Releasing Control

I am ready to stop trying to control my heart and my feelings.

I am ready to release control of trying to feel the right amount of feelings or order my feelings to arrive on a certain schedule that is synced up with someone else’s feelings. I am ready to give up trying to control not feeling too much or correct not feeling enough or pretend not to be feeling things that I am feeling to gain some kind of edge or upper hand.

I’ve had a belief that love was only possible by controlling my feelings. I’ve had a lot of false beliefs around love. That I have to work really hard for it. That I have to be perfect in order to deserve or achieve it. That I can never let my guard down or fail to stay two steps ahead in case someone is going to take their love away and I need to reject them first. All this restriction and suppression of love and feelings can’t be healthy and it’s far from genuine. And it sounds nothing at all like what I know love to be. I just can’t contain or control it when I feel it anymore, I’m ready to release control of that effort.

I recently fell in love at first site and it just completely melted my heart despite all the warnings and red flags. Sometimes you just look into another face and another’s eyes and get lost and want to stay lost there for as long as possible. It was so magnetic, so attractive, and so all consuming. I wrapped myself up in a story of love that I created, but then all kinds of problems started to arise. I wasn’t in control of my feelings. I couldn’t spend as much time as I wanted with the man that I felt so enamored of. He wasn’t available for a relationship or romance. Even the sexual connection that we originally had wasn’t fulfilling for him with me. I didn’t meet his needs in that way and he saw too many problems happening between us to want to move forward with me.

I’m not really so surprised, but I was so blissfully happy in my bubble with my ideas about him and who we might become. The bubble popped because I confessed my feelings and they weren’t mutual. But at least the bubble got to pop and I got to settle back into reality. I could have kept that story going and placed all kinds of projections and regulations and controls on love. I release trying to hide it or not feel it first or pretend that I don’t know that were both pretending so as to be the one with the power. It can be so convoluted and I often want to give up entirely. All the love that has existed in my life so far has found me. It somehow hunted me down and got me to pay attention. All the love I have chased in my life has eluded me, gotten away and taken off. I don’t know what to do about any of it, I am done trying to force anything at all about it.

It’s romantic love that has always been so problematic for me. Finding it, keeping it, admitting it, not overdoing it. I am sure I am not alone. It just is problematic, messy, confronting, dangerous, risky, so much could, and usually does, go wrong. And yet there are just some people that I want to be in the middle of it with. I want to argue, fight, compromise, make up, repair, find peace and then continue the struggle to find autonomy in partnership and growth together, as well as separately. It seems an impossible task, but sometimes I want that impossibility to be in front of me wanting me and needing me. I want so much to have the guts to be myself in love, to risk it all and be a brave warrior of my heart. I have no good ideas on how to do this…

I have left it all on the table, on the field and put myself out there 100% over and over and I am still alone. I think maybe I am doing it all wrong, but maybe I’m still looking for the right person. When I think maybe that search is over (even if only for awhile), it is the most exciting, elating moment and I feel incredibly high from the possibility. It’s dangerous how much I want it and also I’m done trying to control that process. I am done trying to understand and control love. I know in my bones that I am done. I also am not even sure what it means, but I do know somehow.

I am hoping to someday learn to be in love together. To be in it together. We are all in it together. I hear it and I want it and I also don’t know how to do it. How do I stay in it together if no one wants to be in it with me? I guess the people that want to be in it with me are in it. Those are my people. My loves. My community. Those of us that stay in it together somehow. And how can I invite living in a way where more people can stay in together with me? I will have to think about that for awhile.