Some of the most touching moments in my life have been when I truly felt that someone understood me. Knew what I needed most.

Self worth comes from belief in yourself, not from others believing in you. Others might convince you to believe in yourself, though. You can see that others love you, but their love can’t define you. If you hang on their love alone, you will fail. It’s pretty fucking cruel sometimes to be reminded of that.

I was bought with a price. That makes me worth something. It’s hard to choose to believe that. It’s easier to wallow. God help me.

I still rely on the old bonds that are slowly getting weaker. I recognize this, so I turn to God. I realize that the support chains that used to hold me up are breaking, and that I need support that won’t break or decay. And yet, it’s not enough. I know it should be, but it isn’t. It just isn’t. I guess my goal should be to try to make it enough.

I’ve been frustrated with my friends lately. Sometimes I feel like I have to coax them into hanging out with me. This is against my nature. I don’t particularly like hosting all the time, but when none of my friends offer to host anything, I feel I have to. Otherwise, I won’t get to hang out with them at all, because they seem happy enough with whatever else they’re doing instead. Their need doesn’t seem to be enough to overcome the inconvenience.

Other times, I feel people invite me to things more out of “duty” than desire. Sometimes I get invited to something that I don’t really want to do, and I realize that I’m passing up a chance to hang out with someone, but I turn it down anyway.

To me, these are all signs of decaying friendship. When common interests turn into not-so-common interests and desire turns into duty, what of friendship? I wonder if I met some of my current friends at this point in my life, would I still be friends with them? To be honest, I doubt it a little.

And so, life continues. Often (at least once a week… usually on the weekends) I feel lonely but can’t justify inviting myself over to someone’s house or apartment. To me, it’s forcing the issue. I realize that there must be some give and take, but lately whenever I try to organize something, people aren’t interested or too lazy to do anything about it.

Here are my choices. I can: a) mope and whine about it and long for a past that will never return, or b) I can stand up and pick up my bed and walk. I have to take care of myself. And sitting around waiting for my friends to invite me to things that I want to do is not how I want to continue to live.

I need to throw away my pride and understand that if I want to hang out with my friends, I will most likely have to initiate it. This means I have to admit weakness to myself. I have to accept the fact that maybe I need to be friends with them more than they need to be friends with me. I have to do what I want in life without the fear of hurting my pride. But at the same time, I don’t want to compromise who I am to do it.

I want people to be punished for their misdeeds. That desire does nothing but make me realize how powerless I am. I hate feeling powerless. I fight my hardest to gain some control over something, even if it’s not even real control. I want lenience, and yet I’m unwilling to give it to others. I want forgiveness, but I’m unwilling to forgive others.

I can’t keep trying to control things when all it does is make me miserable.

This morning I woke up and there was paid programming on TV. A preacher, preaching about this very subject. How about that? Some answers. I am thankful. Peace. Pause. That’s what I need most. Let the peace of Christ rule in my heart. I am encouraged.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I was completely alone rather than having the hope of being with friends and then being let down by circumstance. It would be easier if I could be angry at someone, but who’s there to be angry at? I feel lonely and angry and I don’t know what to do about it.

Life has taught me that if you can’t self sustain, it’s like being emotionally homeless. You are dependent on the charity of others. I don’t like being dependent on other people. I can’t predict what other people are going to do, or how much they’re going to give. I don’t know how much to rely on them. As much benefit as I’ve gained from having friends, sometimes I feel like I’ve suffered equally much. But even if that’s true, and if I swore off all relationships that were more than acquaintance, I feel like it would be just as hard living life alone.

I came back to God to help me figure out the answer to this problem. God takes the edge off maybe, but there’s no solution in sight. The issue remains. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but whatever it was hasn’t happened. Maybe I expected God to magically take away my pain. Needless to say, he hasn’t. I came to God to try to rely on him so I wouldn’t have to rely on humans that can’t provide me with what I need. God is up in the sky somewhere. Even if he’s everywhere, his corporeal form has been gone for 2,000 years with no sign of coming back any time soon. I can’t hang out with God.

So what happens now? Do I keep holding on to the hope that God will come through? Hope will drive a man insane. And yet, what is the alternative? To give up?

I feel trapped with nothing but the pity of others to provide me solace. Pity is worse than no feeling at all. I’d rather be completely alone than be pitied.

I have some things that many of my friends don’t have. I often forget that I have a very great deal to be thankful for.

But life shouldn’t be about what others have and I don’t, or what I have that others don’t. Life isn’t a competition. I just don’t want to be left behind.

I finally am beginning to have an actual relationship with God again. At this point God is acting for me sort of like a nicotine patch does for a chronic smoker. He takes the edge off. He helps me deal with my occasional feelings of despair and loneliness so I can bear it. As much as my friends mean to me and as much as they help me, there are some things that can’t do for me. And that’s why I turned to God in the first place.

Life goes on. I make a lot of things harder than they need to be. I take a lot of things more personally than they are. But that’s part of who I am. Learning to cope and improve myself without becoming numb has been a lifelong struggle for me.

I fail at it sometimes. But I think I’m beginning to learn that it’s okay to fail sometimes.

Don’t speed up, pass me, then slow down to a speed slower than I’m going. Don’t tailgate me like you want me to move, and then when I move, you don’t pass, at least not until I’m close enough to a slow moving car in front of me to make me slow down and screw up my cruise control. It’s not a huge deal to reset my cruise control, but it gets annoying after 9+ hours of driving. I try to be courteous; you can at least pay attention to what’s going on around you enough to do the same to me. But, I guess it’s good that I don’t take it personally anymore when people do dumb shit on the interstate. Life is better when you don’t take as many things personally that aren’t. I can’t claim that I’m blameless on the road, either, I suppose.

Although, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the drivers in North Carolina this trip. They were well behaved, at least between cities. Expecting people to follow “the rules of the road” in a city is like expecting for it to rain Newcastle Brown Ale from the clouds. Generally, just don’t be a dick. And use your damn turn signal. Okay, moving on.

As usual, when I drive for a long time I eventually start thinking about relationships. I’ve started getting to the point in life where I am starting to want an intimate relationship. Not necessarily for sex, but just intimacy. As Mitch put it to me once, “someone that’s always available to do mundane things with me, like go to the grocery store.” A relationship that has no borders. Now, wouldn’t that be something. I haven’t experienced that in my whole life in this realm of physical existence.

I know really good friends, good friends, colleagues and mere acquaintances. When you get to know someone, eventually you hit a barrier. Maybe the barriers are caused by bad timing, or social circumstances, or personality differences, but eventually it will happen. With good friends, you can push through some of those barriers. Even with really good friends, there are some barriers that you can’t or don’t want to break. Sometimes you meet someone where there are very few initial barriers to a friendship. Sometimes you meet someone that you know right away that you don’t like. Hitting the jackpot is like hitting the $10,000 space with 15 Plinko chips in a row. It’s like “tryin’ a’ hit a large bullet wi’ a smallah bullet, wearin’ a blindfold, while ridin’ a horse”, to quote a wise man. Even then, obviously there are barriers you have to push through together. But the point is, both parties are willing to do that.

My solution has always been to not try to find anyone, because the odds seem so astronomical that it’s completely and utterly futile to even try to look. Which is another way of saying, “it’s in God’s hands.” It always seemed wrong to me to force the issue. I try to get to where I want to be in life, and if I befriend someone or fall in love with someone, so much the better. There’s a difference between “keeping an eye out” and combing the desert.

It goes without saying that this belief has been tested by life circumstances. It has forced me to choose countless times what I feel more strongly about. It means I have to figure out a way to explain to myself why failures happen. Welcome to believing anything. Welcome to life. Blah blah blah.

A romantic relationship has never been something I’ve needed. And it still isn’t. I’m generally pretty content being single. Most of the time when I get upset about being single, it’s for other reasons than what I think is “the right reason”. It usually has to do with the fact that I feel left out somehow, that being in a relationship is the “social norm”, and other stuff. It would be wrong for me to say that I’m not bitter, but at least I’m not as bitter anymore as I used to be. For me it’s more about taking all of the “skewed” reasons I have for being indignant, and reconciling them with real life explanations. The reason for that is simply that being angry all the time isn’t very fun.

That’s enough.

Consider a night of too much drinking. Your body has to get rid of the poison. So, you throw it up. You feel better right after that. Then you start feeling bad again and eventually you puke some more. You feel better. Then there’s the dry heaves. Then you stop puking all together but still feel kinda shitty. You sleep it off and start feeling better enough to eat some soup, or maybe some bread. The food makes you feel bad, and you feel a little nauseous, but you keep it down. Baby steps up to real food again. During the next few days your stomach expands again and starts going back to normal.

Emotionally, I’d probably say that I’m just past the soup and bread and trying to move up to bigger things. My soul is still shrunk, but it’s getting more full every day.

I can’t think of a more perfect analogy. Being sick to your stomach is a different level of pain. It’s not like being injured. It’s pain from the inside. Purging the bad shit from your body. A few weeks ago, I drank too much, and I paid for it. It doesn’t just hurt you, either. Your friends take care of you. They see you at your worst. But they love you, anyway, even though you’re sick.

A few days ago, I swallowed some bad emotional shit, and now I’m paying for it in a similar way. And so are others. There was some puking involved. It’s a different kind of pain. It’s not like being flipped off or cussed at. It’s the kind of pain that frays your soul. It hurt like hell, but it had to be done. And that’s how it goes. But it happened, and now the worst is over, and things get better with time and effort. That’s the way I’m trying to think of it, anyway.

Life is about getting back up when you fall down. You can shelter yourself and try not to fall again, but that’s just as wrong as never getting back up again. But you don’t have to do it alone.

It takes me a long time to learn anything when life is concerned. Knowing something and putting it into practice are completely different things. I think this recent experience has pounded some of the things God wants me to learn into my brain a little more. I forget a lot of it, but some of it sticks. I hope that I learned something.

So, it just goes to show you. God turns bad things into good, somehow.

I still thank God for my friends every single day.