Insecurity. It's a stupid bitch that can go suck it. I said it again. And that's how I feel about it. I know it's nothing new, everyone has their moments. Usually in women it tends to manifest itself in thoughts of feeling 'fat', 'ugly', focusing on things physical when in fact the issue is hardly ever actually really the issue. The physical is just easier to see and criticise. Easier to think if we can fix 'this' or 'that' to look like what people find attractive and desirable, that it somehow will make us feel better inside. But what difference does that really make? Of course I instead want to be a woman of substance, someone comfortable in her own skin, independent, confident, self-aware, all that good stuff. And here is the mental twist. Other woman want to be that too. And they are out there. And they are also physically beautiful. Then what happens then when one is feeling insecure? How does one possibly compare? How can one dig oneself out of such self perpetuating hole? The answer is simple. Don't fucking compare. I know if I cultivate my mind to how I want it, none of that shit will matter to me. I would appreciate the beauty in others instead of feeling threatened by it, I would try to help others that weren't feeling too good about themselves and try to realise that what they need to do is STOP COMPARING and just look inside themselves to find what makes them happy. In the end NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. Because if you can't be the best version of yourself (or at least making the effort to making yourself better bit by bit), what use can you be to others?
I could probably say that I've used most my adult life to cultivate and improve bits of myself that I wanted to improve. I've gained in confidence and have never really done things to make me look 'cool' or because that was the thing to do. I think I've done fairly well in following my own way to make myself happy. I was good at taking all the advice I was spouting in the above paragraph. I was never the kind of person who let my physical shell define my worth or who needed to be in a relationship to feel validated . I always was interested in people who were really interesting to me, who made my brain tickle as well as my body. But I digress a little, the point is my relationships are based on wanting to be with people because they satisfied a curiousity in me, not just for the sake of being in a relationship for the sake of it. Let's just forget those one-nighters when judgement went out the window..
In any case, all that has turned upside down. I'm currently going through a divorce and we have been 'officially' separated for some two months now. I was the instigator in the whole thing, but of course it doesn't make it any easier. It was really fucking hard. It was really hard because he wasn't a terrible person. He wasn't horrible to me, he was intelligent, loyal, hard working, loving, blah blah blah. All this good shit on paper, that I think some people would think that I'm a crazy person for leaving such a good thing. But without trying to explain only feelings that I could really understand (or perhaps others who have experience a similar thing), there was something fundamentally crucial missing for me. There was a certain thread of understanding that was missing between us that is perhaps a very abstract thing to explain, but something that you can just intuitively feel inside. You can just feel when it's there and when it isn't. And because it was hard for me to explain and to make my ex to understand how I was feeling, we went to therapy to try to rectify it and when that didn't work and because I didn't have enough confidence to say definitely 'we're done' (I always thought that maybe that some sort of miracle could happen and we could work it out, oh how I tried!). He said no one would love me like he did and I know he meant that as expression of how much he did love me rather than the more sinister interpretion of 'no one will ever love you cuz you suck', but a part of me thought that that could very well be true, but still it was worth the risk because all I really needed was for me to love me and not have my happiness be based on whether someone else loved me (or not). And to make a long story short, I cheated, he found out about it and from that point he finally began to doubt whether we could work things out. I took that opportunity to make the final decision. I took steps to move out. I needed to figure out things on my own, it wasn't working being with him. Who knows what was to be of the future, but I needed to take that chance, to follow what my gut had been telling me to do all along.
When my ex and I then figured out what in fact was going to be happening, that I was going to move out, that we were going to take some time for ourselves, to see what would happen, I felt exhilerated by it. I wasn't 'happy' by normal standards, but I knew I that I had made a decision on how to deal with it all and that it was time for me to embrace it, there was no point in doubting and feeling sad about what was about to end, but to look forward and to see what was about to begin.
And so that it is how it began. I made it a point to write everyday. I needed to 'find myself' again. I was looking forward to all the things I was going to embrace. I wanted to start drawing again, to write, to explore, to create, to learn, to just be open, free, whatever the fuck I wanted! But of course I knew it wasn't going to be so easy. I knew that a transition, no matter how necessary, was still going to feel weird. I would feel lonely, I would feel uneasy not knowing what my future held for me. I would feel hopeless, not wanting to do anything of the shit I knew I wanted to embrace and then feel defeated for not doing it and so then perpetuating the cycle. I knew I had to give myself patience to just work through the process, but when it feels like the world isn't waiting for you and everyone else is just zipping along with their confident, interesting lives, how shit does it feel to sulk and feel like your wasting your life away? But I have a strategy for combating that, writing. I knew that if I was at least writing about it, I could work through it and even have interesting record of that time in my life when things were crazy and to write about things makes me feel productive that I have created something, no matter what it is. But even so, there might be times when I might struggle to do even that...
But in any case those were my expectations. Expect the moments of emotional struggle, but use the moments of inspiration to act. So when I moved out, I didn't waste the moments to act when I had the momentum. And because I'm the type of person that can go out and do just about anything on my own (the pub, a concert, a trip, whatever), I didn't waste much time to just going out and getting out there to see where things might take me. This didn't mean that I was going out looking for hookups. I was going to go out just because I wanted to. Meet new people maybe, any expectations for those people? None. The first thing I wanted to do was to go to a place to listen to rock music. So I did that, met some people, nothing really mind blowing to write about, but it was enough to think that maybe not all was lost and that life will move on, I will move on.
The next moment of action occured the weekend later when I took up the offer to go on a surfing holiday with a friend and all his friends. The idea of being at the beach doing fun activities seemed like the perfect thing to do in the best and in the worst of times so that was a bit of a no brainer. Again, I had no expectations except to enjoy myself and just being out in it. I knew there was going to be someone there that I had met years ago, but didn't really think twice about it as I thought that everyone there would probably be coupled up and/or with kids and really with my situation wasn't something I was looking for in any case. But funnily enough, I did groom myself in a manner that suggested in the back in my mind there was a 'well, even though you're not looking for a little hanky panky, you never actually know what might happen...' stranger things have happened and it's always good to be prepared :P
So I went on this holiday. Met my friend and then got reintroduced to the guy I met a long time ago. When I come into a situation where there are a lot of new people to meet I just don't go all gun-ho and burst out with HELLO EVERYONE THIS IS ME kind of thing, but sort of branch out bit by bit and just let things happen naturally. So being that my friend and this other guy were the only two people I really knew, I sort of gravitated towards them first as a way of getting comfortable with the new situation I was in. And being that my friend had 2 kids to deal with, it just kind of happened that me and this other guy then had a bit of time to chat to each other.