at the intersection of insanity and hope...

I find peace

celia

Jan 15, 2023

102

Someone (apparently NOT Albert Einstein) once said…

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

It’s a little embarrassing how often I think about this. Maybe I’m insane.

I’m an optimistic person, but honestly life really sucks sometimes. I think it’s okay to say that, I think it’s fair to be annoyed that things don’t work out how you once expected that they would. It’s fair to throw your hands up at the sky and say “you’ve got to be frickin’ KIDDING ME!”

I’ve done a horrible job at taking care of myself in the past. I spread myself too thin trying to convince everyone else that they are amazing while behind closed doors I rip myself apart. I find the worst parts of me and nail them onto my walls to be reminded of them everyday. At the first sign of a switch up in someone’s energy, I hide internally. I blame myself.

I spent my formative years longing for more. When I was a teenager I wanted to be in my 20s to be in love and to be successful and to be everything I always thought was going to be so unattainable. My idea of love has morphed and re-sculpted itself as time has gone on. I deserve more and accept less. Less disrespect and less false hope, and honestly this whole “love in the modern age” has me close to the end of my rope.

I took myself on a date today. I walked around and looked at a whole bunch of books. Romance and fiction and poetry and I stilled for a moment as one caught my eye. It was a book full of love letters. Love letters written by some of the greatest writers and poets of the last century. Intimate writings that contained delicate pieces of people’s souls. It reminded me of the significance of writing. The feelings we can express with words and those that can only be contained in the handwriting we offer to someone else.

It’s rare to be written a love letter now, or at least that’s what it seems.

But it shouldn’t be.

It shouldn’t be rare to have emotion. To show emotion. We fear rejection so much we erase the idea of love altogether. We fear heartbreak so deeply we barricade our hearts and save using them for later. Suddenly it’s later. Suddenly you don’t know how to break down the walls you’ve so meticulously created. Suddenly all your best self-protection mechanisms become your worst forms of self-sabotage. Funny how that works huh?

I’ve written and drafted so many versions of myself at this point my hands hurt when I glance at a pen. I’ve accepted and rejected so many parts of myself I don’t know where the best of me ends and the worst of me starts. I fear letting someone in because I fear having them find that intersection.

However, that fear doesn’t control me. The only thing I let guide me is hope. Sometimes it makes me a little delusional, sure, but isn’t it better to live amongst the clouds than to be buried beneath the trenches? As a STEM girlie, I know the only way to accept if a hypothesis is correct is to test it. Before starting anything you have to accept that it might not work out. No matter how much time or effort you donate to it.

Being a good person, a good friend, a good partner, doesn’t mean doing things with the sole purpose of receiving them back. Love isn’t transactional. It doesn’t keep track of what it’s given you. It doesn’t force you to pay taxes every three months or to prove your worth. Love stays because it wants to, not because it has to.

I think half of the fun of being human is the complexity of emotions we carry within us. I could alternate between despair and hope in a matter of seconds. I could believe that I’ve met the love of my life after 5 seconds of eye contact with a handsome stranger and then an hour later wonder if all my friends hate me (spoiler: they don’t). We spend new year’s after new year’s ripping ourselves apart just to find the best pieces of ourselves to put back together. Maybe this year I don’t want to rip myself apart anymore. I want to accept that the best and worst parts of me can co-exist. I want to be hopeless and hopeful, weak and strong, and when I feel stubbornly right, realize this whole time that I could’ve been wrong.

While I do love manifestation, I’ve learned that literally nothing ever goes as planned. I have all these expectations for love and life and how I want things to look and act and be, but we forget that we are only the main characters in our own stories. Somebody could rewrite their script without us knowing. That’s when you throw a couple of plot twists to your own story. I got brutally dumped in college, and BOOM, decided to pursue poetry. Which has led to a whole cascade of plot twists. People I have met and places I’ve visited and emotions I’ve had. It’s insane, really, when I think about it all. How grateful I am now, for some of my worst memories.

I guess that’s what’s really helped my confidence too. The knowledge that no matter what happens I always have myself. I have my own back. If I put myself out there and get my heart broken again, so what? I’ll be fine. Will I be hurt? Of course I will be. But I will be okay. I have the tools necessary to put myself back together. I allow myself to fall apart. Because it’s so innately human to feel.