On Memory.

There are a lot of things I wish I could forget.

In that I'm not alone, I imagine. I'm sure a lot of people would say that they wish they could forget X or Y. But what is unusual in my case is that sometimes, only when I'm in a bad mood, I want to forget many of the good things I've experienced in life.

Occasionally I will look people up on the internet that I used to know. Just to see if they're alive, see if they look happy. I would sincerely like to know if joy always comes with the missing afterwards. I wonder if I can ever love someone without eventually having to face the reality that I will never see or talk to them again.

It can make you question whether it is worth meeting people at all.

These days, most of my friendships I have to admit are not very intense, intimate friendships. I might even say that I don't have very many friends anymore at all. It is a lot different than my life, say, a year or so ago. I am starting to become a very solitary creature. For some reason, I don't feel bad about this at all.

But every once in a while it makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong. Because I used to have such close relationships with other people that I could never imagine living without them. But here I am. I have no friends now that I don't think I could live without.

Is there no golden mean here? Will I always have to have intense feelings toward other people to have good relationships with them? Because I'm all out of intense feelings these days.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to forget.

Breaking my idols.

I'm the kind of person who tends to glorify the people I really love.

When it comes right down to it, though, people are actually quite predictable. I build other people up who I love and make me feel good as heroic, idyllic paragons of love, mercy, and justice. But in the end, when it comes down to painful human experience, they really are just like everyone else. Even when I say otherwise. I'm wrong.

It's easy to run away. Sticking things out and doing the hard work of picking up the pieces and figuring out what went wrong is the hard thing to do. I'm not sure why I'm the only one who ever wants to do it. Perhaps no one considers me worth the effort. Still, I'm starting to get used to this. The last time I went through something close to this, it took me over 3 months to recover. I'm already starting to feel better after a few days. At least a little bit. How can someone get used to something like this? But here I am.

I really feel like I saw this coming. I started to make odd predictions out loud that I had no reason to believe. I thought I was being insecure and paranoid, but everything I said came true. I have decided that next time I get these intuitions, I'm going to act on them. I was afraid of self-fulfilling prophecies, but now I'm not sure about it.

Here's the first prediction I'm going to act on. If I can avoid my habit of idolizing people and putting all my happiness and hope into them until well after I move out of my current town, I will be OK and make a long-term recovery...I will change and become happy by myself. If I don't...I'm not sure. My prediction doesn't go that far.

I hope I'm not just going crazy. If I read this on someone else's blog, I would think they were trying to get attention. But this just keeps happening. I'll get a feeling about something and it will end up true.

Right now, I feel like breaking my idols.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream of apostasy from my false religion.

Happiness and memories.

I've noticed there are two types of people: those who see a happy picture from long ago and feel happy, and those who see a happy picture from long ago and feel sad.

I am one of the latter. The difference between myself and those who see old pictures with happiness is that the happy ones are the ones who know that those times will come again. Me, I don't. The future terrifies me.

Why? Because I know something other people don't. I have discovered that when people have a good group of friends, they don't look for more friends. They don't care about friends that have gone before them - at least, not in any real conscious, present way, just in the abstract "I hope wherever they are and whatever they're doing, they are happy." As long as my friends have plenty of other friends, I am disposable. The only way it is ever different is if I do something to make them feel guilty - or their other friends leave them. And neither of those are solutions that interest me. This is the truth.

My time is over. It has been long over, in fact. My senior year of college was two years ago, and now I am all washed up, even if am still a student - a graduate student, but a student nonetheless. I look around me and see happy people who were first brought into this community by my class - some of them by me personally. It has never really seemed to matter. So long as they are happy, they could care less how lonely I am. They can certainly pretend to care - they have to in order to feel OK about themselves - but in the end, if I never reached out and asked people to spend time with me, I would probably talk to people a couple times a year. There are a few out there who are legitimately busy - I understand that very well, indeed I do - but there are others who have their band, their group, their "one from many" of which I can never hope to take part. I'm too old - even when I do somehow spend time with people here, I feel like an outsider. I belong to a group of people who have already left me behind.

The times I've been happiest in life is when I really felt a part of something greater than myself. The times when I wasn't just a friend, but part of a group of friends. Those were the best. And now, I am on the verge of leaving behind every good thing I've had on earth. All that I ever really had was here, at school. If I couldn't make friendships that last here, what hope do I have out there, where it is so much harder?

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream of constant memory.

Blindness.

"People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence."

As perceptive as I liken myself to be, I am amazed by my own nearsightedness and blindness. Always it seems I am late to discover something about my life, which then becomes a major source of regret. Like - who is really important. Who is not. Who someone really is. I feel like an idiot when I miss out on something important.

I have developed a defense against this, though. I never hold anything back. Today, I gave someone a present I worked on for months. I don't know this person very well, but I knew that what I did would make them smile because they once told me how much it would mean to them if someone gave them the kind of present I gave. She loved it. Let me repeat - we are definitely friends and think well of one another, but we are not "good friends." I did it for no other reason than I knew it was a good idea. I knew that if I held back, I might end up regretting it. I know very well that I can't prevent every regret that might come my way, but I'll be damned if I am not going to do anything I know I can do to stop it. I will hold nothing back.

What good can come of the things we do and say to one another? How can you know if you don't do it? So long as the action is intrinsically good, good can come of it. Don't hold any of it back. That was the principle of the gift I gave today.

Today, I had to call two people. For different reasons. To the first, I said some things that I shouldn't have said. I meant what I said, but I knew saying it would send the wrong message. So I apologized and we understood one another again. However, I am glad I made that mistake. I held nothing back. Nothing at all - I said whatever I wanted to say in just the slightest hope that something significant would be learned from it. And I did learn. I learned I need to keep my mouth shut when I'm too tired to think straight.

The other person I called because I knew I had something I needed to say. I could have held it back - let the fact that I would miss them terribly next year an unsaid given. But I knew I had made a mistake. I have taken this person for granted for almost the entire time I've known them. I have been under a paradigm, a rigid stubborn view of them that never allowed me to see them as they are. I passed up opportunities to get to know this person in new ways, beautiful ways, and now I see that my time with them is running much shorter, much quicker than I would have ever imagined. I blew it. I had to tell them. Had to say sorry - even if I knew they wouldn't take an apology, or even understand why I was sorry. I found out too late in my blindness what I had missed all along. But at least...at least I had the benefit of finally telling the truth. The truth I'd discovered now that the scales dropped from my eyes.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for true sight.

Shadow and Flame.

"You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum. Shadow and flame."

I have entitled this post "Shadow and Flame" because it is about as close to an overall theme as I think I can get. Sometimes when I start these posts I'm not really certain at all what they're going to be about. Hence, the shadow. But there are some strong feelings circling around (most of them now my own) so I shall call that the flame.

First, the shadow. I'll be brief since I've discussed this in detail before...I suppose the best summary of my feelings about where my personal life is going is "I have no idea." It seems as though the more I try to make my world revolve around God, the more strongly the current pushes me to abandon that and revolve around what I will simply and succinctly dub "female drama" (no questions please) OR meaningless and unfounded anxieties. That latter bit is perfectly summarized in last week's post. One long anxiety attack over a conversation with a friend. Things have, as I really knew all along, turned out fine.

Now we are getting to the flame. I suppose I should start by saying that my personality is "shifting" for the fifth time in four years. It seems like every time this happens I go a little insane. Case in point: freaking out because I was worried I wasn't able to stop counseling people and would lose all my friends by either offending them with directive counseling techniques or by making them into clients.

Yes, this happened.

The flame: my dating fast ends this Sunday. What will I do? Whatever. I'm actually pretty serious about that. I will do whatever I will do, and let God be my guide. I'm not worried - not because I earnestly believe I have nothing to worry about, but because I don't want to worry and rationally speaking there is no real use or purpose for worrying. Whatever comes, comes. Whatever goes, goes. That is my earnest conclusion from all the mistakes I've ever made concerning relationships.

Everything is fine, because on the inside I have the joy no one can take from me. Peace.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for light and warmth.

Addicted to Love.

I ought to go to sleep, but there's something that's bothering me.

In this community I live in, I feel that because of our communal formation in living the divine life there shouldn't be people around here who act in ways that they ought to know better. However, that is not so.

In the same way that all people hate to see others making their own past mistakes, I get frustrated in the presence of people whom I know are chasing the feelings of love. I see it much too often...people who don't really even know each other chasing one another around because of how the other makes them feel. I'd call it pathetic except I've no right.

It makes me want to do better in my own situation. I suppose the only people who read this are those really committed to knowing what's on my mind, so I'll not bother with vacant attempts to hide things and come right out and say I committed myself, following my breakup in mid-November, to being single for at least three months (longer is even better). That also means not pursuing anyone until after those three months, lest I start a relationship right afterwards (I feel like that's cheating). This is so that I can make certain that I'm purging my desire for the feelings of love and chasing something utterly beyond simply feelings, when I do find someone. It's also nice to grow in my friendships and my relationship with the Lord, to better prepare myself for when I do...look around.

However, (and I feel like I've posted about this too many times before) I've not simply ceased to be interested in women. As I said, seeing the poor fools (forgive me for speaking as I feel) who chase feelings and leech happiness gives me strength beyond just my own desire to maintain my integrity to keep on as I've planned. But sometimes...sometimes I am so tempted to tell someone my feelings it's unbearable. And sometimes I really can't keep someone out of my head. It's aggravating.

I can't ever remember something so inane as a crush being so difficult. I'd like to know if there's a way to forcefully banish a thought from one's head.

I'll try anything.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for contemplation of true love.