Make more "real" friends

Does anyone know what happened to Lotus/daringtomove? Her account appears to have been deleted, but I’m not sure if it was the 43T police or if she actually deleted it herself. I don’t recall reading anything from her in the last month, other than her moving overseas… hope she’s ok. Just seems weird.

Warning: Introspective and disjointed post to follow.

I’ve been feeling a bit more aware of a number of things about myself and my life in the last few weeks, but at the same time I feel a bit immobilized by it all. A few years ago, I read or heard an analogy about our minds and the bodies they reside in being compared to houses/homes and I thought it was a great analogy. It’s kind of like suddenly turning on a light in a room that had always been locked or dark and realizing there’s crap everywhere. The easiest thing would be to turn off the light and walk out of the room, but that’s no longer an option. So having to face up to organizing and dealing with the crap can be a little overwhelming, but I’m grateful that at least I have this awareness, even if I feel a bit alien and unsure about what to do with it at the moment.

I reflected on that analogy for some time and realized that many of my relationships (not only romantic ones) had been about escapism: moving into someone else’s house so as not to have to deal with my own. Since then, I’ve been doing some housekeeping and still am. But you know how sometimes you’ll go around your house cleaning maniacally with a toothbrush only to leave the dishes & laundry pile up the next day? Same here. OK, so I get it, it’s a reality, we can’t deal with our issues all the time, we also have to get out of the house and live our lives.

I get these eureka moments in the weirdest places and at the weirdest moments, exiting the highway and seeing the reddish setting sun rays reflect on the grass & leaves (bad news for whoever comes in front of me traveling at 60 mph), or laying in bed reading and looking up for a moment and seeing a new pattern on the ceiling. The intellectual part of my brain is quite satisfied with itself for these personal discoveries about myself, but the other hemisphere is left a bit desirous of getting through it instead of just understanding it.

I’ve been putting a concerted effort in developing new and deeper friendships, especially at school, and I’m getting along great with my lab group, we joke around all the time and have a blast. They are all Brazilian but each of them very different, from different socioeconomic backgrounds, families, etc. In getting to know these people I became aware of several things that help explain the reason for this goal.

For one thing, I found myself asking a lot of questions about who they were, what they believe in, what their families are like, etc… Why do I need to know all this information? I realized that I was doing that to make sure they were dependable and I can so tie that to my childhood. I never had dependable adults, so I look for dependability and deepness, people whose behavior I can predict to some extent since the behavior of the adults around me was so erratic & unpredictable. I can’t seem to do trivial and superficial relationships, which is a problem. Or rather, I don’t feel comfortable, I feel incomplete and awkward in those types of arrangements.

At some point in my life I made a decision, created a belief that I was different, that my family was different and was reason to be ashamed of, to hide, to be solitary, and as a consequence, to only trust myself and do things by myself, to avoid feeling judged and rejected. I’ve changed that belief in huge ways, but I always find new dimensions and faces of the same monster in different areas of my life. All I can do is trust the process and keep at it; do my best, it’s all I can do, I can’t do more and know that my best may vary from time to time.