I hope you are feeling better this week, Lup...
I wonder if it's any better now that the holidays have retreated behind us?
I have never found it more difficult than it was this year -- this time tests everything. Ourselves, our relationships, our courage, and our kindness. I felt brittle, broken, angry, bitter, vulnerable, drained.
Now that I've come out of it and look back on recent weeks, I am feeling I failed to be patient and supportive to you and I think my remark about the frog was very blunt. (I worried about it and I do not want to be hurtful even if I think I'm trying to help.)
But I've been a frog SOOOOOOOO many times, wailing "I don't understand why the man I observed to be a scorpion behaved like a scorpion!" My obsessive pattern of setting myself up for hurt, over and over...was a really really really long one. The repeating went on for YEARS. Different scorpions, deaf frog.
I think I felt a little too close to your anguish to help you soothe it. If it's any encouragement, I hope you can hear that after YEARS of determined effort and therapy and some periods with Rx and going to the church that works for me.......and especially finding healing in women's support groups where the activity was sharing safely and deeply, not impressing each other, especially-especiallly-especially not competing.....I did find new hope and new courage.
I am not as afraid of love as I was. I look forward to it happening to me again, and in a new sane, CB way, if fate is with me. If not, I have made my peace with that too -- other forms of love other than romance are all around me.
I hope you're doing better. And I hope you find love inside you that wells up to blend with all the love around you.
with more,
Hops