It’s difficult for me sometimes to understand that the perceived unfairness of life doesn’t mean that I am somehow defective. That what so many of my friends have and I don’t doesn’t mean I’m less fit to belong.

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 find myself thinking that life is a lonely prospect if you cannot draw from inside yourself that which is impossible for others to give you: self-worth.

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

I have a nine-and-a-half to ten hour drive from Nashville to Virginia. It’s a long time to think. A long time to be by yourself with no entertainment except music and your thoughts and perhaps games with people on the road with you. I find that the thing that pisses me off the most during long trips is people who aren’t consistent. If you go slow, fine. If you go fast, fine. But pick one, for crying out loud.

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.

The best way to describe how I feel right now is “emotionally queasy”. It’s ironic, seeing as I was actually physically queasy just two or three weeks ago.

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.

I’ve decided that dwelling on the fact that many of my friends are married is just an excuse for me to feel left out. Just because they are doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me.