I was a little excited I ended the last post with a new question. It must mean I’m getting somewhere after having asked myself the first, old question. And as luck would have it, the new question is getting attention as well.

For some nutty reason, I was out earlier tonight for coffee with a guy I barely know. He said the oddest thing to me. He said a few things about me and then concluded, “I think you try to let life roll off your back.”

Eureka, he’s right. And I would be calling him for more advice had he not totally judged me for a situation he knew anothing about, directly following that exceptional statement.

How long can I talk about myself at once without getting bored? I have reached the limit. This is the hard part. As soon as I start feeling like I am imposing on someone else, by thinking to myself about me… that is when I give up usually. But this week I am determined. For what it’s worth, I am sorry for doing this ugh… blog blog blog, me me me, ad infinitum.

I guess over the last few years it’s become increasingly difficult to ask myself questions of any kind. What do you think about politics? What do you want for dinner? How about that guy, is he the one? Who cares?

When I was young I would get frustrated with the values systems to which I was expected to adhere. The behavioral rules were fine …I was well-behaved. But the gifts and abilities that others valued about me, made those people become an offense to me. I worried their love was insincere – their attention was only on what I could do. (I do see how crazy this is, so you know that.) My dad valued my writing skills, and I began to resent them intensely. I didn’t want to “be a writer” just so my dad could value me. My teachers valued my intelligence and I abandoned it with great enthusiasm. Couldn’t they care for me if I wasn’t good at  school? What makes me run from my abilities, despite the (otherwise completely elusive) happiness they offer me.

As many do, I always try to test the boundaries of love. It’s juvenile, but I keep doing it. So I know WHY I reacted so strongly to those who loved me, when they began to value what I could do more than they valued HOW I FELT ABOUT what I could do.

Still, in short, it is the soul that makes me run away.

I always thought my soul made me valuable. I was taught God loved my soul, and other people who loved me would be approaching me the same way. I couldn’t imagine anything else about me being valuable.

Interesting maybe. Value was different. Value would be what made someone keep you around. Love in my life at this time (high school) was, if anything, blatantly and brutally inconsistent. I became frightened to my core that real love was actually deceptively conditional, and I didn’t want any part of a love like that.

Now I am in a very strange place. I have to find a career. I have to make myself valuable to an employer. This is a brand new kind of value which I still haven’t come to grips with. I ask, why can’t I just be-me? That was supposed to be the ticket.

I also need empathy and support – I have to make myself valuable to a man whose values system for finding me is assumed to be essentially foreign to me at this point. This also seems incredibly unfair, considering that my as far as I knew God never cared what I looked like. If He cared about me being happy, wouldn’t someone have taught me that a man is not like God, and won’t love you for the same reasons God will? They could have shown me, your value is *here* but your life will have added value if you invest energy *there*. That seems like wisdom.

I am just now understanding that I should do some things I don’t believe add value to me (I of course don’t believe I can add value to myself) to barter with my life and gain what good I used to believe was fated for me instead. What once was supposed to be handed to me because I was loved, is all of a sudden being withheld because I won’t work to exhaustion for any employer or have a physically-centered relationship for any man. It’s not *me* to do those things and that was supposed to be all right. It was supposed to be good for me!

I suppose I’ve believed that I was going to be taken care of forever, since that’s what my parents believed so strongly for me. And probably partly because they didn’t want me to worry about bridges I’d yet to cross until I was much older. And then in the most easygoing fashion I’d strut across into my beautiful life, maybe.

So I panicked like a spooked animal when I hit that bridge instead, most definitely. I didn’t cross it, oh God I didn’t want to. I sat and stared at it, as you can imagine, shocked it even existed. I have to walk across this thing?? I know that at some point, some mob began pushing me, and all of a sudden I was crossing… crossing and crossing! In my mind, I’m still huddled in an aggressive mob, getting nudged along, terrified and lost. Where does this bridge go? Why do these people seem so prepared to cross? What did their moms tell them that mine didn’t tell me? Where’s God, daddy? Is He watching still? I sound like I am a child but… I am much more confused than I was at any point in childhood. Aside from that, I really am just a child who stuck around for a bit, you know.

I think the worst part for me now is that I’ve long-since given up hope on the idea that I could turn around, or even successfully begin to slip through the ranks to the other side. Or maybe I never built that hope, to be totally frank.

This is the truth about me. I want life to roll off my back and stop bothering me. I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready. I’m not tough, I’m not ambitious. I was taught to love and forgive, I was taught to allow others ahead of me and not to place value on the outer person, and I am absolutely getting crushed. I am so mad I wasn’t ready. I am mad at myself and I don’t have any plans to forgive me either.

Christianity is funny (understatement) because the elected-ordained powers that be want you to use your gifts and do good and they tell you “against love there is no law” while you are in a world they tell you is evil and unaccepting of love or loving individuals.

I still believe in kindness because it’s rooted too deeply in my “soul” for me to turn around on it. But I am certain it didn’t prepare me for my life. So. I am unprepared for my life. My entire belief system creates a mentality of unpreparedness.

How sincere am I about what I believe in all this? I still believe that although I am terrified, God is giving to me, caring for me, and being good to me. It’s easy to say that, but I believe it. And I almost feel like I need to say I’m sorry for it, because that belief doesn’t seem to get me anywhere for real, and yet I am still holding on to it. Why would I rely on the same method over and over when I feel like it is failing me? Am I that idiot they make that joke about?

The bottom line isn’t that my belief system didn’t prepare me for life, but that I know I seem excessively naive and trusting, and there’s really not anything I can do about it. That was another surprise ending.

I couldn’t sleep tonight. And a question echoed in my head in Sarah Jessica Parker’s punny semi-profound yet still disembodied voice.

How long should you stay in an unhealthy relationship, to prove you gave it a fair shot?

Sometimes relationships quit on you. If the whole relationship structure becomes unfaithful right before your eyes, shouldn’t you have the right to turn and leave?

Other times it’s not as obvious, and the decision is much, much harder. Your relationship sits in a funk all the time and you can’t seem to crack its shell. Maybe it was never happy? Maybe you can’t make it happy now?

What if you settled for this relationship? Or worse, what if it settled for you.

What is it trying to make you become? Or would it play like it was happy, if you’d just follow all the rules it gave you.

Perhaps in the absence of a natural and healthy structure, we create an unnatural one. I suppose the real question is — how diseased is your relationship? An unnatural structure can come in very handy – even good situations need a break, and a false structure can help with coping there. But if you’re falling into an unnatural pattern of behaviors in order to suit the relationship and its demands… shouldn’t you be worried and complaining? Why should you have to change for a situation that obviously doesn’t like you anyhow.

I guess the idea is, if you love someone, you ought to love them like they are. And if you are unable to love someone as they are, you ought to let them go. You ought to give them a better chance at being loved.

Carrie Bradshaw would need to make some kind of comparison here, about New York City and its freaks, and then the freak in her own head. So maybe this isn’t the same as that.

Ir’s been six months in New Jersey. I still don’t feel trusted and I still struggle to want to be here. I love the kids but that can’t be why I stay, and I am grateful for my situation but that can’t keep me here either. God has provided everything I need and I shouldn’t think that since I’d leave, God wouldn’t provide for those girls just the same as he does for me.

Should I stay the whole year? Who wants that? I wish I could keep my commitment, so badly. And I know I could but they will always want more than a year from someone…. shouldn’t I let them go find that someone? And shouldn’t I set a goal that would tell me when to give up?

I suppose there is no guideline for when to give up, in general. I settle all the time. For unhealthy relationships, for no dreams and no success. I settle for being the bad guy in a lot of situations. …Truthfully…I settle for whatever I’m offered, really. At least I’m not alone in the fear that there’s something more.

I must have thought that making a commitment and seeing it through would make me content. That once I signed up, I’d be resigned to it and focus on other things. The truth is the opposite. I’m even more restless, on a grander scale. I consider myself stuck-for-my-own-good. But I know very well I could make the choice to leave. I could do it if I had to.

Once my mother was in the hospital and she had tubes in her nose and throat. Tubes she specifically asked not be used, because she knew she couldn’t breathe with them in. She woke up suffocating and after a few moments of struggle – in her words — the will to live took over, and she grabbed the tubes with her hands and ripped them straight out of her body, making a bloody mess – but getting the breath she needed, I have to say that a second time, because I panic for her if I don’t remind myself. She got her breath…

When I wanted to move out of my parents house, I would sit and complain to my aunt. And she was so dismissive of me, I was almost offended. When she did respond she would just harp on this nonsense phrase,”The minute you absolutely HAVE to be out of that house, you’ll move out.”

With a power to fight that comes from everything real in my heart, I battle the idea that the moment of desperation is the moment when we act bravely, shattering our own rules and doing what’s best so that we can breathe – begging your pardon for the play on words, I’m aiming for Bradshaw. Back to the point. It’s not reasonable to approach a situation with that attitude, and it couldn’t be wise. There’s nothing to temper the decision, and nothing left to hold it back.

But what’s satisfying is that Desperation, in those times, is a question with an answer, you know. A race with a finish line.

The situations and relationships I find myself in are most definitely akin to buildings, houses, sound or unsound structures. If there is nothing left to temper a decision in a moment of desperation, that is not because you have lost your marbles. It is because these things catch up with us, these unhealthy foundations.

Perhaps a relationship – a great one – would be self-sustaining. And the strength you need to care for the relationship, is drawn directly from within it. There would be an abundant core of resources with which you could build and build, and tend and tend, until you and whomever else were living in a veritable garden of strength.

…You know, I don’t believe in that though. But it sounds lovely. It sounds idealistic and stupid. It does not sound like what I perceive life to be. I did say that maybe you settle for a relationship… or it settles for you…. but I suppose I mean life.

Am I settling for being alive in a broken world?