Waning moon, time for some introspection.

In a bunch of stuff at Mysteria's site today there was this quote from Henry Rollins:

If you're not strong inside yourself I don't even want to be near you. Don't even look at me. I don't want to know your name. Life is too short. The closest thing I can come to love, is respect. To me, respect is miles beyond. That's the problem. Love can exist in spite of a total lack of respect. To me, that's a fucking fat lie. I can only carry myself. I can't respect anyone who can't stand on their own two feet. If you want me, then you must want yourself ten times more. You must be strong. Otherwise go fall in love and lie to yourself as you beat yourself into happiness.

Oh shit... you're talking to me, aren't you Hank? I have been told, by Henry Rollins, and fuck knows I needed it. I've been feeling kind of blah about myself, mostly to do with being in a relationship again... yeah, being in love is an amazing thing but it's hard work for me to maintain myself right now. My perpetual problem of losing sight of myself within a relationship is rearing it's ugly head... and I warned him, and he's happy to remind me not to be crap but really it's my demon to conquer and there's nothing that anyone else can help me with there.

I think it all started because there was a week there where I did not have one night alone, due to a series of events we had slept in the same bed for seven consecutive nights (okay, not strictly true, but the night of the beach party does not count to me since I didn't sleep at all) and so on Thursday when he wasn't here I felt it. Mostly I felt it when I woke up on Friday, almost like a part of myself was missing... and I spent the day with alarm bells going off in my head and muttering to myself "you've fucking gone and done it again, haven't you?"

It is shit because I have proven to myself time and again that I can stand on my own two feet... I am stronger than I look and stronger than most people give me credit for. When I am in a relationship though... you know when you are walking arm in arm with someone, the ever so slight tranfer of weight as you lean into one another? That's how it starts. If you're too crap, it might reach the point where they are virtually supporting your entire weight while you limp along beside them. Of course, like everything, there is a healthy balance... there are times when you may need that support, and there are times when you may need them to take their fucking hands off you... but you can't have someone constantly helping you stagger along because then you forget how to walk yourself.

This is where I can get into trouble. When someone else loves you, you can put less effort into liking yourself... you don't need to sustain yourself because you can feed off what the other person is giving you... and this is so dangerous because when that person is gone from your life, you have lost the ability to maintain your own energy resources.

About a week ago I scrawled onto a page a note to self in so deep... even if you left me now I would have trouble remembering who I was before you came along. It was a month to the day since we'd started walking this path. It was the day I told him I loved him.

So when I woke up on Friday, the night after not seeing him for the first time in a week, feeling flat... there was an energy drop, barely perceptible, but there... and I was not happy with myself. Already, an attachment. I was unsettled. Angry at myself. Losing some self respect. I need to learn to build a stronger shield around myself, a bubble in which to maintain my own energy... but I don't know how to do this without shutting other people out completely. So the barrier does not really exist with me, and I know I can be something of an energy vampire... perhaps that's putting it too strongly, energy chameleon might be a better description - I react too much to the energies around me, usually unconsciously, and don't really know how to shut it off without putting up the barrier. I feel for other people too much, I allow what they feel to affect what I feel... and as the Writer once said in one of our messenger D and M's, it's always dangerous to let other people's universe's impinge on your own.

Anyway, the short of it is that love is highly addictive, and what I experienced on Friday was a minor case of withdrawal, indicating that once again love had sunk it's hooks into me and was going to drag me under if I didn't do something about that. When I am in a relationship, I discover that when I am alone I don't like myself a whole lot... because liking myself is not something that comes easily to me in the first place and it is something I can quickly forget how to do if I always have someone else doing it for me. The other thing that happens, which is as Henry wrote is above and beyond liking myself, is that I don't respect myself a great deal... and that does more injury to my sense of self worth. I am not a weak person, but at times I see myself doing a pretty damn good impersonation of that and it sickens me.

I spent another night alone last night... the Writer was not out at the usual haunt. I am not one to play coy so I was not about to pretend that I didn't want to see him anyway, so I called. He didn't hear the phone, and he never came out... and again my disappointment was palpable, so I gave myself a good talking to - come on, you used to have fucking good times at this bar even before you knew him, not so very long ago... and so I danced and enjoyed it. I danced to the point where I couldn't stand anymore, and I fell asleep in CoWorker's car on the way home.

This morning when I woke up, having had a decent amount of sleep for the first time in weeks, I felt that some of my clarity had returned. I can see a couple of options here... I can decide that I am not ready to go through this again and I can end it now... or I can give it another try, being more mindful of my pitfalls. The first option is obviously not attractive, which is not to say that it could be the best course of action regardless... but it's not the one I am going to take. Besides the fact that it would hurt both of us and deprive me of something beautiful, it would basically be me running away from life again and does not give me the opportunity to learn anything from this experience.

What I want is a relationship based on respect for one another, desire for one another, enjoyment of one another... but not need. A relationship based on need is dangerously addictive... there are too many of them out there. Actually, I have trouble thinking of any I know which are not. It's why people want to stay in a relationship that is clearly not working. If I hadn't come to Japan I may well be still banging my head against a brick wall trying to make things work with the Boy... but I got here and after a week or so of pain I remembered how good I am at making my life work alone. It (being here) was everything I needed it to be.

I was thinking about needy relationships, both observed and experienced, and how it seems to me that the 'I love you' is the climactic moment that is sought together, the ultimate aim. It becomes the peak of a relationship, the point where so many look around and say 'we made it', consider the journey finished and basically give up... and things go downhill from there. Sometimes you try to avoid falling downhill by attempting to scale another peak, like 'let's move in together', 'let's get married', 'let's have babies'... I have no doubts that the Boy and I were trying to postphone a rather apparently looming downhill slide by taking on the marriage mountain as a new goal... so fucking wrong.

This is not going to be a relationship based on need, and I am not going to let my life slide once again. I am so mad at myself when I think of all the things I gave up last year so that I would spend more hours watching Star Trek and eating Thai food with the Boy. Not going there again.

So this morning I slept for as long as I needed to, and then I practiced yoga and did some meditation, examined my energy centres and tried to ground myself a little... I feel better. I've had a day here on my own, away from people, and I feel relaxed and sorted. There are other things to be done, and it is time to stop neglecting all aspects of my life bar this relationship... time to regain some balance.

Reading back though all of this at the moment I am about to upload, I am laughing at my overwhelming ability to turn something good in my life into a mindfuck... but I think my sanity is still relatively intact.

Before After

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