we’ve got our work cut out for us
I read something the other night, the sort of personal engagement with love and the self and the past that was so alive and real and true, I felt the need to have a conversation with it. It’s left me feeling the need to say a few things about my own past, and where I am now.
“I’ve got my work cut out for me.” That’s the phrase that stuck with me the most. I’ve got my work cut out for me, too, but for different reasons. I think about how I have destroyed people and been destroyed by my own inability to be honest with the people I loved. These are things that happened. Sometimes they almost feel like they didn’t, since that was in another lifetime, when I was playing the part of a boy, but they are things I’ve done, ways in which I’ve failed myself and others, and failed love. I can’t deny them, but it’s also true that my life is so different now, and my sense of myself is so much stronger now, that it’s hard to know how relevant those experiences are in any relationships I form today.
And while many people my age have had so many experiences that they’re cynical about love, guarded against it, afraid of it, I sometimes worry that in my own ways I’m not guarded enough, that I’ve spent so little time (in this lifetime) really being with other people that I have no sense of how people really do it. I worry that my impulse to tear down walls is so strong that it will instinctively make most people want to put their walls up, that I crave closeness too much now after not wanting anything for so long.
The piece I read the other night made mention of how people fail each other but how they also come through for each other. Right now I believe very strongly in the ability of people to come through. Right now, I sometimes think that all you have to do, whoever you are, is say the words “trust me” and I will trust you. I want to trust you. I’m inclined to trust you. Whether that makes me hopeful or foolish in this era, I don’t know. I expect I’ll find out sooner or later.
Notes
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