Twenty Eight: 6. Single

I don’t remember Valentines Day 2022 well.

I do remember the culmination of love I shared with people in 2022 well.

There were a lot of highs & lows, in all relationships, across the board.

Honestly, my highest highs & my lowest lows.

I’m thankful for those highs & lows, though.

The challenges, & my responses, have proven something to me.

Each has proven I’m finally the man I dreamed of becoming as a kid.

I’ve lived my life leveraging one intrusive thought at a time.

I’ve lived my twenties acting on more than half of my impulses,

& then running blindly from the other half.

I’m only okay by the grace of god & other people loving me well.

I’ve been aware of my need for other people loving me well a long time now.

For a while, this manifested in misunderstanding codependency.

And, for a few years, this misunderstanding became an excuse for the cause of my singleness.

I’ve been reflecting on this misunderstanding a lot lately.

I found the roots of the misunderstanding in an old blog from 2017.

I wrote a blog about codependency & being joyfully single.

But I didn’t label my codependency,

I just loudly made it clear between the lines of my writing.

I mistook community as a substitute, rather than an additive, for intimacy.

My feelings weren’t necessarily wrong.

But my feelings weren’t accurate, either.

My feelings were too easy to have.

I was a lot closer to 20 than 30.

A little naive.

I hadn’t actually had any intimate relationships yet.

I didn’t want them.

I spent my childhood helping my parents raise my siblings.

Then I spent my teen years raising myself.

I was barely tapping into my twenties.

I was just a kid.

I still am.

At the time, I felt behind the curve on intimacy.

But I wasn’t upset being behind the curve.

I felt energised by the disadvantage.

I wanted intimacy as much as I was scared of it.

Growing up religious taught me a few things about being scared.

Being scared of something is just an opportunity to get hyped on high standards & false confidence.

So I made being single harder on myself & acted like I was proud of the hardship.

My justification for joy was sweet but uneducated.

I had just started dating & I didn’t really need a partner.

I flexed this.

I made sure most of my friends were couples.

I flexed this.

I stayed single while surrounded by not single friends.

I flexed this.

I tried to become a pro at intimacy vicariously.

I did these things so I could learn without doing any hard work myself.

I believed I could become the best by just being around it.

But you can’t become the best if you never practice.

You can’t become the best just expecting things to happen.

In my blogs, & in private, I bragged.

I bragged about a strong community being all I needed.

I bragged about a strong community being all anyone needed.

It might be true. I don’t know.

But as I get older, I realise every day how little I actually know.

I realise how little I’ll ever know.

I do know the way I meant what I wrote is wrong.

& I do know the ways I held onto those ideas are wrong.

In the end, I don’t need to be joyfully single.

I don’t need to be joyfully taken.

I don’t need to be joyfully some other adjective.

I need to be joyful, in general.

I need to be joyfully me.

I need to be joyfully whatever.

I think being joyfully whatever is what I was getting at before.

But I couldn’t wrap my mind around joy abstractly or through me or whatever.

Aside from joy, I couldn’t wrap my mind around community adding rather than taking.

Community is powerful.

Community is good.

But community is not powerful or good because it’s meeting codependent needs.

Community is powerful or good because it’s adding value to self or others.

I understand myself a little bit better now.

I understand being whatever a little bit better now.

I’m no longer joyfully single.

I’m joyfully whatever.

I watched my community -

My substitute for intimacy.

I took notes on what they were learning.

Discipline.

Sympathy.

Sacrifice.

& Love.

Great stuff.

But great stuff is really hard to apply in real life.

Especially when you’re a walking intrusive thought.

My own faults -

Particularly my lack of willingness to try anything scary -

Caused me to diminish the value of a few major assets.

Peace of Mind.

Self-Respect.

Confidence.

& Security.

Instead of having a massive arsenal of positive trait,

I made some traits stronger while I let the others get weak.

After a few years of living through all of this, I’m more okay not dwelling on adjectives.

Single. Taken. Married. It’s Complicated.

They matter. But they’re not as important anymore.

They were more important when I used adjectives like nouns.

Making them a title or an identity isn’t useful.

The lessons I learned before are valid.

I just apply what I’ve learned differently now.

I’m proud of my relationships.

I’m proud of myself.

I’m substituting less.

I’m adding more.

I’m no longer joyfully single.

I’m joyfully whatever.

Cheers.

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