I know I don’t fit in anywhere.. and honestly, I’m okay with that…Most of the time
But every so often it gets to be a bit much, as it did Saturday night. My battery bank runs dry when I get pushed into situations where I don’t know the rules. And you’re probably thinking, what rules? You don’t live by rules. And you’d be right, I live freely and I do what needs to be done. But there are these rules of society, and then there are the rules of me. And the rules of society I just don’t understand, human interaction is just so weird, what is fully inappropriate in a work situation, is appropriate in a private situation with the same people. What are the exact rules to this?
I do not understand this, and apparently sometimes it’s ok to say things to someone in a game, that you would never say in a normal situation… How can words have 2 different meanings when said in different situations? Word meanings to do not change, how can I ever possibly interpret this?
But I’m digressing..
I didn’t even know I had rules different from others until I was in my 40s. A friend just said it one day, “you know you’ve got a whole book of rules, right?” And I thought, doesn’t everybody? Nope. Apparently not. So I actually sat down and wrote the whole thing out, a care and handling manual for me,. I figured if anybody was brave enough to try dating me, they might as well have the instructions; which somewhere along the way ended up being deleted, as apparently I misunderstood and people don’t actually want a manual, even though they say they do. Again why do people say they want something when they don’t?
It’s been a rough year, though. Several of my rules have been broken, and I’ve sat and wondered whether my rules are even fair. But fair doesn’t really matter. When my partner met me in 2016 I was broken in every way you can be. My body was wrecked from the accident, and the whole house of cards my life was built on had just come crashing down. And for the most part, he’s followed the rules, and when necessary has gone above and beyond. And trying to keep up with the game of which part of me is back to herself can be incredibly daunting, as one never knows if I’m going to take off on a 10 day trip to Romania, write a book, or help create a new company; the only thing that is known is that it will be an intense ride that doesn’t give up.
So what was in the manual? Well, how not to have me hit sensory overload, and when I do how to help the recovery – eg I need to be alone. Like, really alone in a sensory deprivation tank. Turns out when you live in a house with other people, I start eyeing the closet wondering if I’m going to have to crawl in there just to get my brain to stop feeling like throwing porcupine quills. I’ve got my office, which is my space, however there’s no comfy spot to curl up into. It’s on my list when I get budget, at least the natural live edge wood shelves are in there, which connect me to the forest that I need and offer me a bit of focal point for life outside the city.
There is also no crude, no rude, no self deprecation. I worked way too hard to overcome way too much and cannot grasp how someone can find humor in jokes that do this, or make fun of other humans.
Don’t come to me with complaints or negativity either, bring to me what you see as an obstacle and what we’re going to do about it. And no sitting still doing nothing, there’s so much to do in this world, how can you not be working on making things happen every minute you’re awake?
I need my brain fed, but somebody’s got to remind me to feed the body, because I never get hungry. I can’t count the number of times food has been put in front of me with clear instructions, said in a Ray Dunn Font – ‘EAT’. But sleep – whole other story, if I don’t get enough of that, slangry will be around the corner faster then you can blink.
Get me outside, camping, hiking. And no, I don’t care if you’re hurting and can’t keep going, then take the choice to stay back and do your thing. Your body’s your responsibility. I shouldn’t get shortchanged out of what I want to do because of somebody else’s limits. And no, I don’t want one of those silly rooftop tents. Too complicated. Keep it simple, low maintenance.
We are the authors of our own destiny… Your place in life is no one else’s fault other than your own. If you don’t like where you are, simply make the choices to get where you want to go
But here’s the key with my struggle with people. I can’t function around people unless I know their rules, because being with people is emotional bondage for me, no matter how close they are to me. I’m sitting there all tied up, biting my tongue, doing the best I can without saying what’s actually on my mind. Because let’s be honest, most people don’t want my bluntness, observations, nor calling things as I see them. And they’ve got about zero interest in anything I’m interested in, or views. If there is conflict they want to stand on a soap box telling me about what they know… or think your being done with the world is about them, as people don’t seem to follow a line of inquiry, simply they know.. It’s exhausting.
There’ve been two people in my life I could just be with. But I never woke up next to either one of them, and that’s a whole different thing than living with somebody. With them it was short visits, all this excited talking, ideas and goals and dreams flying everywhere, blunt truth about opinions, experiences, then we’d go our own ways until it was time to get back together and do it all again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Anyway. My partner and I are together most of the time and we split the bills, but it’s not my home, and I don’t consider us as living together in the sense most people do. Reaching the stage we have was important to him, and I still have a hard time understanding why, other then bills. As I don’t understand “couple” mentality, and not because I’m a single mentality, but it’s just one of those things that doesn’t compute.
My home’s 3,000 miles away in Tennessee. I love my partner, I care about him deeply, and I’m staying. But I’m just not built for a relationship. Not under one roof full time. When there are two people in a house, there’s never real space to just be. You’re always half listening for somebody walking in and yanking you out of wherever your head went. And it’s not that you don’t want them. It’s that you don’t want anything except to be alone. So very, very alone. Honestly, seeing somebody every two to four weeks for a few days would suit me just fine.
And then I wonder why intimacy’s so hard for me, and I have to look at myself first. Because I crave it. I really do. I’ve had it a few times. But it’s near impossible for me to build, for one simple reason: I need 100% trust. Anything that puts that trust in doubt, and it’s gone. That means no white lies, ever. I always know when I’m being lied to. That’s the fun part of seeing patterns in everything. I cared deeply about someone once who just could not be honest with me, and it tore so much apart. But it goes deeper than lying. If somebody can’t fully accept themselves, I can’t fully trust them, because they don’t trust themselves yet.
Which brings me back to the biggest rule of all, and that’s knowing yourself. I can’t be comfortable around people who haven’t gotten there. My comfort level is for the ones who’d walk across a burning bridge for one more drink of knowledge, and who feel connected to everything around them. Not many people make it. But the ones who do quit thinking they’re smarter than everybody else. They figure out they don’t actually know a thing, choosing instead to continually try to prove themselves wrong.
Too many people go the other way and grow into knowing. Knowing is a dangerous place to be, because once you’re sure you know something, you quit looking at it from any other perspective. You just get comfortable and let your ego eat at your soul, and souls that have bites out of them due to ego are a bit of an empty void, like the Nothing in Never Ending Story. That’s against my rules. When I see somebody settle in there, I step back and let them have it, because that just can’t live alongside my internal compass.
Something’s changing. I can feel it. The path’s shifting, my soul’s woken up, and I’m here. I can taste things again. Because life’s got a taste to it… Some days it’s as decadent as a fresh glacier stream running cold off the mountain. And some days it’s fridge water or worse day old dust water.
Plane landing.. time to enjoy what Minneapolis has to offer until I leave for BNA- How far we’ve come from that off grid cabin in Likely(a town) without a roof for the summer.. laying in the fields of wheat – but at the same time how close we still are to it..
