Sharing Love: A Foreign Concept

Every since I was little I've had a few problems with the concept of love.

Originally, it was merely my inability to ascertain what it could mean, or how it pertained to myself.  Over the years I've loved and I have been loved.  I've come to appreciate it much more than I used to, and thus it has taken up a large portion of my heart.

While it has become an easier subject to understand, there are still some issues I can't seem to sort out properly.

For some reason, in my head love seemed to be one giant mass.  Every time you loved someone else, you gave a portion of the mass out.  This applies to friends, family, pets, whoever.  Eventually, you'd get to a point where you don't have enough of the mass left over, so you'd have to take it from certain people and give it to the new people you met.  You'd also have the ability to take away love at will.  If someone has pissed you off royally, or hurt you deeply, you could completely devoid them of the love you once harbored for them.

So when I fought with anyone, I would feel lost and completely inconsolable because I felt as if they'd take their love away from me.  Or if I hadn't seen someone in a long time, I'd be afraid that they'd taken my love and given it to someone else.  If a friend chose to hang out with someone else over me, it was because they'd given them my love, or loved the more than me.  If a bunch of my friends hung out without me, it was because they didn't enjoy my company as much, thus they didn't love me as much.

I'm sure you can see why this thinking is flawed and illogical.  It's also extremely tiring to keep up and makes for jealous tendencies which I hate about myself.

I'm happy to say that I no longer hold the same beliefs of love that I once did, and that's due to many tiring conversations with close friends and family.  I now understand that love is not one singular thing.  It's more like a million different things.  Every time you love someone, you love them a little differently than you love someone else, and thus there are limitless "masses".  So trying to compare your love for you best friend to the love for your mother is impossible.  They're two separate things (thank you Lance for pointing this out).

You also can not remove your love from someone easily, so getting into an argument, not seeing a particular person, etc., will not make your love for them go away.  It may change the dynamic slightly, depending on the severity, but I think that once you love someone it's hard to truly rid yourself of that love completely.  And if you really love someone, you're not going to completely give up on them just because you argue with them.  Parents will yell, friends will be hurt, it's just a part of life.  People are people, and you're not always going to get along with each other, but that doesn't change anything.  At the end of the day, your mother still loves you even if you didn't meet her expectations, no matter how much you argued.

And if a friend is spending time with someone else it doesn't mean they love you any less in lieu of loving them more.  Their love for you is completely separate from their love for their other friends.  And if you feel as if you've been "replaced" you shouldn't because every one is extremely different.  It's not possible for someone to ever "replace" anyone else for the two reasons previously stated:  Because the love for the two individuals is different, and the two individuals are intrinsically different beings to begin with.

Having said that it is possible to become closer to someone else as apposed to old friends, but that's just the nature of things.  If you spend time with someone enough you're going to get to know them more.  It's how it works.

I'm rambling.  I'm sure I left some things out, but I can't think of them right now.

Thoughts?

Baby Steps

There is so much about myself that I have yet to learn, and I've basically stopped my process of soul searching; content with all the progress I've made thus far.  I now have a reason behind the things I do and say, but that means nothing unless I can change the way I think about them.

I have done a lot of work and made a lot of progress, but that was primarily due to Robert and Trina.  It's my turn now.  It's time for the hardest part of this wacky journey.  It's time for me to face up to my demons and accept responsibility.  It's time for me to be happy, to flourish, to be me.  It's time for me to try my hardest to /live/.

As I lay in bead and contemplated this, I tried to think of one major thing I needed to change.  It came rather easy.  There are certain things in this world that, for one reason or another, make all of us involuntarily angry, sad, etc.  The first step is to figure out what those things are.  What are your triggers.  The second step is to figure out /why/ they are your triggers.  What happened in your life, what did someone say to you once upon a time, etc., until you get a good picture as to why these things set you off.

That's where I stopped.  After I unearthed the reasoning behind my actions.  I hit the eject button and went on my merry way, but something happened in my head last night that was... miraculous.  I realized that simply knowing why was not the ultimate goal.  Simply knowing "why" would allow me to use it as an excuse, pardon my unacceptable behaviors, or fuel my negative thoughts when I'm sad.  No, that's not the goal at all.

You have to figure it out, and then you have to let it go.  

I can tell myself "I'm scared to say what I feel because of x reason and y thoughts", but /how/ does that have any bearing on my life now aside from producing these triggers in the first place?  They don't.  So what someone laughed at me for saying how I felt at one point.  Why do I now have to live my life in fear based off of what happened I don't even KNOW how many years ago?  It's kind of stupid if you ask me.

I can't do anything about what happened in the past.  I don't own a time machine and I don't have magical powers.  Nothing I ever say will make it fare.  What I /can/ do is change the way I think about things.  Stop using the faulty logic of a misunderstood five year old, and start thinking like an adult.  Instead of being content with the why's and hows, I need to replace them with truth.  I need to change my schemas, and that's exactly what I intend to do.  One little baby step at a time.