Humble Yourself

November 28, 2020 in Actualization in Action, How I Love

So today, I’m posting an apology letter that I wrote someone who is very dear to me.

Regardless of what happened between us, I accidentally let my ego get the last word. And for me that’s unacceptable. So here goes:

Dear Blank

Please read to the end, this is the apology you deserve, and I’ll be damned if the last thing I said to you was a lecture instead of a heartfelt apology.

Genuinely need to humble myself here.

I’m sorry. For a lot.

First, I’m sorry because I failed to trust you.

I failed to give you the space and time I told you I would, because I didn’t realize it, but I couldn’t handle the uncertainty of it. “I’m sorry. I’ll just never speak to you again until you speak to me, but know that I love you.” in retrospect sounds like I’m writing you off. And honestly maybe I subconsciously was preparing to be abandoned. And that’s not trust.

If I was in a more self-aware space I could’ve asked, “hey can we create rules around communication so we can be in contact? I’m not trying to go cold Turkey on one of my fav people” Or better yet, “can you define for me in the next couple of days how I should interact with you so that we can establish that I’m trying to respect your boundaries? I still don’t know which ones I’ve crossed based on our prior interactions, and because I’ve mostly had unconventional friendships, ours included, I don’t know what you deem appropriate for a friendship with me.”

But Can You Suffer Though?

November 20, 2020 in Actualization in Action, How I Love

Thinking it was the key to enlightnement I used to suppress strong emotion. So as a result, it’s been a long time since I’ve pined anything.

Pine:

To feel a lingering, often nostalgic desire.

2. To wither or waste away from longing or grief: pined away and died.

v.tr. Archaic

To grieve or mourn for.

n. Archaic

Intense longing or grief.

Hmm. Upon rereading the definition… I don’t really know what this is that I’m feeling.

I need a word that means I experience intense sensations within my body that I don’t have names for. I feel a dull ache by the heart. And a feeling in the throat like a slight inflammation. My eyes are full of a sad energy, but I do not want to cry. My belly is full of gravity like the fear that stops you in your tracks when you look into the abyss. But I’m not stopped. I wander in.

A cold runs over my feet and my hands. It creeps up my legs. There is a slight stinging to the flesh of my legs, like they’ve fallen asleep, though I know that they haven’t... and the energy has been sapped from my arms.

The Face of Fear

November 12, 2020 in How I Love, Actualization in Action

For a time I was incredibly disconnected from my emotional world. For some of the more logical people out there, I’d say, my ability to think and act rationally, while compartmentalizing my experiences, hindered my ability to appreciate what I was truly feeling in any moment.

I was going to say, “I don’t often experience fear,” in response to my friend Tracy talking about her experience of recognizing her own...

But that would be a lie.

I don’t often experience fear as a sort of dread that is going to consume me. I don’t consciously notice fear always, because it takes the shape of the scattering of focus. While it can live in my body as orbs of unsteadiness floating in front of my heart or a sinking in the gut or an energetic shock that runs cold through my nervous system… it’s rarely one of those sensations.

Most frequently?

Fear is distraction from my sense of purpose. Fear is the moment I look over my shoulder when I should just be running my race. Fear is the moment where I choose money over love, because I’ve stopped trusting the universe to keep feeding me as I try to pass the torch of passion to as many people as possible. Fear is the moment where I consciously stop saying “I love you,” because I’m worried that your feelings have changed. Maybe it seems like I’m trying to control you. Maybe it feels like I’m being taken for granted. Those moments are fear. They are not simply measured action. They are the lived rationalizations of the experiences within me. It seems we are endlessly trying to make wordy sense of our sense of the world.