Soldier

Life is about lessons learned.

I’m always learning new lessons & trying to apply them to my daily life.

The latest lesson is learning how to open up to a new person after the old person messed you up so badly.

I’m very blessed to be with the person I am with. I have blogged about him more than once, and while I try to keep my gushing about him to a minimum, sometimes one can’t help it.

He’s a very strong, supportive & compassionate man who deals with my idiosyncrasies in a very gentle & comforting way. Every time there is a crisis in my life, he is by my side, rationalizing through it until a solution can be found. However, I find in many situations, he’s the last person that I will turn to, which I think may bother him.

I spent a long time reclaiming my individuality after years of being under someone’s thumb. Part of me fears going back to that. I’m always afraid that reaching out to the man that I love will result in him resenting me for being weak & sniveling, so by the time I do talk to him, 19 things have gone wrong & I’m a crazy, crying mess.

However, this man finds crazy, crying MH lovable, which is probably the sweetest thing I have ever heard. When someone can love the least lovable side of you, & only want to understand that side & not change it, they are likely your match. I’m not the easiest person to deal with. I’m goofy, kind of ditzy & sometimes over emotional. The fact that he can see these things not as flaws that need changing, but facets of my personality that need to be understood & accepted makes me love him more.

The other reason is simple; he’s a busy man. He has many commitments to many people & I don’t want to infringe on them. I don’t want to distract him from the degree he has worked so hard for or his beautiful daughter. I am only a marginal piece of his life & I don’t want to put too much pressure on him to be more than that. He has a million projects & sometimes he simply has no time for me, not even a phone call. I’m the same way sometimes. But I feel guilty when I have to infringe on his life, I feel so selfish when I do. I should be the lowest priority, not someone that requires a lot of attention.

However, the lesson here is knowing when it is the right time to let someone in. When do you have the conversations that are most personal?

For me, that time is now.

I’m slowly building a future with someone whom genuinely loves & cares for me & wants to understand me better. He wants to be there for me when things get rough, just like I want to be there for him. We are getting to the point where we know each other better than we know ourselves & accepted each other’s flaws & foibles. We’re at the point where one bad day/week/minor issue won’t tear us apart & I need to be more open to talking to him, even about the stuff that I don’t tell even my closest friends. I spend so much time trying to be Super MH that I forget that I don’t have to be; my friends & beau appreciate that I’m actually a bit nuts & over emotional. Perhaps if I opened up @ the time things happened & let people understand why I feel the way I do, maybe they wouldn’t feel like I’m high strung. Maybe I wouldn’t be.

Loving someone means loving the parts of the person that aren’t very lovable. Flaws are part of a person too & whether it’s a small flaw (forgetting to call) or a major one (over emotional crying), if you love that person, you embrace their flaws as well as their goodness. If someone can love the parts of me that I hate, then he’s someone I can do damn near anything for.