Get in the ring...

I despise the moment when the only thought running through my head is “I give up. I GIVE UP. I. GIVE. THE. FUCK. UP.” I’d like to think that I’m a pretty strong individual; I’ve never been a proponent of throwing in the towel when shit gets hard. More often than not, I’ll put up one hell of a fight for whatever I believe in, even in the face of impossibility when it just may be a good idea to actually call it quits and accept defeat. I think the one context in which this though consumes every pathway in my brain is when my heart hurts. It’s a strange feeling of apathy, given the shit that I’ve overcome. I’ve been a mess, lying on the floor in the fetal position, balls-deep in a panic attack because one of the only people I had ever loved just really couldn’t seem to muster anything close to what I felt. There was a long string of interactions in the years following and I was able to realize pretty quickly that no matter how deeply someone cut, or how much I may have wanted the fairytale ending, there wasn’t a damn thing I couldn’t overcome and hell if I was going to waste my time dwelling on what could have, should have, would have been. For some reason, I’m on this god-forsaken planet and I’m hell bent on making it worth every minute.
The amount of times I’ve seen my heart dragged through the mud, thrown out of car windows, left lying in a puddle of my own metaphorical vomit…you get the idea, there have been countless crash and burn situations, whether I drove the car into the wall or not, it still hurts. I can get through anything and I pride myself on the ability to feel deeply, but bounce back quickly; unlike a lot of lucky people, I learned how to do it pretty late in life. Sometimes I get worried that no one will ever make a big enough impact to get me to give up a life of complete selfish solitude. I do what I want, when I want, and my actions don’t have a significant direct impact on very many people. I like my freedom to be who I am. IS there anyone out there who might love me without stifling me? I hope so. But hope hasn’t been very good to me lately. The times I find that I want to give up and become a hermit cat lady living in a decrepit old house with a black wrought-iron fence, a creaky gate and weeds for days, are the times when I really think something is worthwhile, and I let the walls down, usually pretty quickly in these instances (don’t get me wrong, I hold onto a few defense mechanisms) and then I find out I was wrong. I made a vast error in judgment, misread a situation and came out on the other side wondering what kind of lenses of delusion I had happened upon to make me think that the situation was coming even close to making me happy. I tend to think it’s everyone else I want to give up on; that humanity as a whole has disappointed me so many times, that the next little scrape on my heart was just the last straw. However, it’s much more a level of disappointment in myself that makes me think, “Huh. So you’re STILL trying to be something other than an emotional idiot and pretending you can commit to someone if the right person came along, huh? You’re STILL a hopeless romantic that thinks you’ll get the happily ever after if you just give one more person a chance?” Hmmm. How can such a jaded cynic be so naïve?
I am a walking contradiction: Far too stone-hearted to love the way I do, far too jaded to be such a hopeless romantic, far too serious to be so adverse to any sort of plan, boundary, or commitment, too solitary to live a life rooted in love, too hopeful to be so jaded…and so I get to the point where it all goes out the window, I sigh, and I want to just. Give. Up. Because one more person hurt my feeling when I thought I could trust them not to, or failed to acknowledge such when I thought that hurting me was accidental. We all hurt the ones we care about; unfortunately, it’s usually inevitable. I think the difference that keeps me in the ring, fighting for what I want in life, is the people that are there with me. If you hurt me, it’s because I let you; I let you in, I opened my heart, and unfortunately that gives you a much easier pathway to come in with guns blazing and leave a few bullet holes. I guess the bottom in line is that I don’t give up; not on me. I’m going to misjudge people, I’m going to make shitty decisions, but every day is another chance to live, and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. Maybe I have a rough time giving up on something I thought was worthwhile, but cutting ties is much better than holding onto the ropes bleeding and pleading for a TKO.
I may be too neurotic, too hopeful, too analytical, too human…but I keep trying and the people who understand me get all of the good that comes out of the fact that I’ll never stop fighting. I protect what I love. I protect who I love. That includes myself and my heart. I will give you everything I have if I’ve decided to let you past the walls and the padlocks, but if you make it into the ring, you better be prepared to be in my corner. It might be bloodbath that sometimes gets in your eyes and clouds your vision, and you might even take a few swings at me, because the fight can get a little messy at time, but if you’re in my corner, you’ll never lose the fight.