When the tough gets going...

I sometimes dislike friendships...mainly when they get murky and blurry when you are not quite sure where you stand with another human being and for me I always read things into the situation that might either exist or not. It makes me really nervous, uncomfortable and the coward in me always shows up and I'll retreat to the corner and whine hoping that somehow God will vindicate me.

When I was in London, I told Hannah how much I'm afraid of people, in reality I'm only afraid of them when I know we are not seeing things from the same light. I've never been a fan of conflict...I'm the kind of person who will maintain peace, even if it means I'll be squirming somewhere in the corner when another person is pushing me down. I'm getting better at it, but it's not one of those things that comes naturally to me. Maybe in this, my thirtieth year, I'll be much better at this. It doesn't help either that I'm a super sensitive person. As a child I sort of trained myself to recognize when people weren't happy with me, in which case, I'd do whatever was needed, for me to get back to their 'good grace', and even at 29, almost 30, I still get caught in that mindset. If for example a person doesn't talk to me as much as they used to...immediately, I start to wrack my brain as to what I could have possibly done for them to cease talking to me...yeah, talk about being twisted! I've always had issues with receiving my esteem based on how people respond to me, I think I've gotten better at this, but I still find myself trying to get approval from people once in while and when I don't, I sort of fall into this 'woe-is-me', no-one really likes me pouting...I know, I should be grown up by now, but regretfully, I'm not...I'm still in process...maybe when I'm 40 I'll have this down.

I really like to believe that I'm a very normal human being (which in my warped reality normal means perfect), until there's some friction or change in a relationship, then it's like all this disfunction ebbs out of me, mind you uninvited...I just hate it...I want to desperately maintain this composure of having it together...but reality keeps reminding me that I'm not all that. That I'm as f'd up as any other human being I know, and I don't need some special treatment no matter how good I think I am. It really is humbling to be human...it's all I can say.

One of the things I keep thinking about is that passage that talks about trying to take the speck out of your brother's eye, while there's a plank in yours. I think of that often when I think someone has done me wrong and I think they need to hear about it. I'm always trying to ask myself if there's someone I'm treating in the same manner as I think this person is, in which case, I have no right trying to correct this person who's wronged me if I'm doing it to another...to me it's the perfect description of hypocrisy...something that I'm pretty familiar with in practice. It's hard to be human and at the same time trying to maintain this whole idea of living out the Kingdom of God. Which lately has been the understanding that it's about having an alternative view of life. Often times, I don't want to be a Christian because it's so hard to maintain this balance...and I'm struggling right now to make sense of this...to grab a hold of this new way of thinking as prescribed by Jesus, and I have to say it's so difficult...sometimes I just want to give up. It's so much easier to payback someone the same as they've done to me, instead of coming up with a creative way to respond in which it allows the other person to really think about what they are doing.

At the end of the day, I think my desire is to feel validated as a human being. It's the feeling that I want to be recognized as valid and not insignificant. That I do count and that I matter, regardless of who I am. I think that's why tension always comes up with people...because none of us want to feel beneath another person...the trick is how do you let the other person know your validity as a human being without using violence and passive aggressiveness?