Stolen Moments

If life is a collection of the moments you spend, then it goes without saying that none of them last forever. The most important thing, then, is making sure the moments you are making are the ones you will be happy to see flash by before the eternal slumber comes. It means living your life in a way that ensures you have a plethora of those moments.

Those moments are different for all of us, depending on what we we value. Some of those moments come from celebrations of the lives and loves of the people we hold close, moments we can freely share with the others in our lives, while others, not so much. For those that we don’t share, there are a couple of different motivations. Some of those moments seem less special when we share them with people who weren’t present when they happened while others might bring down the judgement of others. It’s more than fair to say we have our share of those moments in all of the relationships we have, but in some that moment spans the breadth of the relationship.

I won’t bother to make up a statistic, but there is doubtless one amongst the people reading this post who have been a relationship that conventional wisdom or his or her first mind told them would lead to heartbreak. For some of them, it was a relationship with someone whose heart belonged to another. For others, it was the pursuit of a relationship that one party seemed ill equipped to sustain. For others, it was a relationship in which one party had made a life -married- the “wrong” person, but remained in the relationship for the lives they’d created together.

In all of these scenarios lies a common thread, though the motivation for each might be different. Because I believe that each of us has a desire to give love and be loved, I also believe that most relationships fulfill this need on some level. While I would dare not say that each of us gets into a relationship to find the love of his or her life, I would say that we enter relationships to meet some need for companionship, to give us some mutual feeling of appreciating another and being appreciated, and to discern the qualities that we can accept or reject in a potential partner. For some of us, it means taking a road less traveled.

Both men and women find themselves in love triangles, never mind the fact that he or she may not initially be a willing participant in the same. I say initially, because there comes a point when that bomb is dropped, when a person decides whether or not he or she may continue in the relationship. Each person’s motivations may be as varied as “she/he must not be that happy at home if they can find a reason to stray” to “I know it’s more outside circumstances that keep him/her there, not love”, reasons that may look similar at first glance, though neither is mutually exclusive. When the day comes that the triangle is uncovered, the third party has a simple choice- to stay or to go.

While a knee jerk reaction of morality might say that the other party should leave that situation without a second though, each situation deserves a analysis of it’s own. There are men and women who would stay in a marriage that has ended in all but the formal declaration of the same for his or her children, for fear of having to start over, or simply because the finances aren’t in line to make the legal separation. There are others who are perfectly okay with leading up shit creak because they have the opportunity. While the motivations of the other party may be varied, the motivations of the self must be well understood.

If you can look inside yourself and understand that the moment you are creating is one that is destined to end and not get emotionally attached or start dreaming about the family would have, if you can REALLY live in moment and not worry about the future, then, by all means, do you. If you feel confident that you can make a clean enough break before you catch feelings, or after (because it goes without saying that there must be some involved if you are deciding to ride it out) or you feel there might be something for you to learn from entertaining such a relationship, then live your life. Understand that doing so really means taking one day, one moment at a time, and truly seeing it and appreciating it for what it is worth.

Old wives wisdom/adages tell us ” if he/she would do it with you they would do it to you”, as I’ve already said, the adage doesn’t always apply. Whether everything is all worth it in the end will remain to be seen…and the best judge will ALWAYS be the person in the situation.

In Memoriam

My Red shoes...wear them every work day

I write this post as a premature “RIP” to any woman’s complacency with not knowing her HIV status.

Not just today, but every day, we should make it a priority to ask ourselves and any one with whom we are or might be sexually intimate if they know what his/her status is.

People say ignorance is bliss, but that’s not so when you are playing Russian roulette with your life, or the lives of anyone one you might lay down with, or the lives of the children you might one day hope to bear.

When you look up the infection rate for African American women, the statistics are staggering.  For some reason, they aren’t always enough to move people. So what the CDC says:

                   At some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 16 black men and 1 in 32 black women will be diagnosed with HIV infection.

AND

                  In 2009, black women accounted for 30% of the estimated new HIV infections among all blacks. Most (85%) black women with HIV acquired HIV              through heterosexual sex. The estimated rate of new HIV infections for black women was more than 15 times as high as the rate for white women, and more than three times as high as that of Latina women.

People tend to get comfortable in “well, that won’t happen to me” or  “that won’t and hasn’t happened to anyone I know”.

Whose to say it hasn’t? Everyone who is sick doesn’t look sick…and the only real way to know, is to know.

 

Know you status. Make sure anyone you lie down with knows THEIR status. We have to protect ourselves.
statistics taken from http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/aa/

 

Boomerang Love

” If you love something let it go, if it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, it never was”.

I agree and disagree with this statement. Keep reading and you might feel the same.

When a relationship ends, lots of feelings come to the fore, but for most people I’d bet the biggest one is fear. That fear can manifest for a lot of reasons and in a lot of ways, but I think it can fit in three major categories: fear of being broken,  the fear of having to start over, and the fear of being hurt again.

The fear of being broken is a huge one. It is almost impossible not to think of all of other “failed” relationships in light of one newly gone asunder, and while it is natural, it can cause us to wallow in a very unhealthy place. It is not uncommon that some relationship guru or other tells us something to the effect “if you look at all of your past relationships, the common factor is you, and you might just be the problem.”  It can be even easier to believe that when you find that your past loves have all gone on to get married or engaged. Here’s the thing, while each party may have a contribution to the end of a relationship, that contribution is not always equal, nor it is that contribution the same in every relationship that ceased to be. The danger of taking the ” you are the problem” mentality is that the attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and sabotage our success with both true self-love and romantic love.

The fear of starting over can be just as self-sabotaging. As much anyone might argue otherwise, though change is a part of life, it is certainly not an easy one. This is especially true when the change is an unwelcome one. Even when a person has initiated the end of a relationship, he or she will have a period of adjustment from thinking of him or herself as part of a “we” to a “me”. This transition can be even harder when the breakup was not mutual, as the party who was not in favor of the breakup my find him or herself recasting an obviously broken relationship into something that was beautiful, enviable and irreplaceable when the opposite is true. The hindsight that is usually 20/20 can fail us when looking back on a relationship, as it can be easy to look at the relationship through rose-colored glasses and see more perfection than every truly existed. This stops us from being able to fully let go, which can make it seem impossible to fully move on.

The fear of being hurt again is certainly not one to be underestimated as it, too, can be detrimental to future success in relationships. This fear can prevent us from being able to love another person, truly, deeply, and freely. While it certainly stifles the person who has it, it is also unfair to all of his or her future partners, as it denies him or her the opportunity of being equally yoked in future relationships. While breaking up with someone you could envision a beautiful future can be both painful and emotionally numbing, it is a blessing to learn that you have the capacity to love someone outside of a child you created that deeply. Therein lies a promise of future love that can grow to be just as deep, if not more so.

So after all that, why don’t I agree with the quote at the beginning of the post? In my mind, it belittles the love that existed between to people. Just because it didn’t grow the way they might have wanted to or last indefinitely in the form that they might have wanted it to, that doesn’t make it any less real. Sometimes we love people enough to let them go because we don’t feel we can give them what they deserve. Sometimes letting someone go that way is the truest love of all.

Too selfish to love

This post is response to a text I got last night:

” Think I may be selfish for always wanting love and to give love, never be away from it.

May be an imbalance of affection and attention”.

At face value, I think this is one of the most unselfish things I have ever read…but that wouldn’t be a post worthy if I didn’t have more to say about it.

I think it is worth qualifying the type of love we are talking about here, because there are different types. For the sake of the post, I’m going to take it back to the Greek:

Storge-  natural affection, familial love

Philia-  friendship or affectionate love; dispassionate, virtuous love

Éros- passionate love with sensual longing and desire

Agápe- unconditional love

While I can’t say I listed the different types from the least to the greatest, I’d argue that I listed them from the easiest to come by to the hardest to attain.  I’ll treat them each, one at time.

You can’t get away from family love. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, how mad you get at any family member. I’m famous for saying “I love you, but I don’t always like you”, and more often than not, I’m talking about my family members. Trust and believe, when it comes down to it, I will do whatever I can to make sure they are okay, whether I am near or far. Even though we don’t always agree with each other about everything, we are always there for each other when it counts. If I can’t count on anything else, I can count on that.

All good relationships, friendship or otherwise, should start with philia love. That is the kind of love where loyalty is key; friendships can fall apart over a lack of the same. For many friendships are a trial by fire. While similar interests and sharing good times are important, people tend to define their friendships by the support those friends give them during difficult times. The best friendships are balanced. A friend might tell you the truth when it is the last thing you want to hear. A friend will be there to celebrate your successes, lend a listening ear or a helping hand when you need it. They might be someone you talk to every day or someone you catch up with from time to time and despite those lags you feel like the friendship remains.

In terms wanting love and wanting to give love, these are the kind that you give everyday. These types of love might also include the love each of us can have for our fellow-man, though I know good and hell well that isn’t what my friend meant. I offer those definitions because in the absence of romantic love, those, along with love of self, love for our pets, and a generalized love for each of our fellow-men are the ones that should come to fill our lives when we don’t have either type of romantic love.

Éros can be hard to contain and maintain. As no one can control who he or she falls in and out of love with, this type of love can be pleasurable and painful. When you also consider the fact that one person’s capacity or expression of love may not jibe with their partners it can make this type of love pretty complicated. Wanting to give and receive love are in and of themselves basic human needs, but things get messy when we add those elements. Depending on how urgent those needs are, they can make us accept things in our mates and ourselves that we might not otherwise, especially when our definition of love includes the physical element.  This love may linger for one partner when it is absent for another just as it might also be stronger for one partner as in another, but should a couple be able to nurture it mutually it can be a beautiful thing.

The last love, unconditional love, is the greatest of them all. For some, a progression of philia to agape is the natural progression of a relationship, while for others, they may have some starts and stops depending on how their love grows. Some people lead separate lives -sometimes complete with families and children- until life finds a way to bring them back to one another and they realize that love never ended. Perhaps distance and time made the heart grow fonder.  This might not be the love that leads to a story book happily ever after, but it is the one that lingers.

None of these are mutually exclusive and finding the path between the last three can be a journey. No matter what, it is always one that is worthwile.

The 3 C’s: Part 2

Since people tend not to want to read super long posts on a blog site, I saved the hard hitter for a new post.

So, just in case you are new to this blog, go ahead and catch up here.

Let’s revisit the topic of a woman’s self-sufficiency. Most people would agree that women are taught conflicting messages about who they should grow up to be. Last post -for those who decided not to look back- I talked about a woman’s strength as a weakness. Being unable to ask for financial help was a very superficial example, just a little taste of what I wanted to get into.

Back to the topic of a woman’s strength. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can damn sure speak for me. To be clear, being a strong woman doesn’t lend itself to a singular, succinct definition, but more a collection of actions that I’ve seen or heard about over the years. It means getting up every morning to go to a job you hate to make sure you have food on the table for your family. It means skimping on your meals to make sure you everyone else enough. It means being able to dig inside yourself and make the impossible possible.

Go back and re-read that last line.

On the surface, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Each of us comes into the world alone and leaves it alone, so self-reliance should be valued by each of us…but some of us overvalue it.

When I say some of us, I am talking about women. I know I just lost someone with that…but bear with me.

Every woman should embody strength. Each. And. Every. Woman. We should value our ability to be able to go out and stand on our own two, while realizing that for a woman to be successful in a relationship, there has to be some give and take. I’m not telling any woman out there to rollover for a man, but I am asking every woman reading this to realize that there has to be a compromise to that virtue when it comes to being in and maintaining a successful relationship.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know many women -self included- who feel like they have to have something of substance to bring to a relationship. Beauty fades, and that same spark/passion that can be a driving force at the beginning of a relationship has to be replaced by something stronger as we go along. A lot of times, men and woman don’t exactly see eye to eye about what that means.

The Bible tells us that a good wife “submits to her husband”. Merriam-Webster tells us that to submit means “to yield to governance or authority; to defer to or to consent to abide by the opinion or authority of another”. With that definition, I understand why it can be hard for a woman to even CONSIDER submitting to a man. Here’s the thing: we don’t live in the days of old. Men aren’t the only breadwinners. Women should both value and demand the collegial respect of her partner, while understanding that to receive it, she has to be willing to give as good as she gets. Submission does not have to be absolute, nor should any woman submit to a man who is not worthy in her eyes.

I can’t offer a hard and fast way to decide if a man is worthy. I think it goes without saying (even though I am going to say it anyway) that every man is not worthy. That is a decision that every woman has to make about the man she is with. What I can say is that there is undeniable strength in being able to make that leap to submit to a man. There are countless examples throughout our history: Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, even Michelle Obama. All three women were married to men who accomplished amazing things by putting themselves in a place that was dangerous to themselves and their families. While I don’t doubt that these woman had heated discussions with their men about the decisions they made, I’d also argue that none of these men could have been as great if not for the support of their women, women who were willing to let their men take their places in history, despite their own doubts and fears.

Chopping a man off at the knees, making him wonder what could have been, asking him to conform when a 9-5 stifles his dreams isn’t compromise. Compromise might mean allowing him to take a gamble when the possibility of his failure is more daunting than the spoils of his success. It might mean altering your life plan to allow him to have a chance at that success…but as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In my last post, I said that compromise was arguably more important than communication in the ultimate well-being of a relationship. I take it back. Compromise is key.

The 3 C’s: Commitment, Communication and Compromise

A wise woman on twitter said that a lasting relationship consists of the 3 things in the title. I definitely agreed, so much so that I wanted to write a post about it. It took a couple more conversations with a couple more folks for me to be able to be able to turn it into a post topic.

I’m sure most people would agree that all 3 C’s are important, though they might not agree with me about the order. I’ll ask you to read my thoughts before you make up your mind about that.

No one would argue that commitment is a pretty important part of a relationship. The intensity of the commitment might vary, but it will always be present for the relationship to continue.

No one would argue that communication is important. Most people think communication is key. I can’t say that it isn’t, but I do think something is just as, if not more important than communication. Clearly the process of elimination tells you which I vote for.

Two people come into every relationship and more than less likely, those two people have two different sets of beliefs. In general, it’s a good thing if those belief systems are compatible, but just because they sound like they are in theory doesn’t mean that they will seem as similar when it counts…even though that is the time it will be most important for them to. As I’m a woman, I can only speak from a woman’s point of view..maybe someone will do a guest post or drop a comment to represent the men’s side.

Black women are socialized to be a lot of things, among them we are socialized to be strong, independent, and able to take care of ourselves. Webbie even made a song about it. The downside of that this is that we often feel that asking for help is a sign of weakness, especially when that help is financial. While I can’t say that holds true for everyone, I can say it’s pretty likely that anyone who had parents that told them “you aren’t grown until you can take care of yourself” might feel that way. While such a woman might like to be a stay-at-home parent, she might also like the idea of making money to contribute to the well-being of her family.

This same woman might dream of the day when she can stare deep into a man’s soul and promise to be with him for richer and for poorer but might have difficulty stomaching the idea of being able to accept money from him when she is down on her luck for whatever reason. It might be because she just lost a job, quit a job that was endangering her health or her sanity, or because she’s been actively looking for a job in an economy that is worse than ith as ever been. When asked about it, she might say she feels like it’s wrong to take the money because she isn’t pulling her weight, isn’t an equal partner, isn’t equally yoked. If you step back and think about it, that’s part of what a “for better of for worse” vow is about. Two people stand before God, their friends, families, and the people they felt obligated to invite taking a vow that recognizing that every day might not bring an equal 50-50 partnership. Some days its might feel like 60-40, 70-30, or even 80-20 for a variety of reasons, not just financial. That unwillingness to take that help, her pride in that principle might make her unwilling to make a compromise that could make an otherwise “perfect” relationship fall apart.

That said, a woman certainly has to be able to understand that for her self, be able to compromise that principle of self-sufficiency to be able to rely on her man, and, should the need arise, be able to communicate that to her man.

Closure: The Measure of Real Love Part 2

I wasn’t sure there was going to be a part 2 this post…but I had this in me, so here it is.

I think you would be hard pressed to find a man or a woman who really was in love with someone who doesn’t want to have some understanding of how something that seemed like it would be forever to turned into something that just ended. Sometimes, both parties have to recognize that they have just drifted apart. In that case, though both parties might hate that things have devolved the way they have, they might be able to pinpoint the moment when things went sour. Perhaps the death knell was a divergence in the road the couple felt like they needed to take to move on to the next level. They may have mutually realized that what each ultimately wanted was not something that corresponded with what the other wanted, and could think of no real way to compromise the two visions. In that case, though it might be hard to part company, both can with the realization that each may be doing the other a great kindness in acknowledging an opportunity for the out.

In other cases, closure does not come so easily. More than less likely, this happens when the fallout hits the other person like a ton of bricks. Sometimes a party can be clueless that the break up is coming on because of the way the other party is acting. While a person might sense subtle little changes, he or she might attribute those changes to the growing pains that all people have in relationships. Generally speaking, as each individual grows, the relationship may have to change to accommodate that growth.  Sometimes, the relationship or the parties in it aren’t really mature enough to do that.

So, let me back up. When I refer the the maturity of the relationship I don’t necessarily mean the time that has elapsed. I really mean the understanding of that each person have of what the relationship should be. To keep it as concise as possible, some people feel like they way a relationship starts is the way is should end, while other people understand that it can and should change as the people in it and the desires that they have might change. The latter show emotional maturity.

Back to my thought: Maybe one or both of the people can’t really accept that fact that the relationship has to change for it to grow. The things that used to be enough may not suffice anymore. It might even feel like the relationship has come to a stagnant point, where both parties have an idea of what might help it move forward but neither party is willing to take the first step, for whatever reason.  One party might reach out and feel rebuffed, while the other party may internalize his or her feelings of resentment for the other. Ultimately, this will probably result in some hurt feelings as someone steps forward to put an end to the stagnation by breaking things up.

If both parties come to this conversation with hurt feelings, ego might get in the way and neither will say when he or she really feels. That initial “it’s over” conversation might be messy.  It might take a long time for both people to get to a point where they can have a rational conversation, if the day does come. Being able to have that conversation, whether it takes days, weeks, or months, can be the measure of Real Love. Being able to have that conversation and being able to learn and grow from that conversation can make the difference between being able to truly move forward and repeating the same patterns in love over and over and over again.

The Measure of Real Love (part 1?)

I been chewing on this for a couple of days, so I’m going to gone ahead and let this one ride.

This might end up being two posts, hence the question mark.

When it comes to relationships, there are about as many ways to handle them as there are couples in the world. Some are good while others..not so much. Some are mutually violent while others are one-sidedly so. Some bring out the best in both people while others make one person want to be better. In those relationships where the dynamics are more skewed toward one side or another, it’s more than likely that the relationship will end.

This post isn’t about the dynamics of the relationship as much as it is about what you do when it’s over and why you might respond the way you do. I don’t think there is “a right way” to be in a relationship. For those that work, the people in it will tell you that it IS work…but for those that don’t, you might get a million different answers about what didn’t…but I digress.

A friend and I were talking about the ways that people handle breakups and the why behind it, and she said something that I felt was worth exploring. According to her, the aftermath of the breakup says a lot about the value of the relationship to the people in it. People who were deep in love might wait a while before starting to date because they are holding out hope that the relationship can be revived, while people who weren’t can move on to the next and think nothing of it.

Of course, I don’t see things as black and white as that, particularly for the person who might go on to another relationship to help them get over the past one.

I seem to know a fair amount of people who believe that the way to get over an old relationship is to get into a new one, and from the outside looking it, it seems like they have different motivations.  I know people who are look at breaking up like cowboys look at falling off a horse -you have to get back on to make sure you have the courage to keep getting back on. When I ask them about it, I’ve been told that while getting closure from a past relationship can be a good thing,  sitting and waiting on it to come is not the way to find the person that you can make your forever after with. For other people, I’ve been told it’s so much about looking for the next long-term relationship as finding someone who can put the person you are trying to get over in the back of your mind. While you are learning someone new and bringing them into your life, you don’t have quite as much time to think about the person who just left it.  Those are just two reasons, and we haven’t even touched on the people who serial date because they just need a body to fill a need, whether it be physical, financial, or emotional.

In my mind, pining a way to mourn a love lost. Depending on how the relationship ended and the way the people in the relationship interacted with each other, breaking up means that a part of your life has ended. When you are invested in a relationship, it can be easy to think of the other party the same way you would think of yourself. Instead of planning dinners, meals, trips, dates, or budgets for two, you go back to planning for one. Certain songs or places might make you nostalgic, which can bring painful or pleasantly painful memories, depending on how things developed. For some people, pining is A way, not THE way. Some people redirect that strong emotion to other people, while others work through that grief by losing themselves in other things. Maybe they lose themselves in music or exercise. Maybe they start dating themselves, prioritizing self-indulgence over going out and getting caught up in the dating game right away. Hell, some folk even drink. *shrugs* I’m not judging.

Ultimately, you have to work through the emotion….but some people do it differently. I think that love can only be measured with emotional distance…hindsight is always 20/20.

Stay where you got planted…

The sermon at church today inspired this post.

The pastor preached about how it is important to prepare yourself for what God has in store for you. He talked about how, in fact, if you have not prepared yourself to receive the blessings God has for you then your receipt of them may be more to your detriment than to your advancement.  He asserted that women can ruin the relationship that God ordained by not being ready and that -more importantly- that God plants us in a soil (place) so that we can flourish. He posited that the soil might be uncomfortable, but that discomfort was worth it if the plant was still allowed to grow.

I walked out of church and drove around thinking about it, and decided that I’d thought about it enough that it was blog fodder. As you might already guess, I didn’t agree with everything he said.

Now, before I get started, if you have read any of my other posts, it probably doesn’t surprise you that I had a difference of opinion. I currently hold a job that allows me to change facilities, cities and even states every 3 months.  The longest I have ever lived in one place in my adult life was when I was in college, and that was mostly because I was in college. As yet, I haven’t planted any roots that ground me anywhere. Cleveland is the city where I come from (so run run), Chicago is the city that I would live in if there was no winter, and it’s safe to say I am still looking for the place that I will call home.

So let me go back to the soil analogy. I’m nobodies farmer, but I do know a little something about soil. There are many properties of soil that determine whether it will be plentiful, including the nutrient richness, the pH of the soil, soil structure and the organisms that live in it. That might be more than you care to know, but stick with me.

Once I plant a seed in the soil, the nutrients (along with those other properties I talked about) are going to help determine what kind of crop I yield. While the soil certainly can’t change the type of seed you have, it will determine whether or not the seed blossoms and how it will blossom. A nutrient rich soil will be more likely to be fertile, while a nutrient depleted soil may not bear a sickly fruit, if it bears any at all. A once fruitful yet untended soil that becomes filled with rocks or weeds may choke off the life that has begun to grow in it.

So let’s step back and define the nutrients. They can be faith, hope, love, support, self-confidence….I could keep going, but they can be anything an individual needs to help them become the person that God wants him or her to be. When those things get removed from our soil, the very things that help the soil be fruitful are removed, and the plant may wither, break off, or die before it becomes as great as it was intended to be. Maybe the plant grows bigger than the pot it was originally in and it is straining to survive; in that case, my grandmother would move it to another pot and see if flourish rather than leave it in the old pot and watch it die.

So many times I have said on this blog that change is growth. I know that all change isn’t for the better nor is all change easy, but I would argue that some growth comes from the change. If you put a seed in any type of nutrient-less soil, it may not grow as strong as it might have otherwise . If you pick that same plant up and put it in a soil that is more compatible, it may begin to flourish. Still, that plant isn’t pruned, it is likely to become weakened or deformed.

Oh, and we haven’t even talked about that seed spreading it’s seeds.

If you look around, the type of plant life in one area of the country may be very different from other areas of the country. While I have never seen a palm tree or a cactus in Cleveland’s natural ecosystem, I have seen dandelions in a lot of the places I have been. I don’t care how nutrient rich that soil is, if I plant a palm tree in Cleveland, it is likely to die. It’s not just the soil that helps that plant flourish, but the environment that seed is planted in as well. The same way every parent wants to make a better way for their child, some plants have to move from the soils that were grown in into soils to which they are more suited if the soil isn’t cared for properly.

For me, I’m not as concerned with staying where I am planted as I am finding the soil that is going to help me flourish…but I think that’s a choice each of us has to make.

Changes

As I am sitting here on the brink of realizing one of my dreams, I can’t help but wonder what is next for me.

When I think about the way I thought my life was going to unfold as opposed to the way it has, it sparks a feeling in me akin to disappointment. If you had asked me 5 years ago, I would have told you that I would be married by now, maybe even starting to think about having children. I might not have been able to tell you where I was going to be working, or where I was going to be living, but that whole “happily ever after” thing was close to a definite for me.

In the interim, I have changed. What I once wanted isn’t what I still want. Don’t doubt me, I still would like to find my “happily ever after” but I have slowly been coming to the realization that it won’t be what I once thought it would be.

Part of it is because, though I ALWAYS say that I think change is key to growth, you really can’t account for the ways you might change. The person who made your heart beat fast every time you saw them three months ago may not do the same thing for you two days from now. The thing that was once your life’s passion may take a back burner to everything else depending on the choices you make and the hand life deals you.

I might just be in my feelings today, but I’m wondering where my life is leading me.

I can’t say that I feel helpless, because that is absolutely untrue. While part of me wouldn’t mind the stability of picking a city and making a life there, placing roots, doing all the things that society tells me I am “supposed” to be doing, the other part of me is pretty skeptical about the whole thing. I know that once I do that, it is going to be hard for me to uproot myself, especially when I think about the extensions of myself (read husband and child) that my family is wondering when I will have.  While I still feel like the decisions I am making are mostly about me, I see the impact they have on the people around me and I wonder how to figure out how to make choices that I feel like are causing the least hurt to the people I love the most.

I feel like I am straddling the line between selfishness and selflessness. Ever since the day of my departure has been growing closer, I have been listening to my family tell me their concerns about me going away. The most prevalent theme has been that they felt I had been “sowing my royal oats” so to speak, and that they felt I was always going to end up where my heart is (which is where they are). While I certainly feel a tug to be close to my family, I always feel a little trapped while I am with them. The city where I became a woman is the city of the girl I used to be, not the woman I have become, or am becoming.

Maybe part of it is my fear of being defined by who I am to the other people in my life. Granted, I already am. I am a daughter, a sister, an auntie, a friend. I’m not yet a mother or a wife, but those are roles that I will fill one day, and those might be the ones that scare me the most. You can fail at them, or at least feel like you have. Maybe you have an idea of how you are going to be, how you will grow with your partner, the relationship you will have with your children. No one sets out to be a bad parent -and in their own eyes they may NOT be- but that doesn’t mean that their children will see things the same way.  When I sit down and talk to my brothers about our childhood, I realize that we have different ideas about what the successes and failings of our parents are…and I guess we can only agree to disagree. By the same token, no one sets out to fail at any relationship, much less marriage, but no one can foresee the ways that their lives will change or how the person you took for better or worse (and the person you took) might change.

It’s crazy that the same ponderings I am facing now won’t be that different from the ones I am facing 1 day, 1 week, or 1 year from now. I just hope I am able to look back on all the choices I’ve made and feel that I have done the best with what I have. Fear of the unknown is a bitch.