Tuesday, May 18, 2010

journal entry - 5.17.10

I continue to "get over" the girl I fell for in October of last year. In the words of my good friend Doc Rob, "That whole situation was FUBAR." Everything that could go wrong did, and I ended up being borderline traumatized and ran helter-skelter away from her (a wise, well-thought-out choice). I don't think about her very often, but there come times, in my weaker moments, when I imagine her with another guy. Laughing. Loving. Fucking. A single thought hurls a dark cloud over the rest of the day, and I find myself imprisoned by the chains of fictional nostalgia. Yesterday was such a day. One thought colored the rest of the day, and all joy and peace were evaporated. She consumed my mind. I crawled into bed to escape the thoughts--blissful, blissful sleep!--and I closed my eyes and thought to myself, "She is no longer a part of my life."

She is a friend, and I do care about her. But the shape and structure of my life is not defined by her actions, her choices, her disposition towards me. Since October--well, September--of last year, my own life--its shape and structure--was coiled around hers, like some sort of helix. Her actions and choices affected me so deeply that they guided my actions, my choices, my thoughts and feelings. My life was in step with and wrapped around hers. Something like this:


No longer was my life--its "look" and "feel"--determined by me. I was enslaved to her without ever realizing it. Everything about me--and thus everything about my life--was directly linked to her independent self and life. Moving out in February, I began to see this, and I fought against this en:coiled existence. Slowly we disengaged and untangled, but the affects of her self and life still indirectly affected me. Like this:


As I focused more and more on God, the rate of change increased. Probably because my focus was upon God and thus not upon her (I can multitask well, but not when it comes to my thoughts). Whereas I had been devoted to her and "our" kingdom (a non-existent one; and, to be truthful, I was really just devoted to myself and my own kingdom, and I wanted her in it), I have been re:orienting my life to devotion to God and His kingdom. The result is a "break-away" of sorts. Like this:

That doesn't mean I am detaching myself from her or abandoning her. It just means that now I am making divine things my main concern (or at least attempting to!). This is all due to repentance--these flimsy charts borne from a tired mind just represent something going on in my heart, thanks to God, and its subsequent manifestation in my life. But my repentance is not perfect (whose is?) and one stray and listless thought can funnel my attentions back onto her, resurrecting the feelings (though greatly-diminished in form) and digging up the pain of disappointment and those archaic fantasies of being with her. The result is that the upward-swing of my life disengaging from its control of hers becomes interspersed with moments of back-tracking, like this:


This is a common occurrence, and daily I pray that God will take this burden from me, renewing and reforming my heart--and the result, I hope, will be something like this:

I want and pray that she moves forward in life, and I want and pray to move forward, too. But I don't want her journey to affect my journey in the way that it did. We're not married, and so it doesn't make sense for our journeys to be entwined (and, in reality, they were not just "entwined": she was doing her own thing, and I was plodding behind begging for crumbs and scraps off her table). I pray that God will bring me to that emotionally, spiritually, and mentally place where I can be made healthy and whole in regards to this FUBAR situation. And then it will be on to the next struggle--but hopefully with a few more tricks up my sleeve for the second round.

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