I am telling you that it is not your fault... that you have done nothing wrong.... I am telling you that you have nothing to be sorry for or to feel badly about.   I love you and you are the only real best friend I have ever had, and I cherish you - everything about you.  I don't want my crap to put a wall between us....   

I’m not saying that this has nothing to do with the way I immediately shifted gears upon Dan’s arrival. Everything about the way I spent my time – working, not working, the way I planned, the way I expressed pretty much everything immediately shifted.  But, that wasn’t your fault.  It was just a reality check for me. I suddenly felt very alone in the world.  That is not your fault either.   The reality is that I AM alone in the world. Really.

This is not about Dan.  I am nearly a middle aged lesbian, who has made a series of poor choices all across the span of the last 20 years. And I have no one to blame for those choices but myself.   My life in no way resembles what I imagined it would at this stage of my journey.  I have had the good fortune to be deeply and completely loved by some very worthy and wonderful people.  I’ve had the world offered to me on a pedestal, figuratively speaking, of course – a few times.   But, I’ve always been looking for the total package, not seeing it right in front of me – until it was forever gone from my grasp.  That’s me, always a day late… always seeing in retrospect what I couldn’t see standing right in front of me.  Always fighting off the one that I should have been fighting for.  Always fighting… and I am sooo tired.  So tired.   I want to just give up sometimes.

The reality of me is that I am the things that I despise in other people.  I am the sensitive one who wears her heart on her sleeve.   I am the one who is scared, the one who is vulnerable, the one who  dreams and who only wants to be loved more than life.  I am the one who longs to be held and cherished… the one who falls apart in private.  I am the one who no one ever really sees – they never have, and so I learned to trick myself into believing that it was my choice and that I intentionally hide.  It was an excuse created to make myself feel better.   I cry if someone looks at me wrong.   I cant STAND to think someone is upset with me.  I worry about everything and it drives me crazy.  Yet, I am the one who masks all of those emotions with every wall, every layer and ever hard core exterior that I can find in order to keep anyone from seeing that inside, I am just another bleeding heart sap.

There are soooo many things I am dealing with right now and part of it is that I had a wake up call - that I needed  - and they are never fun.  In fact, I have had about 4 wake up calls in a short period of time.  

There's a Hindu practice of cleansing that I am giving into right now so that I can bounce back from the lessons of my teacher -- I'm letting it consume me, whatever that will mean.  I want to feel this, as unpleasant as it is, because I’m really tired of pretending that I don’t feel…    I think I feel more than most… and stuffing it is killing me.