Into my fifties, 10 years with the latest incarnation of my itinerate technical career at one of the biggest companies on the planet. I wake up to find myself lost in love with the most interesting, empathetic, and genuine person I think I’ve ever laid eyes on in my life. Just a look can make my heart race, and this is my first gender fluid attraction. I haven’t felt stirrings like this in a long, long time. The problem is immediately obvious, there is a chasm of years that would make me incredibly selfish even if interest was mutual, which it isn’t.
I’ve been honest about it and have been greeted with the most caring and supportive no I ever remember getting. Thinking of it, a wordless scene from a Stone film plays in my mind. Even the gentlest, and understanding no is still disappointing.
As I feed off the energy that my feelings bring, and revel in how exciting just sharing, confiding, and trusting can be with my friend. Selfish desire is an exercise in futility, and I’m caught up in the whirlpool.
I know that infatuation fades without the stimulus of interaction, as I here I sit writing through what I think and feel. Wondering if what I think is an honest genuine feeling is going to stay and force me to manage my disclosures and curb my excitement and joy that I feel with almost every single interaction. Or will ten days without them create the space to let go, and move along. The point is actually moot from a real world perspective.
I take my leave to learn if I've actually lost the ability to discern the reality of my own emotions. I already know the answer, but respecting a certain lack of subjectivity, and frankly recognizing my own inability to maintain a perspective of intellect over emotion I choose to exit for a time to verify.
I have failed to protect them from an increased emotional disregulation that I have, to recall my skills to manage. My most recent display was intrusive and in my view an inexcusable violation of my word. I may have already done more damage than I can overcome. I'm really afraid that my failure may make me appear as some sort of threat or loose cannon.
I’m a selfish, doddering old prig, for thinking that they would ever even consider letting me witness them from my desired perspectives. I’m lost in some bizaar Cloud Atlas reality where my hope is for the next life. The insanity of them finding in me the least bit of what I see in them is astounding and epic idiocy. I may be bright, and empathetic, and capable, But I’ll never be twenty, free, beautiful, and sexy. At least as friends we share some things.
I can say without reservation that despite thirty plus years of personal emotional process work, when confronted with the feelings invoked by some pretty limited depth of interaction, I disappoint myself.
Apparently I can immediately return to some of the basest, and most egocentric tendencies I have experienced. I want to ask for a no self harm contract. I want to experience more then just a meal or discussion about the movie we just saw. I desire opinions on all things, to savor and turn over in my mind. To revel in them and discover how they alter my perception and perspective.
I am ashamed. I will not surrender to these tendencies. I choose to do my work, and be the best possible friend I can be, no matter how much private emoting, writing, inventory, and behavioral modification and self training I need to accomplish. I will respect boundaries and give all I possibly can to this relationship. I want this friend to be my best one. And I will die trying, if not succeeding in their eyes.
I spent most of my childhood in fantasy as is characteristic of the third born in a family of my particular strain. Alcoholic Mother, Codependent Father, two older sisters who also fit their prescribed family dynamics role to a T. The Hero child and the scapegoat, limiting when expressed that way but archetypes that are well documented in the recovery movement timeframe.
A significant amount of that fantasy time was about finding “the one” the mythical and I now feel fallacious belief that there is a being out there that is the mate of my soul, the true puzzle piece fit for my particular assets and liabilities that allow us to become one true union. Interdependent, sharing everything, giving and taking with each other in a syncopated synergistic dance that is at once hole and donut. the Yin and Yang that will fulfill each of us.
Through the bakers dozen of relationships I have attempted in this life, maybe three of which I believed after what I thought in the moments were actually about love, I decided that this myth was nothing but that. Myth. There is no “one” no predestination, no grand design that the great screenwriter in some sky decided was anyones fate. Relationships are about growing, about giving, and taking. Sharing is the watchword, recognizing the need for space, and the need for intimacy, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Letting the selfish self centered child become the adult and practicing the lost art of forgiveness.
I have come to believe that what we call Love is a joining of boundaries through work, sharing, caring, arguing, supporting, sacrificing, and allowing those from a partner to enhance and detract from each other and grow in the best case together. In the joining of those boundaries they encompass each other, not to bind, but to defend and protect. It’s the difference between lines on a floor and walls. It is real and measurable, and it is ethereal at the same time. A force that can survive much and if not respected be destroyed by the smallest petty thing.
To find myself in love at my age is a wonderful and terrible gift. I have to say I would not trade it for a life of wealth and avarice. Requited or not, the propensity to have the willingness to experience life in the way being described here is an honor I am unable to refuse. Some will judge my perspective as sick or deluded, as I have in times when I needed to, or wasn’t getting what I wanted, or when I just thought I knew better than others. The truth? In my state I would rather be clear about my motives and fair about how it impacts them and myself than most everything else.
Submitted April 02, 2020 at 07:22PM by Cybrvid https://ift.tt/2UYA7TS
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