&& then it hit me like a brick wall

I used to look at couples who depended on each other for happiness as if they were lunatics.  I would snort, all high-and-mighty, telling myself that it didn't matter how happy they seemed because having to depend on someone else for happiness could only lead to one thing: disaster.

After all, if you don't first love yourself how can anyone else love you?  If you aren't happy with yourself how can you be happy with someone else?  ....right?

The problem with this way of thinking, this mindset, was only recently revealed to me during an argument.  I'm not sure how I managed to overlook it for so long considering how prevalent it is in my life.

Sometimes it takes someone who loves you on all human levels to show you how beautiful and awesome of a person you really are.  Someone who cares about you as a lover, who knows all your secrets like a best friend, who is concerned for you as a family member would be, who can kiss and hug and cuddle and argue and yell and make up and pressure the secrets out of you.  That someone is instrumental for a person like me, a person is is scared to share her secrets and is insecure and afraid and used to pushing everyone of importance away.

People aren't meant to go through life alone, we are meant to go through life with a group of people holding and supporting us.  Most of us will never be happy on our own, will never feel complete on our own.  And when we give a part of our soul to someone else, how can we ever expect to feel complete without them in our lives?

We all need help being happy, and I think it's the most natural thing in the world for that help to come from the person closest to us, the person who knows us on every level and doesn't run away. No mother or best friend can know us on the same kind of level a boyfriend or girlfriend can.

Obviously, I need to be happy with who I am as an individual, but is it so wrong for me to like myself better because someone else helped open my eyes to how lovely I really am? For me to like myself better when someone else is in the mirror too, protecting and loving me and making me smile?  I don't think it is.

I've spent years trying to see what everyone else does when they look at me, but it wasn't until recently that I can glimpse it every so often.  How is someone screwed up enough to hurt themselves supposed to feel capable of loving and caring for herself without feeling the warmness it from someone else first?

So, now that I've become one of those lunatics who radiates happiness when shes around her boyfriend and can't stand being away from him because something just feels like its missing, I understand why my attempts at being happy with myself have never worked; doing it on my own simply doesn't work.  I needed to be taken by the hand and shown by someone who isn't afraid how all of my mistakes have made me a more beautiful soul.

After all, God did make woman from the rib of man, he made us in a way that forces us to depend on one another for our survival.  He made us in a way that we need one another on levels several thousand feet deeper than sex and reproduction.

just when you think it's all figured out

Sometimes you think you know what you want for yourself, or what you need to be the best you can be but then you go to obtain those things and every single plan you have made crumples just when it's within reach.

Then what?  What happens when you are left with nothing?

Start by sitting down in the rubble, examining a handful of broken dreams and hopes, and figuring out why it didn't work out.

And then the rebuilding starts.  The restructuring of your future, your dreams and hopes, your ideas of who you think you want to be. Pick up whatever remnants are left and then make up stuff to fill in the gaps. 

But this time take a moment to be influenced by the people and things around you, by the small signs that you have been noticing but ignoring because you hate to be wrong.  Let them take part in the shaping of your soul. And don't focus on the past: let new people and experiences in.

Not taking those thing into account is probably why everything failed to begin with.

Take the time to be upset, to be disappointed.  But don't dwell too long on what you've lost because there is something absolutely amazing just a few steps into the darkness of the future, waiting for you to put your damn shoes on!

My "normal" self (the person that most of you reading this know and remember me as) would now insert a great bible verse or relation to how great our Father is and how His timing isn't the same as ours.  Except I'm not the same person you guys knew, and I'm just starting to come to terms with and accept the fact that I may never be as preachy or religious as I was, or at least not in the same way I was.  I'm starting to accept the fact that my life fell apart and the way that I put the pieces back together made me different...no better, no worse.

If nothing else, the nineteen years and two months I've existed have been full this cycle. I build a plan, watch it collapse (usually at the most awful time), break down because of it, resist accepting that things are changing, and then embracing it and allowing myself to be remolded into something new.

All we can do as human beings is try our best not to mess up too terribly and hope that we leave an imprint on someone's life.

Actions and Words

Actions prove who someone is, 

Words just prove who they want to be.

Dang, how true is that?  How often do we see someone in our lives saying something but doing the opposite? How often do WE do that? 

But what's wrong with hoping to be more than we currently are, with wanting others to see us in a better light?  I think that it is more of a problem to think you are okay and have no way to improve...God made nobody perfect.  

We are human. We hurt people. We get hurt.  We are sad and lonely and angry at the world sometimes.  We laugh at things that shouldn't be funny.  We do things we know are wrong just because of some strange impulse.  We live the only way we know how, the way we think will bring us the most pleasure.  

Yet, more often than not, the way we live is hurtful and harmful and needs improvement. One of the best things about being human beings is having the opportunity to change the course of our lives a hundred times before we reach the end of it.  We start out with the most basic goals as children: to have fun, hot dogs in our mac & cheese, and our favorite toy tucked into bed with us.  From that point our views of what's most important will change a thousand times: boys, marriage, partying, careers, vehicles, animals, staying out of trouble, God, our health, moving, being happy, having children, growing a record-size tomato, walking to the bathroom by ourselves, family.  

What makes us who we are is constantly changing.  What we want, what we dream of, what we pray for, what we work towards is constantly changing.  So yes, our actions prove who we are today and who we were in the past, but our words prove what we aspire to be tomorrow and the day after that and the year after that.

People change and as hard as it is to accept, sometimes the changes cause friendships to break, relationships to end, beliefs to disappear, morals to be altered, and lives to flip-flop. 

We are on this crazy, crazy ride and the best we can do is hold on through the flips, curves, slopes, and hills.