A Little Game With the Universe

I know it seems I say it all the time but;

There’s so much breaking, cracking, bending, rewiring, and morphing happening around and inside of me lately. And every time I feel it it’s just as intense as the last time.

I mean…we’re supposed to be constantly changing so I suppose it isn’t unnatural that I talk about it as often as I do. (Although that isn’t the point right now.) On top of that; my minds’ awareness is shifting faster than my soft, emotional heart can begin to fathom.

I’ve been asking for all of this change for so long now, mainly asking for awareness. To be more aware in every aspect of myself, my life, others, and the world around me. Now it’s here, and I’ve found myself trying to figure out the best way to handle some of these changes and truths.

It’s as if my mind and heart are like the tortoise and the hare.

Knowing deep in my heart, that slow and steady wins the race. That in time I will know when I am finally able to handle and accept the truth of life that comes with being aware VS. my mind just wanting to get to the finish line already to say I’ve simply made it through, and won in getting the truth.

Learning to trust the slow and steady process of the journey, believing that time will teach us all, and to just be as present as possible, is the biggest blind leap of faith any one of us has been, or is crazy enough to dare take on. This human world can harm and bruise us in so many unfathomable ways. Chew us up and spit us right back out just because it wants to at times. So it’s natural to be scared to believe it can really be attainable to just be at ease and in harmony with the world.

So when it comes to asking the Universe for certain things, it’s going to take time and a lotttt of patience to receive said things. Patience goes hand in hand with receiving truth. And she sure as shit likes to get creative while strengthening that patience in the process.

It’s a little game the Universe likes to play.

We ask silly little questions, and get answers back in an even more amusing way. Ways that are probably perceived by most as unique. Or cryptic. Or sometimes, more than what was asked for. This is the Universe’s humor though. And boy is she funny as hell, because she gives you exactly what you ask for. Just…maybe just not in the way YOU wanted it to be.

For me right now, in the midst of asking to be more consciously aware in life, I had also been longing for closure.

So…finding the truth and awareness in the ability to be able to get that closure was the Universe’s riddle to me this year.

As the time inched closer and closer to a wrap on 2021, I had been sitting and analyzing every piece of my life in the last 365 days. What I did, who I met, places I went, things I learned, emotions I felt. Anything your mind can think up, I probably already thought about it and applied the question upon reflecting on my own life.

And without even trying, I realized that I learned SO much more than I initially ever anticipated or asked for. I got so much more than just closure out of it all.

You see, I spent the better part of this year in agony.

Mourning in so many ways. Over so many people. Broken, or lost relationships in my life.

Most was over one person in particular, and for the life of me, I could not let go of them. I couldn’t even begin to understand how, or why, I had to let go of this individual. I mean, if I felt so torn up about them, then it had to prove that I did care, and that had to have meant that none of it was without reason right?

Yes and no.

Now allow me to explain;

I believed that if I was experiencing such suffering it meant that they cared for me as well. Just as I cared for them. I had insisted that the torment I was going through, was to simply show “how real” the connection actually was.

But that’s not right. And that’s not what love is.

I had created this ideology in my own head, and I clung to it so desperately, as my source of hope and “truth” for having created it, but all it was doing was killing me slowly.

It took everything I had, and then some, to pull myself out of that hole and to learn to get better. Of course even at the time of my realization to start working through it, I wasn’t magically aware that my fantasy was actually a nightmare. Back then all I knew was that my mind was essentially fixated on this one person, and seeing that alone, I knew it was unhealthy. It was time to change the narrative for myself.

It wasn’t until recently that I understood where the intensity and extent of the fixation/fairy-tale idea of this person and life with them, came from.

What it really was, was me thinking and believing that my sources of love had to first come from deep pain. Because pain is my first memory, and my first friend.

I had never known what it had been like to love someone without having be hurt while experiencing that love. Every major relationship I had in my lifespan so far, has ended with being left, or the love for one another was turned to anger and somehow the relationship just managed to become stained from more harm than good.

I mean…

I grew up with a semi-present mother who was more of a child herself, than a parent, (to no fault of her own because a lot of it was trauma) but inherently still incapable of caring for a child the way one needs to be cared for.

I grew up without a father. Who I did eventually meet, and then came to learn was just more willingly absent than present, that I spent most times instead wishing I had never met him at all.

I grew up around a lot of people who loved my energy, and the ear I could lend, or the advice I could offer more than they were actually interested in knowing who I was as a person.

I grew up submerged in rage, distrust, paranoia, in dis-ease.

I grew up in suffering, and yet…

…In suffering, I grew.

And while now I find it wildly beautiful that I was able to grow, no matter how little or how much, I still grew. Somehow. Someway. In all of the pain that spilled around me. But for quite some time I was so accustomed to it, that it became my home instead of just being a visitor passing through my home. I got so used to its’ presence that I could not recognize pain even as it looked upon my face.

As a child, my mind could not distinguish the difference between playfulness and passive aggressive mannerisms. I did not know that receiving gifts as a child was more of a bribe to be won over in some way, rather than as an act of genuine love. I couldn’t see that jokes were actually hidden feelings. I couldn’t see that my mother and step-fathers attention and bonding with my brother and I, were nothing more than a disgraceful, yet subtle game of who can hurt the other adult worse by using my sibling and I as the bait. Everything was dressed up so beautifully, that it didn’t seem possible to be so incredibly dangerous.

So, as I grew older;

I thought boys who ignored me, or played hard to get, meant they liked me more and they were just bad at saying it.

Friends who came to me mostly to talk about their issues meant they just trusted me deeply to confide in.

I thought family who invited me to spend time with them was because they wanted to, and not to get revenge to spite another family member.

Any sort of situation that left me feeling utterly disappointed and betrayed, was glossed over by justifying their behaviors, and believing that even in the suffering they caused me, somehow they still cared for me.

How fucked is that?

To believe that in order to be loved, I must first or also be tortured. And (unknowingly and simultaneously) torture myself by feeding this false belief.

So you remember that silly little game I mentioned the Universe likes to play?? Well there you go. That was also part of my game to play this past year.

I started it with believing I had to be in pain to be loved/and love, to seeing that the pain I thought was love, was simply just a sign that it is actually the opposite of what I should feel when giving or receiving love.

So either way, in a sense, I did have to experience some sort of torture. Some form of heartbreak, to decipher free, genuine love from suffocating, selfish love.

This is what I’m talking about when I say the Universe finds the most unique ways to give us answers, or transform us in some way we’ve asked for.

All I asked for, was love. Genuine love. And closure from the genuine love I didn’t receive.

And so…I spent all my time hung up on a person, who left me, then went and gave their love to someone else. I spent so much time angry at a mother for seeing my pain, and still not changing. So much time spent feeding breadcrumbs to friends to be seen and understood. Fighting tooth and nail, with so many relationships, to be loved. Suffering for weeks, or months, trying to seek out love in all of the most challenging places, because the fight needed to be worth it if I was going to fight at all. When all I did was justify their shitty actions and my delusions.

But it’s okay now.

Because I learned that in experiencing such a range of emotions, experiences and ideologies, was just so I could find the actual truth. To get the closure I truly needed. To find the answers I had been so deeply searching for. To gain that sense of awareness of the world I’d been longing for.

I learned that I was searching in all the wrong places for the love, closure and truth I had been seeking.

It was in me the whole time.

It IS in me.

I cannot yearn for something so deeply, without already BEING it myself.

There is so much irony that comes from so many different aspects of each of our lives. But finding the truth or closure of a situation, or gaining the awareness I asked for, by experiencing the pain itself will never not leave me speechless.

Mainly for the way the Universe really just does shit like that so casually, while all we feel is the consuming breaking or cracking or morphing inside of us as we learn to navigate through such life events.

And as much as I do not wish to suffer, I have learned that it is still okay to know that I do not need to feel pain in order to love or be loved, but I can still be in love with my pain. Somehow, my pain is also a teacher, just as much as any other of my emotions are teachers to me.

AND all any of this does, is just teach me that patience really is a virtue.

Because while I learned that my original idea of love was not the proper way to experience love, I understand that in time I will always make it out of the clouds to have clarity again. All I needed to do until then was take my time caring and helping myself through the storm of pain until I was able to come out on the other side victorious.

Patience is where you find the real answers. The stillness shows you the truth. It shows you the changes you need to make or that have already started to take effect.

So, no matter what I face in each day, each month, each year, I know that I will grow through my darkness, just as I have done millions of other times.

And I found acceptance that there will never be a time in my life where I don’t experience some sort of grief. So now I am just thankful for every year I have already collected, and am excited for all the time I still get.

To break a little more.

To love a little harder.

To make a few more mistakes.

To find more patience.

To receive more answers.

To get more pure truth.

But ultimately to learn and soak up the richness and limitless opportunities of my life.

Every year is a good year, because I am simply here. And so are you. We’re alive, and yes life is fucking irritating and hard at times but we’re still alive. And that means another day, another chance at any given moment, to make life a little better than it was before.

So I’m also learning to embrace and have fun with the game the Universe plays, in helping us all learn and grow, because no matter what, she always gives me what I need and sometimes more.

And I hope you learn to love the game just as I am doing.

All my love, -A.