I made a passing comment the other day about feeling like I’m going around in circles in my life but didn’t realise how deeply poignant this statement was until I pondered on it properly. To clarify, I was making the proclamation based on the sole assessment of my love life, or lack thereof. In all other aspects of my existence I feel quite the opposite. Career wise I can feel the shift as I enter the next phase. As is the same for my other relationships and ‘life progress’ in general. I feel like I’ve now hit the sweet spot with nurturing the relationships I have with those I love. The friends and family I have who are closest to me are there for a reason and I would trust them with everything; and I know they feel the same way. So why then do I feel so strongly that this is the opposite when it comes to one specific area of my life?
I’ve often written of how lucky I am to be surrounded by people who I can have honest and true conversations with. I was speaking to one of these kindred spirits not so long ago and pondering on the status of a ‘lost love’ who is still in some way hovering around in the picture. At this time I verbalised a feeling of how I had once again started to think that perhaps after everything, and despite all of the prolonged hardship, maybe this person was actually the one for me. And furthermore, maybe we actually had a chance this time around.
In saying all of this, even at that time I recall also raising the possibility that maybe these feelings weren’t exactly true. I began to wonder if maybe I was just looking back irrationally and romanticising a problematic relationship that was problematic even back then. I began to understand that I had taken the easy route of falling back on past relationships and past ‘someones’ looking into my future. It was just so much easier to think about those I already know, as wrong for me as I knew they were, than to look into a questionable future with potential someones.
It became quite obvious so very quickly that this person was not the one for me. More than that, they weren’t really there at all. They had just been, for all that time the one I’d be leaning on as an excuse not to take that step forward, into the unknown. Keeping the possibility alive in my mind had somehow allowed me to not try. It had kept me in a safe back up space in which I reasoned that I didn’t need to put myself out there and wade into murky waters because my future was already set; surely with this person that had to be for me.
To be honest, it was never an idea based in rationality. I mean if I think about it further, this person isn’t who I could see myself forging a life alongside. They were just my easy out to not challenge myself, to hide behind and refrain from admitting that I didn’t know; that I just hadn’t met that person yet. This is not saying that I didn’t feel for this person, or that at the time they were properly in my life, that it wasn’t something special, something that I treasured. But I think I knew even back then, that it was fleeting. Because deep down, despite all of the fear of the unknown, I respected myself enough and believed in my future enough to know that there was something more for me out there. Yes it’s something I couldn’t see back then, and honestly that I can’t see right now but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there waiting for me somewhere along the line.
I realise now that the ease of this comfort zone was holding me back. I was deliberately leaving the door slightly ajar not because I thought it was a viable choice, but because I had tricked myself into believing that it made me feel better. But it hasn’t done that, all it’s done is held me back and resulted in me projecting tainted expectations on the wrong person.
Sx
I blog for Change. 