Disappointment is a self inflicted pain

Disappointment is a funny thing.  It starts with an expectation and ends with a realization that you created the chaos in your head.

I am feeling a little off kilter today so I thought I would share it with you guys.  My voice is still perky, my hugs are still snug, and my smile is still infectious…but I am feeling bit, well, like my old self.  I have this insecure neurotic thought pattern, I am obsessively checking my phone, and I am beyond emotionally drained to the point where I took a nap on a yoga mat.  

I know a little bit about being a good person and what it takes to be happy, but I am also the master at not following my own rules.  I get up on my soapbox and preach my words of wisdom to my friends and family, but I struggle at listening to myself and forcing myself to understand.

I built up this grand event in my head last night and was let down when it didn’t come to fruition.  I blamed the other party involved for my sudden lack of serenity, when really, as I mentioned, it is my expectation that leads to my decreased happiness.

I think the key to understanding our feelings is that realization that we base our feelings today on our experiences yesterday.  I know the biggest reason I am feeling let down and unloved today is because it is how I used to feel regularly.  When someone begins to act in a way that others have before, I begin to feel the way I did before.  Does that make sense? 

There is no sudden answer or logical reason behind my resentment today.  It is simply what it is.  My reasoning may be childish or immature, but realistically speaking, it stems from my fears; my fear of not being good enough, not being loved, and of people always leaving.  You can call me needy, insecure, or emotionally unavailable- I wont argue with that, but don’t forget that I am honest, vulnerable, and compassionate.  I feel love with every ounce of my being and when I am hurt, it hurts just as deep.

I feel like every person deserves a lot of respect and a little bit of true love in their lives.  And for all you men out there wondering what you did wrong…if you have enough time to take a leak during the day, you have enough time to send a text!

So, I will go back to watching my blackberry not light up with the promise of a text message of God forbid a phone call and Ill pray that one day Ill take my own advice and not be such a needy little girl.

Reset

My little brother Scott said one day over dinner, “the great thing about life, is you can start over anytime you want.” (or something very similar).

Where did this tall handsome 17 year old get such wisdom- not from me that is for sure!

But how true it is.  No matter low we have fallen on our spiritual totem pole, there is always that reset button we can hit.  No, it is not the EASY button but the emotional restart that we as humans are capable of choosing is a beautiful thing.  Days can be long, arduous, troubling things and when we live in that….chaos, we lose track with our true being, but when we step back, look at the big picture, and make the choice to turn it over and start again- we are gifted with a fresh start.

Easy enough sounding right?  For me I can reset the day with a great cup of coffee, a phone date with my mom, or a visit to a friend over the lunch hour.  Restarting my day isn’t about what other people can for me, it is about what I can do for myself.  I’ve learned lately that I am the true master of my destiny, and with the exception of God, I have the most control over my life.  Choosing to be happy, faithful, honest, kind, positive, and sober is the choice I make every day.  Knowing that I have the power to control ONLY my actions is a relieving thing.  I don’t know what the reply to a text carefully speaking my mind that says, “I miss you” will be, nor do I know the reaction of the other person when I bring them coffee over lunch.  I can hope both responses will be positive because I have acted lovingly and honestly, but I cannot expect them to be that way.  When I have an expectation for things to happen, I am building a resentment almost immediately.  Being expectation-less does not mean that we allow ourselves to be treated poorly or disrespectfully; it means that we allow things to happen as they are supposed to happen.  I take things one day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time.  But when things are really bad, to the point where I am tempted to isolate, lie, or even pick up a drink…I can always just start again.

 I was in a rough spot yesterday.  My trust issues became very clear to me, and again I was faced with my fear of losing people.  I was angry, sad, shameful, and guilty.  I felt like my bubble had been popped and again I was just a zombie going through the motions of life but refusing to feel. I do that when I am feeling down, I refuse to feel anything to avoid the sadness.  I simply couldn’t find my reset button to turn things around.  So, I picked up the phone.  I talked to a friend about where I was at, how I was feeling, and the fact that I was so stressed out I was punishing myself by not eating again.  By the time I finished talking to my friend, I realized he had hit my reset button for me.  How lucky am I to have friends who will do that for me?  Talk me through my confusion and love me until I figure stuff out.  My friend calls himself the “donkey”, and it makes sense, as he has carried me through a lot of stuff.

No matter where you are at or how far down you think you’ve gone, remember to have faith that everything will turn out.  There are no such things as accidents in your life.  You have the most control over your thoughts and actions….exercise that control carefully and be your best self.  And when you can’t be…start again.  Scottie always has it together so I may as well take his advice!

Deep Sustenance

It doesn’t interest me what drives you, motivates you, scares you, or lifts you up…it interests me what sustains you.  What keeps you going when all else fails?  What makes you wake up in the morning?  What feeds your soul and keeps your belief alive?   How do you get through when all else fails?  What is your life preserver when there is nothing else to hold on to?  What do you ache for….

For me it is love.  Love for myself and those around me.  Love for my family and friends.  Love for my brothers and sisters in the room.

Love makes me wake up in the morning with a smile on my face.  Love gets me through hard yoga classes and endurance runs.  Love pushes me to be the best possible version of myself all the time.  Love convinces me that even on the hardest days, I will be okay.

I have love for my parents and I have faith they will stay together, happy, and free for the rest of their lives.  I have love for my siblings and know that they will find what they are looking for.  I have love for my friends who have gone before me, as I know they are in their resting place with Him residing over their spirits.  I have love for God as I understand Him, as it is he who keeps my faith alive.

But what is there to find love in when my heart feels like it is cracked beyond repair?  What is there to love and who am I to remain faithful when my mom gets cancer?  Why am I to believe in love when the person I have given my all too just leaves?  Love and disappointment can go hand in hand for me.  Love and darkness find themselves side by side in my heart far too often.  But without darkness, there can be no light.  And those wounds, left so raw and open after so many years are healed by love.  By loving myself, my family, and the new and old friends in my life a, I can have faith that the eventual light will shine from the darkness.  The self inflicted pains of loneliness are cured by love.  The fear of cancer is squashed by loving our sick friends as much as we can.  We become understanding that people must leave us to save themselve.

It isn’t easy.  It isn’t at all. But love feeds my spirit and my soul.  Love keeps me alive.  Love gives me hope.  Love sustains me.  What sustains you when all else fails and you are left alone and scared?

Openness

We are not loved for what we do, rather, for who we are.  When we let love flow through us like the beam of energy that it is, we are rewarded with a sense of joy and peacefulness that cannot be replaced.

The most beautiful thing about loving fully, is that we are open to realize damage.  We can get off the treadmill that keeps us walking on eggshells and having the same fights.  We can detach with love from the people in our lives that WE are no longer good for.  We can send love, light, and happiness their way every time we think of them, and know that they will always have a home in our hearts. 

The most rewarding thing about love is the filling feeling it allows us to have.  Love is like a big meal- it sustains us and keeps up going forward.  Without love we are empty lifeless bodies made up of hair skin and nails.  The feeling of being nothing is devastating.  We question our need to be on this earth and we doubt any reason for our existence- but when we allow love into our hearts we can live again.  Freely.  Joyfully.  Truthfully.

We fear so much in our lives; failure, success, crowds, loneliness, death, life.  But often what we fear most is true happiness as it has the ability to take us to a level we never expected.  It transports us to another dimension where we lose control and often find ourselves laughing and smiling so freely that we immediately recoil from it like a hot flame.

At the end of the day, the biggest fear I have, is not letting love take me to where I need to go.  Not having the courage and the faith to trust that the path that love will guide me down the is the right one.  I fear looking back and realizing what I missed out on.  It requires surrendering to what is Greater than I and being willing to ask for help when I need it.

In this place, this moment of compete peace, fear, surrender, courage, and FAITH, we find ourselves.  We find what we are looking for and that is patience.  We sit and wait for what must find us and we believe that it will.  And when it does, we are ready. We are open to joy, freedom, love, and happiness, and we do not fear the unknown that is tomorrow.

Butterflies

I have this stupid grin on my face.  I can't stop laughing.  I am told that I look better.  My shoulders are rolled back and my head is high.  Why the sudden change in behaviour?  I am the fake happy girl- the one who smiles when appropriate but really inside feels like she is getting stabbed in the gut.  Not these days though, lately I am really happy, all the time.  I smile because I want to and because I mean it, and I laugh with my entire soul.
How!  Why!  What did I do to change!
I let go.
I let go of the pain, the angst, the hurt, the disappointment, and the anger.
then I opened myself up, as wide as I could, and I let myself be flooded with whatever feeling came my way.
I cried in the arms of a good friend one night, I smoked too many cigarettes for a couple weeks, and I journaled Carrie Bradshaw style until I felt normal.  And when I felt normal, and I opened my eyes and I looked around at all the beauty the world has to offer- I discovered what over indulging in yoga, running, friendships, and new crushes can do.  I sprang free of resentment and expectations and began to love again.  Really truly love- but not X, or Z....I began to love Y (I am Y).
I realized one morning that I am so okay with who I am.  And I lead the most charmed life.
When I began to be happy, i began to attract happy people.
I have someone in my life these days who makes me laugh (SO HARD) and makes me feel safe when he hugs me.  I am finally not walking on eggshells, or trying to be someone I am not, and it feels so good!

So, open yourself up.  To pain, to hurt, to joy! to freedom...
be one with yourself and God as you understand Him.  Pray, meditate, journal.  And believe that everything that is meant to happen, WILL happen.

Understand that without openness, you are nothing, that without hope the world will die, and without love, new or old, the heart will cease to beat.

Make decisions as they come- don't wait.
Pay compliments as people deserve them.
Forgive when it is needed, not only when it is deserved.
And FEEL.  Most importantly, just feel.

XYZ

My head hurts from the all the f***ing.  Not the fun kind, but the mind messing, head pounding, fist clenching, shoe throwing kind.  You know the good ole’ head screw that comes because you give someone else too much power?  The one person who can make me go “mental”, as my mother says, is the one I have deemed all powerful.  What kind of craziness is that!  For the answer, refer to my last blog where I describe my addiction to chaos.  Insert chaos here.

I read in one of my dusty self help binders (because I print stuff and put it in binders rather than pay for it), that when you are experiencing negative thought, you should talk to yourself like you are talking to a good friend in the same situation.  Well okay,

DEAR GOOD FRIEND, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!

That is what I would say.  Nothing consoling about that hey?  I guess I need a good kick in the ass- any takers?  Not that it would matter.  My unmanageable head tells me chaos is the only way to live.  I guess after years of it I have become dependent on it- God I am crazy aren’t I?  I am stubborn, rotten, and very confident that my way is THE way (probably not a good Lava Life line).  In this case, as in most, those traits are not really paying off for me.

I have been letting X text me and call me at his convenience…be nice and charming to me…supportive, kind, and even loving….yet I am left with the final knowledge that he is X and I am Y and we will “never” be XY again.  Does that make sense?  We broke up.  Again-still-not really.  Who knows.  All I know is that I am happy.  I love yoga over fights, I love the gym over sexless nights, I love eating dinner at 10pm over walking on eggshells, but I can’t seem to let it go. 

Why is that?  Why isn’t happiness a good enough reason for me to stick it out?  There is even a Z in the equation now.  I am quite fond of Z...I don’t know if he knows this.  Would it be juvenile to pass him a note that says, “I have a crush on you.”  Yes- yes it would be, but so cute.  The thing about me turning from XY into Y and so quickly wanting to be YZ, is that I know what I like as Y, but when I turn into Y with anything else….I lose track of it all.  Suddenly things aren’t important and my happiness becomes dependant on the other “letter” (please tell me you’ve gathered what I am talking about).  I know I know….I am co dependant and my life in unmanageable.  I have work to do don’t I?

I think tonight ill do what I am good at- gym, yoga, ½ a pizza, then JERSEY SHORE.  See I still find true indescribable happiness in the overly tanned, too drunk madness of MTV.  I’ll close with this question though…what in your life is unmanageable but oh so good to feel the sting of…do you have an X?

A splash of indifference

I’ve been thinking (and not acting because I am terrified of my mother) about tattoos a lot lately.

A couple things jump out at me:

“everywhere she goes, a million dreams of love surround her”

And

“when the world says give up, hope whispers, try one more time”

Why am I thinking about tattoos?  Perhaps it is because of the milestone I took in the beginning of June, or the end, yet again, of the same relationship. 

I feel like I am in a more accepting place with both those things than I would have been a year ago.  Milestones are a good time for reflection…they allow us good reason to look back at where we were and where we came from.  I have been stuck lately on who I was and not living in who I am.   I feel stronger, more mature, and a tiny bit wiser, but not as confident, honest, and sane as I would like to be- but WHO is as sane as they would like to be?  I don’t lose my temper anymore like I used too, now that could be the meds…but I still feel like I am riding this wave in  and I never know what the next day, or moment is going to hold.

Is that exciting for you?  Not knowing the future, because it sucks for me.  I like things NOW and I like things MY way.  I don’t care if my imagination is a fairy tale.  I like things to be perfect and I am not so good at letting things go when they aren’t.  but the insane part of me loves the chaos too.  I love the drama and the edginess and the revolt and the unmanageability.  I get that all those things are strange addictions….but I thrive off them.  I take things personally just to get a rush.  Sometimes, often lately, I feel like a zombie made up of hair, nails, and skin…and I have nothing inside.

I am not dying, nor am I depressed, but I am constantly searching for that rush.  I do hours of yoga almost every day and push myself to dizzy at the gym…I find that head spinning, almost vomiting point of excitement for 1.2 seconds then it is gone.  Why do I search so hard to find something so chaotic?  It is probably the addict in me that loves it so much.  Too many cigarettes, too much tanning, too much exercise, too much of the same boy…whatever it is, give me drama in excess and I feel ALIVE.

So yes.  I want to feel the familiar prick of a needle etching its way across my skin, permanently marking my body just for the rush and to forever remind myself of where I am at….so mom, be grateful I am not getting some God awful body piercing….or Heaven forbid- coloring my hair dark again!