Sometimes I feel like I’m slipping away.
Like I’m a buffet and people are grabbing everything until all that’s left is grime and messy, old leftovers.
Or like I decided to have an open house and everyone in the neighborhood barged in my door and left my belongings in disarray.
Basically, I feel like I’m letting people take advantage of me. And I’m a broken record, seemingly fine for a while, only to inevitably hit that snag yet again, where a person will enter my world who zaps a lot of my energy. And instead of closing the door and taking care of myself, staying true to myself, I keep opening the door out of some odd sense of obligation. Like I owe it to the world to be available at all times. And when I do this, who I am slips away because you can’t keep people different from yourself happy and comfortable 100% of the time and still stay true to you. You will push item by item under the rug until there’s nothing but a shell left.
I wish I didn’t care about what others feel and think as much as I do. That’s a phrase I’ve uttered too many times. I hate conflict. I hate that moment when you have to utter a hard truth and it hits the other person in a hard way.
My main area that makes these issues arise is the area of relationships with the opposite sex. I’m at that magic age where everyone is on the hunt for a romantic partner. And I’m not. Not that I’m against it or not that I even don’t desire it, but I refuse to play the game because I don’t like it. I want to know and love people, period, with no agenda. If romantic things arise out of that at some point, cool. If not, I’m still good.
But the majority of American culture does not operate this way. Being single and happy is unacceptable. People see you with someone of the opposite sex and immediately want to put you in that box. And if they don’t see you in that box, and they are single too, then they try and date you and it’s no longer just hanging out. You’re suddenly a pawn for their romantic agenda and happiness. And this scenario happens to me over and over again until I’m run ragged. It’s like a size 8 foot that is used to sneakers being crammed into a size 6 high-heeled shoe. It is awkward and uncomfortable and suffocating. But the world sees that high heel 6 on every foot so they don’t know how to handle a size 8 sneaker.
I’m not sure if I’m even making sense right now, and I kind of feel like Rachel in that first episode of Friends where she says, “It’s like all my life everyone’s told me, ‘You’re a shoe!’ Well what if I don’t want to be a shoe? What if I want to be a purse or a hat?”
I am not against romance. I was in love once. It was awesome. I am thankful for that experience, because it was beautiful. But, I was friends with that person for a while and knew that he actually loved me and not the idea of me.
And it sucks, because it feels like no one understands my viewpoint in this area. They say things like, “Well, you have to date to find someone,” and “You have to take a chance,” and “Just because you don’t love someone yet doesn’t mean you can’t try them out.” But 99.9% of the time I literally do not have romantic feelings if I do not have love. The rest of the world begins with romance and love is born out of that. I have to have love first. Which means I need friendship, deep friendship, for a long time first.
I’ve attempted to blog on this several times in the past. And I always end up deleting it because I think it’s too honest or too anti-romance sounding or too negative. But that is yet another way that I am trying to please people. And I want to kill that spirit, that voice that says it’s my job to keep the peace, make people comfortable, do what they want. It gets me into deep entanglements that blur my sense of identity, which mucks up my life.
I want to learn how to say no in a more confident way. I want to stop saying sorry for things that I shouldn’t be sorry for. I want to stand in the tension and not waver.
At my church last night, we talked about having the peace of God. How Jesus literally took the most chaotic, uncontainable thing — the ocean — and not only calmed it, but walked on it. The key is to keep my eyes on Him. When everything in my body screams to look away, pay attention to my surroundings, freak out, I have to stare at Him all the harder. I have to decide moment by moment, second by second, that He is what I want. Not approval. Not praise. Not that thing that looks like peace but is actually complacency, a silent scream. Him. Truth. Us.
Sanity is not statistical, He reminds me from one of my favorite novels, 1984. Meaning that even if everyone in the whole world is on one side of the fence and you’re on the other, it doesn’t make you wrong. You can stand all alone and still have all the sanity and all the truth.
Maya Angelou says that you find freedom when you let yourself belong no place and you just focus on knowing and understanding yourself, belonging to yourself.
“I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much. I like the humor and the courage very much. And when I find myself acting in a way that doesn’t please me, then I have to deal with that.” -Maya Angelou
I want to get to a place where being untrue to myself feels worse to me than upsetting others. Where I prioritize who I am in Him over it all.
Where I protect this rare thing God has given me dominion over — myself.
