Ready or Not

What is “ready”?

You know, despite that I’m in a relationship, I still - at times - feel not ready.

Not ready for the emotional investment, not ready for the vulnerability, not ready for the way that two different lives can mesh after a period of time.  The idea of living with someone else again makes me want to run. Marriage? There’s a realm where that’s a possibility but I don’t know where or when it’s at. It’s somewhere in the space:time continuum, *laughs awkwardly*

It’s not even that I lost my sense of romance. That will always be a part of me. I will always yearn for that which I thought I had found, but what’s changed is that I’d rather a lasting love vs one that burns hot, because those….burn out quick.

I had a rather predictable progression from self-inflicted delusions to callous jade-ism.  

Having worn rose-colored glasses for much too long, I gained a new - rather unromantic - perspective. I began to see the peeling cellophane from the edges of these glasses. The crimped lining coming off the cheap, plastic lens; glue stringing along the rims.

At one point, in my brief dating experience during the year of moving-on, I became the kind of woman that said no to almost everything and everyone. My peace was & continues to be more important than some dinner date, steak & conversation going cold over bullshit niceties.  I was picky with who I even said yes to for a date, & I refused to date only one person at a time. I rejected giving one singular man all of my attention or time, & I absolutely was not going to be someone’s body to masterbate with. I had zero incentive to give anyone love & I certainly didn’t need it. I was busy analyzing. & I’m glad I did it that way. I certainly ran into guys that played the long game; driving from Houston every weekend to see me, long conversations well into the night only to slowly fade away when they realized they weren’t going to get laid. It was sort of laughable because I didn’t care. The detachment was *chefs kiss*.

But the pendulum always swings back. 

This is how we find our center.

It has to swing, sometimes hard & fast, but there’s emotional viariancy in each stage.  The pendulum doesn’t just swing once. It swings until the momentum - the energy - we give it begins to ease into itself. Still, there’s wisdom & growth in each stationary moment of time - the pendulum frozen at times until there’s a surrender, again, to the unknown.  

Of course, the end result is a good one; we end up somewhere in the middle but only after we’ve exhausted ourselves.

I can’t tell you where exactly the pendulum finds itself now but it’s somewhere that feels unfamiliar, but somehow wiser.  I find myself still running away at times. I have created a life for myself that does not include making someone else 100% a part of it. We’re both dedicated to our respective careers & keep in touch throughout the day without needing constant connection. He’s not the type to just express deep, passionate emotions. I, on the other hand, am a pool of emotions, haha, even if the deep end continues to be taped off until further notice. He jokes that despite my “badass-ness & muscles”, I’m just a teddy bear. Lol. He’s not wrong.  But, there’s no expectation for him to fulfill a role for me. If I say something cheesy or cute, there’s no need to respond with some validating statement. I don’t need him to feel anything about anything. I really want him to like me, lol, but if he doesn’t, well, there’s no reason to act as if the truth isn’t the truth. & truth has become more important than my feelings.

The pendulum falls……

co-dependence to hyper-independence, with said variances in between.

The goal being inter-depence. The center.

I still struggle at times.  The other night, I had a thought that reminded me far too much about my ex. An anxiety. A fear. I looked that motherfucker in the face for what it was: an old story.

I have a new story to write.

This idea I had about reprogramming pathways that were set in childhood - literal decades of neural-responses to behavioral cues - was fuckin’ absurd, to say the least, because what I thought would happen & what I still at times want to happen, is that because I cognitively grasp the concept, that I should be able to implement it right away, but that’s not how it works. You build new pathways by putting the new reaction, new concept, new pattern into action over & over & over & over again.

There’s so much that goes into creating a new story. It’s a hard thing to surrender to the swing of the pendulum while also knowing that, within the spherical dimensions of Self, there’s much I can implement & change within myself in order to help create a Me that can live in a new story.

I feel sometimes we want to write a new story but our characters never change. We bring in the same NPC’s, press the same fuckin’ buttons & then we’re confused when we fail our mission.

There’s no judgment about it; it’s an observation about us all, including myself. 

So, I don’t quite get what “ready” means. Maybe ready is just our avatars bobbing gently waiting for us to press Play. It’s not that we’re ready for the mission, (wow, I’m a fuckin’ nerd), & we definitely don’t know what’s going to happen, but, if we’ve programmed some new code into our psyche, & have someone to bob gently with through the matrix, well, it’s worth a shot.

*play*