Calculated Fear

I was meant to do better. I meant to do better. I meant not to be afraid. To take chances and to fall in love and do the right things when choices were presented to me. I meant to do all of these things.

Something about me has always seemed different. I've tried to convince everyone, me especially, that I didn't want to be happy in the conventional sense of it. That instead I'd find my happiness alone. That falling in love, caring about people, staying around even at the risk of being hurt, was weakness. That it was beneath me. Most things seem beneath me.

The truth, of course, is that I can't stand to be alone. I can't stand it. I'm sure that doesn't come as a surprise... the problem is only that I've spent my entire life convinced that alone was how I'd do it. I'd be on my own. And now, twenty years or so later... I believe it. Now that I'm really, really alone... I no longer know how not to be. I've fulfilled the prophecy which fueled me. And it turned out to be a terrible mistake.

The disasters of our lives, the disappointments and times of great sadness are our own creations. We own them, however unwillingly, as well as our greatest accomplishments and achievements. The moments we run, are as defining of us as the moments we stay and fight. And they help determine those things about ourselves which we would never know how to create on our own. We make ourselves in part out of those times. The things which scare us are those which formulate our roads and journeys out of here. Into where we're going. Or in some cases, not going at all.

I believe now, that having spent so much time being too strong to love anyone and too scared to try...that if a real life were to present itself... I'd be unable to accept it. I'd move away from it too. Just as I have moved away from everything else I've known, and been afraid to know.

I've run myself into a place that I cannot navigate. Sadly, no one can help me out of here but me. I can't see, anymore, the path on which I began. I forget what seemed noble about being stronger. And now, as I have lost sight of who I thought I was, I find myself believing everything everyone says that I am. And you can imagine, maybe, how glowing the responses have been...from those I have been driving away.

The tragic, the crazy, the useless overreacting, the pretentious and the vicious. The drama queen. The manipulator. The easy girl. The simple, insecure and easy girl.

I wish I could take some solace in the fact that at least I knew what I wanted. And that I did what I did as a means to a more comfortable end. Where I might finally feel secure. In fact, I've done what I did...which seems like nothing but pushing away... for no discernible reason at all.