In which I hit bottom...maybe

If this were Victorian times, I would say I'm having another one of my spells. I wish I could cast spells.  I've been so so down these past couple of days (especially today), and I know it's all about issues I'm working through, which impact my thoughts and feelings regarding the guy I've been dating, Red Flag Guy.  

He's just a guy, see, a guy with red flags that I've detailed before. And I've probably chosen him in part due to those red flags, because I'm still working on myself and am feeling kind of scared of something too healthy. But I'm starting, in the deeply grooved pathways of my brain, to want to lose myself in him. It's nothing new.  It's a way to fill the emptiness. But it doesn't feel healthy to me.

And he's just a guy, granted a guy with whom I'm pretty compatible and who can be sweet.  He's a guy with red flags that make me worry that he'll be picking up women wherever he goes. If a friend of mine expressed these concerns, I'd say to lay down the line.  But I don't think he's done anything. My concerns are really that he'll stop paying attention to me.

Because loving attention was what I didn't get from my parents. And I have a hole in my heart or my soul and I'm unhealthily looking for a guy to fill it. I tried to do it in the past with food. When my kids were babies, they filled it.  There are lots of ways I've tried to fill it. And when I try to fill it with a guy -- involuntarily, it seems -- it blows up in my face. And I'm so so SO afraid of that happening. I'm scared it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today, the only that helped with my feelings of pain, fear, and self-blame was walking around my work neighborhood, past courts, museums, restaurants, Oyamel, Gallery Place, all around like I was walking a labyrinth.  Walking through pain, walking through fear and dread.  Each step moving me forward, stepping through my fears and having them dissipate like smoke.  Realizing that if I move forward deliberately and directly, my feelings shrink down to the size of a bathtub

 or a bucket

or a thimble.

And they'll come back, in the circular way that feelings do, and I'll try to remember to walk through them again. Move toward anxiety. Own my story. Trust that things are happening at appropriate times.  I don't know...it's easy to write.  I have to take the point of view that whatever happens, I can trust myself to respond appropriately. And it's not all about me. I need to relinquish control.  I need to watch and learn. After all, guys have their own impetus and internal calculus, much like Martian rubber bands.

Jeez, a girl can go crazy thinking about all this...But it's important to process it. And it helps to write about it.Things will all be okay. Fall into the plan.