Escape

Sometimes we make a decision that we think is the right/best one. After all, we want what's best for ourselves and for the one(s) we love, don't we? But then what happens when you realize that might not have been the wisest decision to make? Do you grit your teeth and bear with it, hoping that in the end things just might work out, unlikely as it may seem? Or do you resign yourself to that unlikelihood and find a decent, less painful way of getting out of it? 

In short, what if you need the doghouse, only there's no doghouse?

I have no illusions about my life and the circumstances of it. I am well aware of what I've been doing and the consequences of everything. I know that everything that's gone wrong -- and everything that has suddenly begun to get worse -- was entirely my own fault because I didn't play by the rules and I didn't know what others wanted, and I was too afraid to ask because every time I opened my mouth I made things worse. And I know well enough not to blame anyone else because there isn't anyone else to blame. And yet... sometimes -- just sometimes -- I wish there were a way I could make it all a little easier to bear.

weighing it out - what would finally tip the scale?

There are times when I wonder what this is all worth. There are times when I wonder if it's worth it. But, just like all the other times, I know that whatever it's worth, and whatever it costs, I would gladly pay the price for it a hundred times over.

No regrets

Someone once asked, "Does it bother you that you told him you were in love with him but he didn't say it back?" Admittedly it was mortifying at first that the words had been thrown out there and had just hung there without coming back. But then one of the most curious things about loving someone is that we do it unconditionally; we don't love someone on the condition that they have to love us back, and we don't say it on the condition that they have to say it back. Maybe things like that are just supposed to happen in their own time, or maybe even not at all. But we learn to accept it at any rate, and whether or not the other person says it back, we can look back and tell ourselves, "At least I told him I loved him."

If it ain't broke, don't break it

Five years ago, I was in a relationship with someone who had dictatorial skills even Adolf Hitler himself would have envied. He domineered my entire life: how I should dress, who I could hang out with (which naturally consisted of the XX chromosome only), where I could go, and even what I should do. I never saw the inside of a bar or club for two whole years (until I met some new XY chromosome friends and all hell broke loose), and I barely hung out with anyone except him. And throughout the two years -- when it had become painfully clear after several months into the relationship that I had somehow been yanked out of my body and stuffed most unceremoniously into one he had conjured in his mind -- I occasionally had to ask, in the most acerbic tone I could manage, "How did you ever fall in love with me in the first place?"

And his reply, however impertinent it was to the original question, would be, "I thought I could change you, to become a better person, to be the perfect girlfriend. It's for your own good."

Skating over the obvious fact that there is no 'perfect' anything or anyone, trying to change a person is like trying to rid the world of cockroaches. We scour the surfaces and crevices, pointing out all the areas in which we want them to change, fix, or eliminate altogether, and it becomes a process that never ends, because there will always be something that just isn't quite the way we want it. This is not to say we ignore the flaws altogether, but surely we have faith in their maturity, in their common sense, and in their own sense of self that they would be able to think for themselves whether or not they should change? Because not to have that faith and confidence in them is tantamount to telling them flat out that they're just not good enough.

Has it become impossible for people to accept one another for the way they are? Must there always be something that made us fall in love with them in the first place? Granted, we can say we like the way they make us laugh, the way they can pull us out of that emotional hole no matter how deep it is, the way they look at us until we have to turn away, but then there's so much more to it than that, so much more that we can't verbalize or put into words at all. So when there's no laundry list to fall back on, is it really not as simple as, "It's just you being you"?

keeping on toes

The fear of inadequacy plagues us throughout our lives. We're always afraid that we wouldn't be good enough at our job, our relationship, our friendships, and pretty much everything else right down to lawn bowling. We spend our days wondering if we got that press release right, if our boss is silently scrutinizing us and thinking they might be better off without us, or if we're really what the other person wants, or if we measure up to their expectations of us. Even if things were going all right, somewhere in the back of our minds the question will always lurk: Is it all enough? Am I enough?

When we feel inadequate, we try harder than we can afford to to show that given the chance, we can be good enough. Unfortunately this applies most to a relationship, because whether or not we like to admit it, no matter how bad a time we're having at work, no matter how difficult everything else is, and no matter how self-sufficient we'd like to think we are, we just need to know that there's someone we can come home to at the end of the day and who (hopefully) loves us just the way we are. Even then, twenty years down the road, we could still harbor the fear that what we say or do will never be good enough, and we might still be spending a good deal of our time looking at them as the person who second-guessed us so much before that we have to wonder if they're still second-guessing us now.

We would lay down our lives to show the boss that we're really not as inept as we may seem, to make the other person realize that we can really can get this relationship thing right, to comfort ourselves that we really can be good enough at life itself. This then begs the question: are we sticking to the job, the relationship, or whatever endeavor we have at hand because we know we really want it, or because it has reached a level at which we just want to prove our point?

epitome of an oxymoron - a.k.a. story of my life right now

Piece vs peace - either one can make or break you

Sometimes just when we think that opening up and saying whatever's on our minds and in our hearts could possibly make things better, it turns right back around and shoots us in the face. So we should know when we need to say our piece, or hold our peace. Because that determines how much deeper a grave we are digging for ourselves and how much we stand to lose from it, and it saves us a lot of unnecessary -- "but healthy," as someone claims -- mortification, humiliation, and heartache. And yet we never learn; we just keep stupidly and naively clinging to the belief that it's best to say what needs to be said for everything to be all right.

No marks for guessing which one I tend to do.

Head vs heart - the never ending battle

We hear the clichés over and over again. "Listen to your heart." "Follow your instinct." "Trust your gut." "Go with your feelings." The phrases uttered so mindlessly, so mechanically, that we know we'll never follow them no matter how many times we hear them.

How do we stop the war that rages on in our bodies? When will we know that it's time to stop fighting? Even when we know it's time to stop, will we stop at all? Why do we keep fighting? Is it because we're holding on to that unswerving faith that everything will be all right in the end? Or because we simply refuse to stop fighting because we're secretly afraid that stopping means a lack of faith and therefore things won't go our way? And yet, when in the end either the head or the heart wins, we're so battlesore that when we take a look back at what we've fought for, we wonder if it was all worth it to begin with.

How do we know when to listen to our heart and when to listen to our head? The head tells us like it really is, but the heart tells us what we want it to be. And in the end, when the battle dies down and we make as best a decision as we can, we're never really happy with the outcome, because it was a battle that was won by default, when one side simply chose to give up. We will always end up wondering what it could have been like if the other side had won.

And the war will go on..

refusing to settle

It's human nature to refuse to settle for second-best, to harbor that determination to get what we've set our sights on and try our best not to just give up and pass it off as a lost cause. But if all we end up doing is banging our heads against the same wall and reopening old wounds, why do we do it? We've had plenty of opportunities to get ourselves out of this predicament, but instead we choose to stay in it and just.. wait. And even when we're presented with other options that may or may not be better than what we essentially want, we stubbornly turn away from them and continue to wait. Is it a case of I Want What I Can't Have, or is it really that worth it? Or is it faith -- faith that if we work hard enough for it, and believe for once that the tide really could turn and that this could be a turning point in our lives, it will eventually come to us and everything will be all right?

I'm learning again..

How it feels to be afraid.

How it feels to be teetering on the edge, too terrified to move and too tired of standing still in the same spot.

How it feels to have the stakes raised against me.

How it feels to be completely helpless.

How it feels to rather be left in this gray area than to be sent hurtling back to the black area.

How it feels to know that this time around, I really could stand to lose everything.

That in the end, I would still risk everything to know how it all could have been.

The price to pay - we can't afford it but we would go to any lengths to settle the bill

- Picture courtesy of PostSecret *

Possibly the most famous quote from one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman:

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

- The Sandman, #65 -

The worst feeling in the world

When you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

When you don't know whether to give them the hug they want or push them away.

When you don't know whether to comfort them or turn your back on them.

When you don't know whether to be cruel or kind.

When you don't know whether to love them or hate them.

And then that little voice in your head eventually whispers, "You know..." It's so ironic that all you can do is laugh, until it makes you cry.

Why gamble?

Why do people gamble? In a world where money is so fluid, how do we know how safe it is to risk (almost) everything we have just for all that brouhaha? We scan the room for a table that could make us potential millionaires, and we put our money into it in the hopes that we gain something. When we see something coming back, that's when the stakes get higher, and we put more into the game, hoping that we'll get more back. And even when we begin to realize that we may end up losing everything, we keep going, determined to redeem ourselves and at least be able to keep a tiny bit of the money that we gambled.

The exact same thing can be said for relationships. We scan the world (or the streets) for that person who could be a potential Somebody in our lives, and we put our time and effort into it in the hopes of turning it into a decent relationship. When we see the slightest bit of progress, our hopes get higher, and we put more time and effort into it. And when this person happens to be someone we really, really like, we choose to ignore all the bad signs that it might not work out the way we want it to, and we soldier on, desperate to salvage what we thought could have been a relationship and trying our hardest to hold on to that last shred of effort that we put in (not to mention our dignity).

So when is it time to stop gambling? When we sense that we're about to lose everything? Or do we cross all fingers and toes, keep playing, hope that we'll get some of it back, and then stop only when we have no other choice? Or do we just play it safe and not gamble at all? Not gambling leads us to either breathe a sigh of relief that we didn't lose as much as everyone else did, or wish with all our hearts that we had dared to try our luck and end up among the few fortunate ones. So maybe the important question isn't why or how much we gamble. Maybe it's when to pull our highest bet -- our hearts -- off the table.