Wow. There’s so much to say about this that I hardly know where to begin.
I’ve been noticing recently how deep this runs in me and how hard it will be to root it out. Every time I think I’ve beaten some of it down, I only find more lurking. Exorcising selfishness in me will require a fundamental personality shift. Scary stuff. For me it’s one of those horrible paradoxes where I can see how I hate being selfish and hurting those I care about, but at the same time it’s so comfortable and so much of who I am that it’s really fucking frightening to give it up.
I guess I haven’t yet had a relationship or a space where I can really work on this without fear. Pushing your boundaries is difficult and scary (at least for me it is). Personal change is nerve racking and I usually opt for the status quo due to the difficulty of the change.
This makes it really hard on the people I care about. No one really wants to be with a girl who’s trying to crack her old personality like the shell on a hard-boiled egg to get to the shiny new stuff underneath. It can be totally miserable for them. I’m just starting to see how true that is and how hard this has been on my current boyfriend. He wants very little from me, but I can’t even give him that… I’m so scared of getting hurt, of being vulnerable, of letting myself desire anything that I withdraw into my head and can’t even let myself love him the way he deserves.
It’s a classic catch-22 and it sucks. I need to get out of my head more, actually listen to people and allow myself to really care about others. I have to learn to stop protecting myself or I’ll never be happy.
