Today I went on a walk with a friend.
We hadn’t seen in each other in a couple of months cause of holidays and quarantines and moves. We hiked all around Mt. Tabor in East Portland and talked. About work (we’re both starting new jobs) and family and politics (a teensy weensy bit) and how we are struggling with ourselves now. We…I just have so much time to be alone with my thoughts.
And there are a lot of them.
Towards the end, we talked some about relationships, and where we are in our in betweeness of things. It was nice because he described things that I remember going through a year or two ago. And in that way, I felt less alone with that, and hopefully so did he.
There was a point where I was telling him about how I did all this work to separate my self-worth from a romantic relationship and how now I felt stuck in this weird way. Like I don’t know how to be in a romantic relationship if that’s not a part of it.
And I’ve thought about that (duh) over the last few hours and it’s irking me. It feels like I did all this work to learn to love myself, and I do, but now I don’t trust myself to hold onto that in a relationship.
And beyond that…now that I love myself, the thought of having to convince someone to love me just sounds exhausting.
And I know that that’s where the rub is. In the idea of having to convince someone to love me. I know that’s not how it works. Or how it should work, I guess. And that’s where I’m stuck now.
That’s the work now, it seems.
tmd 