A mysterious silence.

I've actually written two blog posts since my last one, but I've deleted both of them. They were just not material for sharing.

Since then my mind has quieted a bit. The anger and personal issues I'd expressed in those writings are now mysteriously quiet. Usually I'm very well in-touch with my feelings and have lots of opinions about them. Now, I mostly feel numb.

"Then darkness took me; and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell," says Gandalf of his apparent death at the hands of the Balrog. I suppose even the strongest of us have only so much they can take before everything sort of...resets. And that's what I feel has happened to me.

I seem to be accepting or at least resigned to my friendship/relationship difficulties. I seem to be not thinking about my issues with Counseling ethics. I move on...I just go. And that's not like me. I live life actively, meaning, I think about it and consider where I'm going. I don't just...endure like this.

But that's what I'm doing now. I'm just going on.

Life goes on as I see people I love slip through my hands, people feign my friendship and those who seek to understand me understand less and less of me.

I suppose the best thing I can do for myself now is reflect on what I don't understand. I suppose when you're not reflecting on what's going on, the only way to not be stagnant is to reflect on your reflections. These are mine:

Things I don't understand

1. How a good friend whom I love a lot can so easily avoid my honest attempts to reach out and help
2. How people I've known who are so good and pure could be corrupted so completely
3. How people can seek pleasure so adamantly without realizing this means they obviously haven't found it
4. How so many of my friendships could have looked to last forever when they really only lasted a short time
5. How so many people can ignore what I'm trying to say because they'd rather remain the same than face the truth
6. How tolerance can be taught to be a higher value than human dignity
7. How people can seek something so strongly and reject it when it shows itself
8. How manhood can go from something so wonderful as courage, dignity, honor, and integrity, to being an ideal based on physical characteristics and sexual promiscuity
9. How women can be so easily seduced by an ideal based on seeing themselves as only free if they love anyone but themselves
10. How fallacies and false ideals can become true when they become fashionable, and the truth can be equated with hatred as soon as it becomes unpopular

An image of courage and dignity

 There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to think and understand.

A question of silence.

I really like getting asked good questions.

By good question, I mean really open-ended questions, like "I heard you like this. Why do you like it?" Not questions like "How was your day?" Or the inane "What's up?"

When people ask me those sorts of questions, I really feel like they want to know me.

Well, it feels like I don't get asked a whole lot of questions. I'm not sure what to make of it sometimes. I'd like to think that people just don't know how, but I also don't want to insult there intelligence, since it's pretty elementary to know how to ask a question that has an answer other than "yes" or "no."

Sometimes I get talked at a lot. I suppose that's a sign that I'm a good listener, but after a while I wonder if the other person would give a hoot about me if I had no ears. What's worse is, later when I get to spend time with a good listener, like one of my best friends Brian, I talk his ears off. Then I feel bad because I'm a hypocrite. :(

I think worse than that, though, is just plain silence. When someone you know hasn't spoken to you in a long time, and they just won't. You wonder if they care that they say they want to spend time with you and don't follow up. They pretend like they are not all talk and they never promised you they'd be in touch...

I'm really grateful for the handful of people I know who really seem to want to spend time with me and know me. I suppose that you really can't make people your friends - all the people who still talk to me are none of the people I spent a year and a half trying to love. I will never understand how people can accept kindness and pretend nothing's wrong when there is no return gesture and no sign they even care to talk to you.

I suppose I've given up on trying to hide that I'm hurt, at this point. I'm always afraid that people will think I want attention. I just want to get this out in the only way I know how; by writing.

I'm mad at the fake friends I spent a year and a half pouring out my love and energy trying to befriend and understand and be there for. I'm tired of being the only one to follow through with my words and really invite people and welcome them into their lives, only to never have any of it reciprocated. I'm really really angry that my experiment in just giving up on doing all the work in the friendship ended in a bunch of half-hearted invitations to hang out that end up being forgotten. I feel like I'm an idiot because I can't just appreciate the friends that I've managed to keep all these years and forget about the few people that have hurt me.

I hate how I feel like my relationship is just wearing me out and I don't know how much longer I can take it. I hate how I can never forget about girls I used to like and how I still really care about them like a brother after all these years and they can still treat me like crap and I never care because I just want to know they're doing OK.

I hate how I've been fooled into believing I had a lot of friends and wasted so much of my time on people who really don't care about me.

I'm also tired of my postscript. There was no dream that I dreamed. It's all a lie. I'll never be another Aragorn. I'll never be a chosen hero like Link. I'll never even be a cool, hip, electric Pope like John Paul II. I'll always be me, except in my imagination. That's where my dream has always been - my imagination. And my imagination is not real.

I hate how I know I'm going to regret this post and I'm nihilistically posting it anyway.