So i have written about this topic before (check out my other blog at the entry “My name is Isabel and I have a disease”) , but let it only serve to show you that everyone is constantly evolving. Even if we know things, we forget them as the weight of the world and challenge and choice closes in. Though at certain times we are able to silence the less productive voices, there are also moments they are louder – and clearer – than we ever want them to be.

See problem is that they are embedded so well we don’t even notice them until they start talking so loud that we can’t hear anything over them. What we forget is that they are mastercrafters of lies that always start with a grain of what we hold to be truth. Of faults that we really despise but show their faces every once in awhile.

We let the things we hate about ourselves help us to forget about all of the wonderful, special and admirable things that are also us.  That make up the greater goodness and light inside of ourselves.  We LET our joy be stolen because we are convinced we are not worthy of it.  That it is fleeting and simply a mistake that some found it’s way into us.  The worst part is that we don’t even realize it.

My Achilles for this is dating.  Gets me every time.  I have issues.  I admit it, and yet I can’t seem to stop it.  For one, I seem to fall in love with people that can’t love me (capacity, emotional availability, choice, life circumstance – a combo of any or all of them, probably been there done all of that.).  Recently though, I loved a boy.  And he loved me.  Or really we loved the version of ourselves we had created to dream about. 

…And then I moved.  And he didn’t. It wasn’t clear when or if he might come too.   And despite the promises of us coming together sooner than later, I didn’t have the faith that my patience would outlast the time that it took.  I wondered if I was crazy to hold on to the belief that it would all come together, and that I would look up and be older and still just waiting.  And so we had “that talk”.  The talk that everyone hates.  The one where people tell each other that they love each other, and that they should stay in touch?

What I really wanted to say to him is that I was scared.  That I loved him, but was afraid that this process would take so long that I would age and miss stuff.  I namely, though I could not say it, was afraid that he wouldn’t love me.  That he would find someone new and forget me.  Simply send me a note or a text and let me know that he had found someone else.  Given all of my history and abandonment issues, it is easy to listen to the chorus of internal voices that can support this theory, and add volume and vigor to it.

That, though, is not the worst of the torture. The tortures come in the night when it is dark and the room is quiet and you are supposed to be asleep.  But you are not.   Instead, you are being needled by the Krewe of  “what if” that pulls you in to the “Weary old land of “what if””  What if I had waited? Not moved? Did or said something differently? What if I had hung on to the rung of the ladder a bit tighter? If I had believed more – in myself, in the opportunity, and possibility of great things with or without them.  Was breaking up with him right? wrong? The only thing I can identify was that it was and is absolutely terrifying to think that I may have altered my life in a significant way in my choice. 

In allowing myself to be paralyzed by the Krewe, I fail to see that there may be significant and necessary growth for the both of us.  That this choice is powerful and a gift to the both of us.  To have faith that if it is meant to be we will find our way back to one another, but it we hang on to one another for dear life, we will never be who and what we are supposed to be.  

Sometimes, we have to get a bit harsh with ourselves to move on and not just survive but thrive – or maybe let need a reality check a dose of truth, a hard i-don’t-want-to-hear this but I must.  I made a choice. And I can either accept the choice, move on, and head towards my greatness to conquer the bigger beasts in life that I WILL FACE OR I can sit at this crossroads and wallow in how i feel and all of the crazy what if’s will stop me in my tracks.  And that would be horrible. 

I need to remember the words of Tim Hoch in his article, Roadblocks to Happiness.  Do not let your progress be stopped by in invents of your mind, powerful as it may be. 

I write this partially as a healing for myself.  But I also write this so you know that there are others who feel your pain.  Who stand with you.  Who want you to move past the “land of what if”  and into the freedom of admission and moving on.  We all are blessed and lucky in so many ways, and if we focus on our failings or all the 101 choose your own adventure  endings we will never ever go on our adventure in the first place.