Music. Life.

This year has been, by all considerations, the hardest year of my life thus far. Usually, I would apologize for what I am about to write, because well, not all of it is nice. But, I have recently turned over a rock in my life path that has told me that I need to embrace the complexities of life, and in particular, of assertiveness. I am not even close to being perfect. In fact, if I learned one thing in this last part of life, it is this... I am flawed. So flawed that sometimes, well, a lot of the time, I fuck up. Or, screw up, for those PG audiences.
I lost... well, the first relationship, person, and love that I have ever really had this year. We had been together for just long enough to start to hate one another, to fight in the really bad way with one another, and to make each other completely miserable when we parted. Much like Blue Valentine, Scott and I were... love, loss, pain, hate, anger, and sadness. Looking at it from where I sit now, I don't understand, still, why it went so wrong. But, I do understand that ending that relationship was the best decision I have ever made. It was me telling the world that I wasn't going to settle... to settle for what I thought was happiness. Instead, I am finding happiness in the most bizarre of all places, myself. This is rare for me. For so much of my life, for so much of who I was, I have depended on others.. on men, on friends, on my family, to tell me what to do and who I was. No longer. I am me..... This emalgimation of every moment I have walked, talked, lived, breathed, and loved on this planet.
I haven't talked to Scott for months, largely because he started to become scary to me after we broke up... it was messy, gross, and painful. I wish that I could tell him how happy at one time he made me. I wish that I could show him how my heart has changed from our love... and how it has healed as a result of my self-love. I wish that love was like we thought it was, gentle, kind, and always faithful. Instead, love is hard, heart wrenching, life stopping,... and it has the ability to change you. From the inside out, to make you better, worse, more or less controlled.......... I understand why people become bitter, like my dad, from the pain and the anxiety and the heart crushing of a love lost. I find myself wondering about what love is really like, and if life is simply the ability to experience, not to keep it, like we seem to think we need to. Why does hanging onto it make it better, more powerful, or more real?
Love is all around us... love is within us, love can destroy us, love can make us, love can.... do anything. I want to know that love for myself... and only me. In the most selfish way, I want to make my life a reflection of the ways that I have allowed other people to be loved by me.
I lost a lover but gained a friend in myself...
 I have learned this year that life is about the moment. About this second, about smiling, singing, listening, crying, enjoying..... and that really, life is too short... too short for us to figure it out and too short for us to really understand it. But, that doesn't mean that we can't try.... and fail beautifully and amazingly at it. I am thankful for all of this, for the good, the bad, the ugly, and the scary terrible failure... because it has taught me how strong I truly am, and that I might not be a good person, but I am someone who knows that the only truth that can be held is the one we experience right now.