The post that almost wasn't

I almost didn't do this post.

Every time I post, it's about my feelings. Even a post I do that I swear up and down won't be about feelings, it will always end up being about them anyway.

I just don't want to do it. I have been mulling over my feelings for 3 days now, and I've come to no conclusions. I saw my brothers yesterday, they stopped to drop off some of my stuff. To make a long story short, they were traveling out west to take my parent's stuff from one house to another, and since they had some of my stuff from when I was a kid, they stopped by here to drop it off. Well they would have had their rental truck not broken down an hour down the road. So we (meaning myself, the shrew, and the kids) went to go meet them while the truck was being repaired. I got 8 boxes of stuff.

Well I got home too late last night to really look through it all, so I did most of the looking through today. As you can imagine it was quite a stroll down memory lane. High school yearbooks, pictures from grade school, every scrap of art I ever did, oh and that drum I mentioned a few posts back, the one from the '76 fourth of July parade. That was quite a thing to behold, still in excellent condition, and now it is in my possession, amazing, after 33 years. There were some things I had forgotten about, like two marionettes I played with as a child, a battery powered boat, and assorted odds and ends like my baseball glove, and some books and magazines.

The things that brought back the most memories by far were the 3 yearbooks, well 4 if you count the one from basic training for the Navy. Two of the books were from the high school I graduated from, and the other was from the Christian school I went to in the 4th and 5th grades. 1989, 1988, and 1981. I saw pictures of those I saw in classes every day, most of whom I had forgotten, but it all came flooding back just leafing through those books for the first time in 20 years. Then, I started reading the "autographs". There was a recurring theme. "You are a good friend." "You are the nicest guy." "You are so sweet, don't ever change, and don't be so down on yourself". Oh and my personal favorite, "Good luck with all the girls". See, I was a bit of a nerd in school, always the teacher's pet, getting the A's and B's, but had no luck with women. You might say I had no clue how to land a date. Not that my mother would have let me go on one, but at least I was making the attempt at procuring a girlfriend. And I liked EVERY girl it seemed. When one would shoot me down, I would just move along to the next one that struck my fancy, or more likely the one who showed even the slightest bit of interest in me. Ridiculous behavior, deplorable, and a little psychotic, if I do say so myself, it's a wonder ANY of the girls ever talked to me.

But I digress. It made me realize that when it came to women, I tended to be a little obsessive, and possessive; if there was a girl I thought I could "acquire", she was all I thought about, and for all intents and purposes, she was MINE. I was jealous of ANYONE who talked to her, or showed any interest in her. I'm sad to say that this thought process did carry over into my adult life, but only through seeing it with those adult eyes and looking back at the fool I was was I able to see that it was something I have done all my life.

The thing is, now I have a completely different idea as to what "love" is, and not just as in the differences from a child to an adult, but a really different way to approach how I feel the emotion. What I felt before, what I thought was love, was nothing more than infatuation, even lust. Not to mention the dire need I had for love and affection from the opposite sex to feel "complete", to feel "validated". I'm not going to go into it right now, I just don't have the words for it. Suffice it to say I have felt love, real love, and it's nothing like what I thought before, or what I ever thought it could be.

I don't want to talk about feelings. Logic has it's place, alongside the emotions. The memories I re-lived today and just my state of mind in the last few days, maybe a week or so, has me thinking I'm ready to move on. I have never felt before like I do now.

I guess I know now that I can let go. Yes it will be sad, I will be upset, I may even cry. But I can let it go. This isn't one of those 'I'm losing everything I ever loved, holy crap what am I gonna do' feelings. It's a sense of nothing lasts forever, and change is inevitable. Those that love me still will, and those that don't probably never did, but regardless of what others feel, it's about how I feel about myself that really counts. I no longer have a desperate need to be loved, for I have embraced who and what I am, and that alone gives me the thought process to let things go.

There is no need for the excessive flood of emotion. The obsessions and out of control way I dealt with my feelings was wrong, and if I had not seen it before, I do now. If I had one way to describe it, the words would read something like "man discovers inner adult, and puts him in charge, and puts the child to bed." That's really been the thought process for so long, one that has been very juvenile. I don't even think I had a clue what that was up until recently. I have had an epiphany or two along the way, and maybe this is one too, but either way, as I think about it more and more, ( a counterproductive operation in itself) I sense a change taking place, something profound yet so simple.

And that's what brings me back to the post that almost wasn't. I didn't really want to post about my feelings, but I just need to purge them from time to time, and so this was what happened. I've always been dramatic in my writing, and a little preachy, always wanting to make a point, give everyone that "bang" that hits 'em right between the eyes. Sorry about that folks. Sometimes you just want to read something because you want to read about someone, not get a "moral to the story" every single time. I actually had the audacity to say I know how everyone feels, that we are all the same. Oh we ARE the same all right. We know whether we want to read something that is self righteous, or go to the next blog with something more entertaining. Now that's not to say I'm putting what I wrote before in the garbage heap, it's what I felt like writing that day. I just read my own stuff later sometimes and say "what the heck was I thinking?"; "but you know, it's pretty good for that day". Cause I change every day, little things, details, I learn new things that change me.

So here I am, just writing. The weather has been good, a little rain here and there, the temperatures dropping a bit, but it's been good. My brothers seemed to be in good spirits, and the stuff they brought was amazing. The older I get it seems we look less and less alike. The kids had fun spending time with them, however brief it was, after all, one of them had not even met my youngest brother. The last time I saw him was 10 years ago, before she was born. So I was happy they finally met face to face.

I guess I should end this now, it's getting late/early. 7 o'clock comes pretty early.