Tender and Afraid

First things first, I want to say thank you to everybody.  Somewhere over the course of the last week or so, I hit the 20,000 page view mark.  I'm a little late in seeing it actually, and I'm at about 20,200 right now.  I know that there are bloggers out there who get that many views in one day, and it's taken me a couple years to get there, but I'm totally cool with that.  My number one goal isn't to create content for other people, and I'm not constantly searching for ways to up my readership or anything (although if that happens, great!).  Mostly, this blog has become like a diary for me, and a place where I can be the truest version of myself that I know how to be...and it's like I'm sharing myself with you guys.  That's why I'm so glad to have my 20,000 page views...because it means that there are people out there in the world who like my weird ways enough to stick around.  That means a lot to me and I want to thank you wholeheartedly for it.

And now I will abruptly change the subject from a sappy thing to a crazy Amy thing...

For JOURNAL 52 this week, the prompt was "Napkins" and here's my page:

She's a little softer looking than my other girls, isn't she?  I think my girls are a reflection of me, and right now I'm feeling tender and afraid.

Have you ever had something happen to you, and in one single moment, your entire view of the world shifted?  Maybe it wasn't even a big thing, but suddenly you just have this epiphany and everything is different than it was before?  That happened to me last week.

I was talking to a friend of mine about something that's going on in my life right now that I needed some outside input on.  I was giving him a hypothetical question and I started the question by saying "I know you don't love me but..." and I finished whatever it was I was asking...barely.  Because right at the point I got out the "I know you don't love me" he says "I'm sorry".  And at the exact moment those words came out of his mouth, my brain went haywire.  How I managed to finish the original conversation, I have no idea... 

Those two little words rocked the boat so hard that the oars fell out and floated away.

I've always felt like love was a choice.  I choose who I love.  Other people choose to love or not to love.  It's only recently that I've entertained the idea that maybe it's not as much of a choice as I thought.  And when my friend innocently said "I'm sorry" it hit me hard that I've been wrong my whole life.

When you believe love is a choice, you think there's something you can do about it.  If someone doesn't love you, you think you can change their mind by doing something differently.  Stop talking so much, stop being so weird, lose weight, dye your hair, wear make up, whatever it is...then they'll love you.  I've fought really hard to make people change their mind and love me.  I've tried to make myself be worthy of love, because clearly whatever little thing I was doing made me unworthy and I had to fix it...but that's not true.

It seems funny to me now, but I never looked at it the opposite way.  When my friend said he was sorry he didn't love me, I realized that maybe he wants to...he wants to but can't.  Because it's not a choice to love someone.  You just love them or you don't.  They love you or they don't.  And no amount of effort is going to change that.

The idea of not having a choice about loving someone or not loving them totally shifts my life.  I've spent a lot of years trying to earn people's love.  I've also spent a lot of years telling myself I love certain people because I choose to...because they are good, decent people and I should love them...I want to love them because they deserve it.  And all that time, it seemed like my fault that I didn't feel that love like I should.  I want to love them, but I don't...not really.  

And now I have some tough choices to make...actual choices, not imaginary ones like before...and I don't know what to do.  It's a new world out there for me, and I'm scared.  Fear is one of those emotions I don't like to admit to having.  But right now, I'm scared to make the wrong choice.  Because regret is hard to live with...trust me, I know that one for sure.  But you never know what the wrong path is until you take it, do you?  And I'm standing at a fork in the road, knowing full well that at some point, I'm going to have to take a step in one of those directions...and I don't know what to do.  Not only do I not know what to do, I don't even know how to decide what to do.  I feel paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.

How do you know what the answer is?  How do you make the right choice and then act on it?