Since Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, I am kind of stuck on some sort of love inventory. Not just the romantic absence of that kind of love in my life, but love in all its varied forms. I guess that is one of the benefits of being single and not in love, you get to think about all the other types of love available to you in your life...which really is a comfort. And the thought of being alone gets more and more acceptable each and every year.
I found a quote that is today’s photo and it struck me that this idea is like a loving pre-requisite. Being sensitive enough to feel it and strong enough to survive it. Seems like I have never quite gotten that balance right. I am either too indifferent to feel it, mistaking the love others have attempted to give me as not being worthy, the right kind or the kind of love I am interested in...or knowing all too well that I just don’t have the kind of metal and hustle required to keep up with the demands of any particular kind of love being offered.
I have worked a lot on this whole acceptance thing...learning to accept different treatment and insisting on new things that previously I might have allowed...to my own detriment.
Who I really thought of when I read this quote is my friend, Sam. She is sensitive enough to feel and strong enough to endure it. Which I have always marveled at this quality in her. She doesn’t wince off the feelings. She just seems to welcome them in even as they threaten to take her out. She is a fucking warrior like this. And I admire her immensely for it.
I, on the other hand, seem to have the strength to endure it. I have adopted long suffering as a life motto repeatedly. Signing up for shit that looks bad going in. And then staying even when the pain has become insistent and unremitting.
But I am really a chicken when it comes to the first part: I am very sensitive but I have developed over my life this idea that I can someone how skip all the blustery sentiment that makes me feel like I am bringing on my own doom...so I attempt, still, to short circuit the whole feeling part. I still buy into this idea that feelings are optional and if I am uncomfortable or unwilling, I can just change it. I cannot tell you how much and for how long I have been attempting to change my own sensitivity. I mean, it hasn’t really worked...when you deploy this as a life strategy, it means you get to have the strange experience of feeling things decades after they have happened and knowing that you did it to yourself. Always so willing to put off feeling today that which you might not have to feel tomorrow if you can just out run it.
So it has been a hard balance for me to allow my own sensitivity to give way and rise to all the feelings encompassed within and then to have the strength and tenacity to survive it. I definitely have the later, but not when paired with the former. It seems as though I have lived my life as if I had a choice...when in reality being sensitive means feeling is attendant to everything you do, and the strength to survive that is a necessary part of any survival strategy.
I can see and admit that I am one of those selective feelers. I pick and choose what I want to feel and there is a great number of things that fall outside that circle for me. So I really do admire those who are willing to feel it all and have the strength, repeatedly, to survive life and themselves. It isn’t easy living, and harder still to love and lose or perhaps even, love and keep.
So I guess as this year’s forced celebration of love comes round again, I will endeavor to accept and feel all the feelings that come up knowing that I will not only survive them but hopefully use them as fertile soil to grow myself into a person who is capable of feeling everything and knowing that she will survive it. And allowing my previous ideas that I can limit the feeling, to curtail my sensitive nature and call that living to just be a thing of the past.
I mean love and living is pretty much a feeling and enduring adventure, right?
Again.
Still.
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