I Never Planned on You Changing Your Mind

There was a plan. A devastating, hard-to-comprehend-the-intricacies, life-length plan. I never planned on you changing your mind. There was only A. How do I switch to B, or the X I am now at, when there was never supposed to be anything but A?

It's always a dream. Life is fine, I am fine, and then a dream.

My subconscious doesn't understand, either.

I'm Too Young to Feel this Old

I spent the weekend with a dear friend doing the most wonderful things. It was so lightening to just be in the presence of someone who I'm so comfortable with, doing whatever the heck we wanted in the moment. It was a nice reprieve from the last long while. Lately I have felt very, very old.

The amount of life experience I have had in the last five years alone feels like enough to make me ancient. Someone asked how old I was the other day and I actually had to do the math. I feel as though I have had at least thirty years of life, if not more, but I am selling myself short by at least a decade. There is still so much to go.

Devastating loss takes so much away from a person. I found my first white hair awhile ago, and another one yesterday. The stress of life as it is has literally been aging me before my own eyes. I have acne, which is the strangest thing because I rarely had more than one pimple at a time until now. Wrinkles are appearing. My metabolism is slowing down. I am sure that if people heard me say these things they would laugh and tell me to stop over-exaggerating, to quit being such a drama queen. This is no hyperbole, however; I am aging far faster than years are going by.

I am no longer afraid of being alone. I'm not. I never have been, I never will be, and that goes even beyond death. I am tired of being the kind of alone that was God's first declaration of "not good," though. That kind of alone is exhausting. I am whole by myself. I am a fully functioning human being without a man. I can survive this way until I die. But now I want another whole person to walk through all of this with. I want to enjoy it all with another person by my side. And I can wait. Patience, over the last several years, has been growing on me. I can wait.

I feel eons old. Maybe when people talk about the day-age theory, this is what they mean: days go by but it feels like forever. That doesn't mean it actually is. I'm not stupid enough to think that I am a billion years old just because all the evidence I can see looks that way (not that I'm making jabs at day-age theorists...much). The point? I am so, so old. Maybe one day I will find an old soul like me.

No It don't Come easy, No It don't Come Fast

What to say?

I am being forced to dig within myself to the most hurting, buried parts, bring them to the surface, and face them head on. Through this process I am finding out exactly how much of my life I have repressed. It is a lot.

I remember the first day I taught myself to compartmentalize to the point where I could be physically present in a conversation, respond as required to the smallest degree possible, and record what was being said for later review. That way I could recall it later, piece by piece, and not deal with the hurt in front of the person. Unfortunately, I always forgot the last step; I would leave the traumatizing material buried and not even scratch the surface of my hurt. As these things have compounded over the last three years (the time since that date), it has only served to further compound the things inside that I had already done this with, unbeknownst to myself. Now when I try to access a memory from, say, the second grade, it's gone. I have to dig through the last fifteen years of garbage until I finally get into a place of clarity where it is possible to see the hurts (or even positive experiences) from way back then.

All I can say so far is how sad I am. I am sad that I have wasted so much of my life repressing instead of facing. So sad that I am now having to spend a significant chunk of my life working through this stuff instead of getting on with my life. Devastated by what I'm turning up, which if it had been addressed in the moment would have only been a scratch on the exterior of my soul; instead it has become a sickness to my soul. I cannot believe some of the things I am discovering.

This is going to be the hardest work I have faced thus far.