relationship have always (I believed) failed me. When things with Ben failed the way they did and I completely changed how I approached those corollary relationships, I did myself significant damage because I did not understand how I was further weakening an already flawed support system. Grad school further exacerbated all of my abandonment issues because of my chosen shift in focus and the ways in which we dealt with that. I didn't know that then, but these are all the underpinnings of the catastrophic change that happened in June: I systemically tore away the foundations of what I needed without seeing what I was doing or why I couldn't emotionally survive my own decisions, any more than I understood well enough to either ask for what I *really* wanted (which was for Matthew to be willing to love me no matter what) nor trust that even if I *had* asked, he would actually deliver what I needed in the face of my own perceived unlovableness. Yes, it's a tangled mess. The ACoA readings have taught me this Gordian Knot-ism is a part of life for us until we start to get shit sorted out. So without Matthew **OR** significant others/lovers to offer me the reflections I needed, I got caught in the broken mirror distortions and started to thrash. Most of that part of the story is well-documented elsewhen in this journal.
How I have used kink has also been forever tied up in all of this, but most especially with Matthew: over-promising and under-delivering in the context of using intensity of focus that comes with the lens of a D/s relationship to feel connection that true intimacy didn't have (in the early stages of the relationship especially, I accepted intensity in lieu of intimacy; convoluted relationship with BDSM on many pre-existing levels got complicated because I used the D/s relationship to help cement Matthew's focus, but as we settled and my insecurities began to rise back to the surface, I returned to doubting that I was loved the way I thought I wanted to be, and the withdrawal reflex manifested as resistance and disinclination in the D/s context: I felt I had lost the connection because I felt I had lost his interest, so not trusting in the existence of stable love, I withdrew from him and didn't trust his interest even when he did offer it. My resistance and withdrawal fueled his fears of being unattractive and undesired, and as he withdrew to nurse *his* wounds, I could only see his retreat, which I took as a sign that I was, in fact, unloved and unlovable... and that cycle perpetuated *constantly* all through the final years of our marriage, each of us seeing only the other's retreat, each of us only wanting the other to come after us and pull us back into love. The heartbreaking truth is that the love was always there on both sides, but in such intensities that neither of us could look at it directly, and at least in my case, that made it tragically easy to not look at it at all, and forget it was there when I needed it most.
Many things are broken, but nothing is "wrong". Many things are mutable, in that change is encouraged and possible, but "fixing" is an approach that "broken" = "bad" and "fixed" = "the problem goes away forever" = "good". This is not a realistic system of belief, but I don't know (yet) how, or even if, I can unhook from it. I'm reasonably certain it will be impossible to find partners who are not hooked into it; even Matthew at the end was hung up on wanting to know how I was going to "fix" things. I understand the assurances he wanted, but I cannot provide them, and anyone who believes they can is either completely unflawed as a human being, or just has some serious blindspots around human behavioural patterns. Doesn't stop any of us from WANTING to fix things, in the way my early work with Gloria was fixated on WANTING to completely eradicate weasels. Those weasels are a part of me; they are the minions of the Narrator. I know this now. I have an incredible power now to change my world in hugely significant ways, but radical acceptance means ALSO accepting with serenity those things I cannot change, and adjusting around them the coping mechanisms that CAN change. this is not an issue of right or wrong, broken or fixed; this is improving my stance of being imperfect.
Acknowledging and accepting my grievances, past and present, and learning to relinquish those in order to soften my stance within the world at large and my relationships in general.
Transmuting shame, especially around those thoughts, decisions, and actions I believe render me unlovable, into something easier to live with.
Improving my ability to stay in the moment by staying in and with my body and observing the emotional tides without necessarily succumbing to them (...some days remain better than others here).
Continuing to make space for the voice I have never heard before.
Continuing to be (mostly) open to whatever is falling into my lap in terms of learning or perspective development, and listening to my emotional tides... as well as the murmurations of whatever stirs beneath those tides.
Continuing to stay in place, for the most part; not as a recognition of stagnation, but as a practice of staying where I am, staying with what I'm feeling and doing in the moment (the job of Now is learning to be still and open and listening), staying rather than yielding to the compulsion to either move toward something, or away from something. I have been running away from my fears all my life, and running toward the distractions du jour; I still do enough self-distracting to be problematic, I can afford the time now to calm myself in new ways.
These are the big pieces, compiled in one place here for the first time. Some of this has been skirted or covered before, some has not. But these are (most of) the Self awarenesses that are new to me since the summer started. these are the pieces that have been rattling around in my head for nigh-on six months. These are pieces I have been struggling to integrate into some kind of cohesive understanding of what's happened or happening or will possibly happen in future. Maybe now it's clear why the past half-year has been a struggle to make sense of everything falling into place or falling into my hands: it's a major archaeological dig inside my head these days that is also trying to apply new or changed understandings and perspectives to the question, "Who do I choose to be, going forward from here?" I want to be someone who can see and ask for love even when - ESPECIALLY WHEN - I am in the middle of feeling dangerously disconnected from the belief in love, or that I am lovable. I want to be the partner who learns to trust that love is there for me, that my partner loves me and accepts me with no expectations of being perfect (and knows how to help me let go of my own expectations of everything being "perfect"). I want to be the partner who doesn't have to withdraw to nurse my hurts, nor set in motion the cycle of abandonment, time after time. My having been abandoned does NOT make it okay to abandon someone who needs and wants my love as much as I need and want his. I want to be a bridge builder, even if this means having to climb down into the darkness now and then to lift up the broken pieces. Sometimes things just break; that doesn't make them wrong. It means things can be rebuilt, not abandoned.
I want to be someone who understands how pieces work together without needing to construct them into rigid things they are not meant to be, and stop stressing about how all the good and useful and beautiful things in my life don't always fit into one single, cohesive, tidy, *CONSTRAINED* form. This does not need to be perfect either; imperfect does not mean wrong. Sometimes it doesn't even mean broken. It just means, "done by human hands". I want to be someone who is better at letting go of uncompromising expectations, who can handle being surprised without exploding.
I choose to be these things and more, and I accept that I am imperfectly in all of them, and will remain imperfectly in all of them. But I choose to move within all of these elements as best I may, and as I may continue.
These are just building blocks. From here, all things remain possible.