Let me preface all of this by saying that I’m aware of how fucking stupid it’s all going to sound.

There is nothing wrong with my life.

But here’s what happens: I go looking for trouble. Me and my little friends (neuroses) go digging into the foundations of all the good things in my life and look for integrity issues. Because here’s the thing – I am an absolutely hopeless romantic. Not in the ‘awww, cute!’ way you’re probably connoting that phrase. More in a ‘dear god, lighten up’ way. All I’ve ever wanted in my life was a partner that I was desperately in love with. And it turns out finding that doesn’t make your life any easier if you’re a sensitive, people pleasing, anxiety ridden mess like me. Because now you feel like you have to work to keep them. You’ve shown them only the best parts of yourself until the ugly little pieces that have been pinned down by security in the wings rush the stage like a bunch of hormonal preteens at a Bring Me The Horizon concert. And if you’re a sensitive, people pleasing, anxiety ridden mess like me, you go ahead and compound those little ugly things by making them into absolute giant deals. It’s like taking a white head and picking it into cystic acne.

Ultimately, I end up hating myself for the things I do from a place of immense love. It’s only now that I can say that because I’ve spent 4 days berating myself for thinking I was dismantling my life into ruin. I’m a good person. I think about other people; what they might like, what they might want. I genuinely want to make people happy. I go out of my way to do things for them. I remember what they tell me. I support them when they need a hype man and when they need an executioner. I love them hard. I’m loyal to them to bitter ends. I act, always, with love and good intentions. I act with empathy and compassion. I give inordinate amounts of grace and patience. I love them for and despite their flaws. For these reasons, I know somewhere in this war zone of a headspace that I am worthy of loving and that the people in my life benefit from having me. But I am entirely incapable of extending my own love to me. So the moment I’m not all these things, the moment I’m not doing something for them, I feel the worthiness drain from me like a cracked sink. I am not causing problems, I am not acting from a place of bad intentions, I am not doing anything wrong to anyone. But I’m not doing anything good either, and ultimately, that’s the rub.

I’m acting from a place of fear, because I love my life so much. I am so lucky. I got everything I ever wished for. And I guess I just thought if I worked really hard, if I managed it all just right, I could protect it from all harm. I’m breaking my own back to do something impossible and unexpected. I feel illogical amounts of guilt for expecting anyone to do any of the heavy lifting. So if I’m doing anything wrong to anyone, it’s myself. If I should apologize to anyone, it should be to myself. It should be to this girl I found here in the corners of these rooms and put back together. 

Buddha says that the present moment is all we have. And so our happiness is now or never. We don’t have the future, and we don’t have the past. So trying to control the outcomes or logic away the predecessors won’t bring us anything good. All we have is now, so if we’re not happy here, we never will be. I’m training myself to find that more scary than the bad things that could come. The idea that I have everything I’ve ever wanted and I’m not happy while I’m with it because I’m scared of things that may never happen. It’s now or never.