So, I’m sitting here today, working on two different writing projects, and cleaning up the mess in my kitchen, and what’s really going on is a re-education in absolute love.
This current portion of road I’m on started what seems like eons ago. It’s part of why I stopped blogging. There’s too many places I could call it’s starting point. So, Imma gonna pick about 2 years.
I found a path that I thought would carry me through several years of my journey, one that I need to have in my life. It was challenging and met, I’d say, about 80% of my needs of this portion of who I am, in stability, creativity, and my skillsets. I jumped for it. I opened my heart to this path, attempting to make the best of a past that I can not change and need to accept there is not really a good way to fully step off the highway, but maybe I get to pick the lane that best suits me. It has, unfortunately, turned out to be a major source of drama and disappointment. So much so that while I was meeting the needs of that path, I wound up, once again, stepping off too many others.
There was a second path I had begun that I thought would carry me through several years of my journey, that met the needs of another portion of who I am, in so many ways, I’ve actually lost count. Opening my heart to this I thought would create new paths, heal old ones, allow me to travel back to myself. In many ways, it has. It has, unfortunately, been a major source of grief to me, as well.
The lesson I am getting in Life is one about Denial. Again. Denial is a powerful force, almost impossible to deal with.
I fight against this concept and have such a hard time letting go of the psych-ward-style concepts of: that if we just talk things out, everything will be okay and dealt with. That if someone can just hear the right words, in the right combination, then… the door will unlock and Life will smooth out for a bit.
I am snorting in sardon-ez at the moment, because that very thought, that very concept is the denial I’ve been dealing with, from others that has taken away both paths that I thought were the two major portions of my own. I feel like screaming and weeping. I have, for days, because these were two major components of the life I was trying to build for myself. Not top of the rainbow stuff. Not the win the lottery dreams. But good, healthy, every day, this is what is going to be my day-to-day life dreams that give me x, y, z and a really good banana split.
I feel the burn, because, in less than six months, in three different situations, a person simply does not get that the very thing they are bitching about, the very thing they have injected into my life and are objecting to, is the very thing they are doing to me.
Denial sucks, and it doesn’t matter if its from your boss, a coworker, a family member, your best friend, or a client. People can’t hear, for whatever reason.
It stings. I have a hard time letting go, even though I am giving the same advice to me that I give to others: Give it three tries. After which, you’ve done your best. If they can’t hear you, do both of you a favor and cut it loose. The only time to break that rule is when they at least try to communicate back, because those are the only ones to ever keep anyway.
I learned that one the hard way, six times over, and I have bled through the nose for long enough. It sucks when someone basically makes you wait until someone they care about passes on before “they can fully be themselves around you.” I fell for that one, big time, with all the other lies that went with that, just like if they’d been a married spouse not willing to get divorced, yet still in the dating pool without permission.
I keep going back to the movie, “He’s just not that into you.” About half way through watching this one, and several times after the fact, it hit me that anyone worth “it” is willing to do the hard thing, and it doesn’t matter what relationship type it is. It doesn’t matter, really, how that communication happens, or if it’s perfect.
Love is. And if someone’s going to fight it, fight hearing you, fight seeing what you have to say just because of their own ego- inflated or deflated, then disaster is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it’s okay to say “no” to that. It isn’t betrayal. It isn’t that you aren’t strong enough to take it. It also isn’t anything you have to prove to the other person by crawling through their broken glass repeatedly. ‘Cause guess what? Relationships, of any type, take at LEAST two people, and both of them have to be able to say: this is what I want out of it. It could be something like, “this is what I’m willing to do for a paycheck” or “this is worth me dealing with what I have to do to earn my paycheck, just so I can sit with you and watch Mr. Ed on re-runs,” or “you mean something to me that I can’t quite define and I want to spend time with you but my brain shorts out, can you give me a list to pick from and we’ll go have a blast.”
So, I’m sitting here, with this screaming, weeping feeling, with my brain going 17 million miles an hour, trying to figure out what I could have said or done differently, when I know there isn’t because it does take two people to have that conversation, when I get this lump.
Literally. A lump. In my lap. A tiny squeak.
One of my babes isn’t feeling good and she smells like poo from diarrhea, and won’t let me fully wash it off, and she crawls into my lap, and puts her head back, just the same as when she was a helpless, sick, 5 week old kitten when I found her.
It’s here, and now, that the tears I can’t shed over my life falling apart again finally come.
Saving her, her sisters, and her mother had been hard. I had spent days at the vet. Dealing with my own mother and sister having cancer, on top of it. Dealing with my long term whatever ending. I syringe fed three kittens, seven times a day, dealt with vomit, fever, medicines, shots, the feral-ness of their mother.
And all that love, coming right back at me, when my heart is breaking and feeling like why try again, when people fight so hard not to accept love or kindness in their lives, treating it like it’s garbage, and it comes to me:
This little babe doesn’t speak English. She’s not even human. She has a temper and a will of her own and she definitely has her own likes and dislikes which are quite easy for her to communicate, in or out of her own species. It just isn’t in words. But I understand her, quite well, and apparently, she does understand me, too.
As the tears start coming down, when she’s in my lap and not feeling well, this little babe crawls up my shoulder and just hangs on, purring louder and louder as I finally, finally, can cry. Two beings, both not feeling well, and just holding on through the discomfort of it all, and that is all anyone can really dream of in this Life.
When I get beyond this feeling of loss, I know, I know, she will still be there, making me laugh at her antics, cringe with being woken up at 5 AM, and showing me, yet again, that there are more important things in life than pain, misery, and disappointment, and how the hell to get out of the rabbit holes.