Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is a very important day for me. Not because anything big is happening today, but rather because the concept of Valentine’s Day means a lot to me. I am not a very open person emotionally to anyone in my life. Some might disagree with this and say that I am very open with how I’m feeling, but just because I tell people I feel bad or want to complain about something does not mean we have an emotional connection or that they understand me on a deeper level. It’s not that I don’t want to be an open person with those close to me in my life, I just can’t seem to do so naturally so it seems forced usually. It’s challenging for me to make connections with people that have any kind of worth to both of us and that last longer than half a year. While I haven’t outright asked any of my friends about their views on me or our relationship, I can assume that a lot of them don’t feel genuinely close to me. Like I said before, I might open up about what surface-level thing is bothering me or complain about something easy to complain about, but a lot of the relationships in my life lack the depth that I crave. Valentine’s Day is all about embracing that depth that you do have and it allows you to create that depth with others in your life. I would say at the moment there are probably two people in my life that I would say I have quite a close relationship with that has this sort of depth I’m describing. The difficult thing about this though, is that while I do want this kind of deep connection with others in my life, it seems as though there is a barrier holding me back from creating it with others. I’m not sure how to overcome this obstacle that’s in my way to having a fulfilling connection with others in my life. I can’t even begin to describe what is exactly involved in this barrier and why I can’t make these types of connections. This heavily contributes to how lonely I feel in a lot of my relationships, platonic or romantic.
I am thankful for my boyfriend and I know that he loves me a lot, as I do him. Our relationship is one of the two in my life that I do believe that I have a deeper connection with, the other one being my best friend. The connection I feel with him is so much different from the other romantic relationships I’ve had in my life. It makes me upset that I’m not able to easily put it into words, I just know that it’s different. I feel closer. I can honestly visualize my relationship with certain people in my life and with him I just can tell that the two of us are very close, maybe even merging as we learn to understand each other on a deeper level. While my relationships with a majority of my friends seem to be distant and separate and no matter how much work or effort I put into it the connection I crave is just not possible. I see this same type of struggle with my parents, especially my mom. My mom has been more vocal about her struggles with this with me and has told me how difficult it is for her to make friends with others and how much she is desperate for a friend. I understand her pain, but knowing that my mother is going through the same things I go through daily I can’t help but feel a sense of hopelessness. My own mom struggles with this while she is going to be entering her 60s soon and I am only 22. I don’t want to live the rest of my life in a constant state of loneliness, feeling as though I am separate from everyone else in my life. I don’t know what to do to change this either and it scares me that even though I so desperately do not want to go down that route with my life that I am going to regardless. I understand that becoming comfortable with oneself and appreciating loneliness is a vital asset in life especially as I grow older but I can’t help but want to revolt against that idea. I see others in my life happy with their friends, fully fulfilled with the connections they have made over the years, and continuing to make new ones. I don’t understand why I seem to be one of the few to be having a problem with this. I reach out and attempt to make friends, I try to talk to my friends, I go out and do things, I constantly talk to new and old people, and the list of things I’ve tried to do to bring a meaningful connection into my life goes on. Nothing I seem to do seems to work. Everything seems to be a waste, but I continue to push forward. I don’t know if I will ever reach a point in my life where I have the connections with others that I dream of having but all I can do is try to work towards a future where I do.
I am stuck in my head daydreaming often. I daydream about situations that just aren’t possible in my life and I do it so often that I trick myself into thinking that they are possible and it pulls me deeper into this feeling of despair. That’s a bit dramatic though, as I don’t actually feel genuine despair. For the most part, I have accepted that I will be lonely, but I still continue to reach out and do what I can to combat this inevitable future. I daydream about going somewhere new and meeting people I never thought I’d meet and having a friend group with which I live my life. I daydream about going back to college and finishing out my degree to work at my dream job and a majority of my coworkers there are the exact people I have wanted in my life since the beginning. I daydream about picking up the clarinet again, or maybe creating my own band in which I’m either the drummer or the singer, and meeting people in the audience or in other bands that are exactly what I need in my life to feel fulfilled. Though I realize these are just childish daydreams that will be nothing more than that, I can’t help but give myself hope that one day one of them will come true. I see others in my life having these good things happen to them and these opportunities fall into their lap, and while I know it’s wrong of me, I feel jealous. I am jealous that people get to have these good things happen to them constantly, and I get nothing in comparison. I do know that it isn’t genuinely “constantly”, but I do know that it is enough of the time to be a complete 180 from my situation. Good things don’t seem to just fall into my lap. Even when I put effort into things, nothing seems to come from them. Like I said before, all my effort is usually for nothing but I still try regardless. There is always the chance that one day all of my effort to put myself out there and make connections with people will bear fruit, so all I can do is continue forward.
I got a bit off-topic. I was talking about Valentine’s Day originally. While I am quite negative in a lot of these posts, it honestly is just that way because this is one of my only outlets for these types of feelings. It feels nice to just brain vomit about everything that has been spinning around in my head for god knows how long. There are things I am happy about in my life. As I talked about for a short moment before, I am so happy for my boyfriend to be in my life. I am somewhat of a difficult person to deal with when in a romantic relationship, yet he has the patience and love to deal with that and help me to work around my difficulties. Not many people I’ve been with previously want to even bother to put in the effort to be able to do that even slightly. With what’s wrong with me mentally and what has impacted me from my childhood, I understand that dealing with me is not something anyone should honestly have to deal with, yet my boyfriend continues to stay with me and love me regardless of anything. Just yesterday, he admitted that he is in love with me. I can’t tell you how happy that made me. I feel so much love for him in my heart that I’m not able to condense it into words to properly express to him how much I love him. I am so thankful that I am with someone who has as much love for me in their heart as he does. I hope that I can enjoy loving him and feeling loved by him for a long time.
Valentine’s Day to me is a time to appreciate those around you that have made such an impact on you that you section off a portion of your heart to them. I have so much love in my heart to give to everyone, even if I don’t make it very obvious that I do. Those that are in my life that makes an effort to let me know that I mean something to them don’t understand how much they mean to me. I honestly need to take more time out of my day to fully articulate how much they mean to me. I love them all so much. This goes for the friends in my life as well as my family. I am not close to a lot of my family but my immediate family means the world to me. My mother especially, ever since she has made the decision to divorce my dad, she’s had so many realizations about herself and her relationship with me that it has made us closer than ever before. The same goes for my sister ever since I moved out. I do believe that living further from them has allowed our relationship to mean something. I think that being with them every single day since I was born up until when I decided to move out just put a lot of stress on the relationships with had, so I’m thankful that now we can have a better relationship while I am living in a better environment.
There are a lot of things I want to do with my life and I do believe that if I ever put the effort in to start any of the things that are on my mind, my life could head in a better direction. A lot of the things I want to do are honestly just ideas to make the idea of going through life alone less difficult, but that is what everyone is working towards I believe. Depending on one person or a group of people to bring you meaning and purpose will do nothing but destroy you. If you live like that you won’t be able to be on your own, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll lose sight of yourself altogether. I’ve talked about it multiple times in previous posts, but I have a major problem with knowing who I am as a person. I don’t know what makes me “me”. I struggle with this so deeply that I have sought out people to give me a definition for myself and meaning, but I always come back empty-handed. I’m hoping that throughout the year this year I will be able to finally be able to sit down and describe myself. I do understand that a lot of people have a problem with doing this normally, but it is a goal of mine to be able to say what makes me “me”. I don’t want to rely on others to have a meaning as I have for the majority of my life. Living my life by a guide handed to me by family, teachers, friends, the internet, society, etc. has just broken me down as a person to a point where I feel that there is nothing unique under my flesh and bone. I feel as though I am a shell and simply masquerading around as a person around others that have a definite idea of who they are. My motivations are not my own and while I have had this realization for years now, I’ve done little to nothing about it. I have never really taken the time to sit down and think about what it is that I want and if what I am doing is for myself or for others. I crave the approval of others. I have never once stopped and thought, am I proud of myself? Do I approve of what I’m doing? Is this the life that I want to live? Living a life for others is no way to live, but it’s an awful habit to try and break. If I was able to live as my own person as a child into my teenage years maybe I would be different now. Maybe I would be able to construct my own life to a point where I believe that my life is my own and that my fate is not completely determined by those around me. I don’t know what I have to do to get to a point where I can feel content in my decisions, but I will continue towards a future that I believe holds the key to it.
It seems that the posts I write up that I am most proud of are the ones where I am simply letting myself ramble off everything going on in my head. A lot of these thoughts I’ve never expressed to others in my life and it’s very therapeutic to be able to do this to an audience of just myself. Putting these feelings that I have into words as well helps me work through how I feel about certain things and I’m happy that I finally took steps to create this little blog since it has been on my mind for quite a while now. I hope that I can continue this for a while, hopefully, an indefinite amount of time. I’ve gotten off-topic again though…
I want to finish up this by circling back to the concept of Valentine’s Day. I haven’t done any research back into the history behind the holiday so all I have is my own understanding of today that has been crafted upon years of experiencing it myself and watching others having their own experiences with the day. Even if I did not have my boyfriend, I would not feel alone today. I know that a majority of people who dislike the holiday dislike it solely because they feel lonely, but I have not really felt that paired with hate for today even when I was not dating someone during it. While I do feel jealous of other people’s relationships and connections as I’ve stated before in this post, it makes me happy to see so much love in the air shared between so many people. Today is not just a day to show love to the person that you are dating, but to everyone close to you in your life. If you are anything like me and tend to keep your emotions sealed away in your heart for fear of being judged or vulnerable, Valentine’s Day should be a day to let all of that out to those in your life whom you hold a place in your heart for, be it friends or family. I believe that you can show love to others that you don’t even know today. Being kind to others is such a wonderful way to live your life. I try to live every day with love in my heart, and while it’s hard sometimes, it’s such a better way to live rather than to live with hate fulling up where love should be.
Viewing the world for what it is, a beautiful confusing thing that doesn’t make sense, and going through each day appreciating all that the universe has to offer is the only thing any of us can do to fully enjoy this life. Picking up new hobbies or entertaining old ones that you’ve forgotten will make the life that you live just that more beautiful. It’s hard for me to get through the day sometimes because of things I’ve talked about before, but I always am sure to hold a bit of hope in my heart for the future. Living while hating the world around you is no way to live. The only reality that matters to you is your own so you have to put the effort in to make it a good one. While others in your life can make your life more enjoyable and add color to it, in the end, it’s up to you to make your reality beautiful. Going through each day with love for yourself and others is all you, me, or anyone can do and that’s what Valentine’s Day is all about to me. It’s a reminder that life is beautiful no matter what harmful things come to try and distract us from that fact. You cannot let the ugly things in life cover up the magical beauty that there is in just being alive. The fact that no one can fully explain how we came to be is part of what makes me believe that life is something so gorgeous that being sad all the time and ignoring what there is that the universe has to show you is not how you should live. Just as there is no one way to complete your goals, there is no set way to live life. We all experience the beauty of the earth and universe and our lives in all different ways. We cannot judge others for the way that they live their life, just as we shouldn’t accept any judgment that others try to pass on to us. We all must live our lives in such a way that we can fully appreciate what the universe has to offer in our own way and create our own beauty to also bring into our own reality and hopefully touch others’ reality with that same beauty so that we can experience the love that exists simply in being alive together.
I’m not sure where I was going with any of that, but I’m in a really good mood. There are a lot of things that bring me down often, be it because of my mental issues or issues in my personal life, but I try to live each day knowing that there is still life and beauty out there in the world. I want to work each day to better appreciate the world that is around me and I hope that one day I am to a point where simply waking up and being able to live another day is enough to bring me the joy to want to continue on to the next. Sorry for writing so long, I just had a lot of fun writing all of this. I hope everyone has a wonderful Valentine’s Day and they can share all the love that they have in their heart with everyone they adore in their life.
Looking back on this post months later, I feel the same amount of love in my heart now as I did while writing this. I have been single for some time since this post was created, but I have allowed my heart to open up to the people that are in my life so that I may grow closer to them. Something that I have never allowed myself to understand is the fact that platonic love and connections are no less meaningful than romantic ones. It’s always been something I’ve known to be objectively true but never allowed myself to believe it for myself. As I slowly open my heart to those in my life whom I can trust, I find myself working towards a more fulfilling future. Letting down the walls I have had surrounding myself since I was a child to allow my life to become intermixed with those around me has opened my eyes to a new perspective of the world. I’ve lost people in my life because I was not able to previously accomplish this at any point in my life, so I am proud to have finally reached a point where the beginning steps of my journey can be taken. I hope to continue into the future with my head held high and my heart beating with the love from my friends that overwhelms my mind and flows through my veins.
.˙· 𓆝.° ｡˚𓆛˚｡ °.𓆞.° ｡˚𓆝˚｡ °.𓆛.° ｡˚𓆞 .˙ 