Online Love - Soulmate

Because I want to remember...

Meeting you. I felt so much trepidation. There is this element of mystery that surrounds online relationships. When I first talked to you on the phone your deep melodic voice intrigued me, if nothing else I fell in love as we spoke. I imagined that you were tall and thin. Who know's where I got that idea from, some deep subconscious idea about what Indians looked like? I imagined that you were strong. The straight forward, no nonsense way that you approached life made me feel it was so. Especially when it came time to look at my problems in the face, to see them as they really were. You helped me to stop equivocating when it came to doing the right thing. You always have had that effect on me.

Meeting you was a shock. The flesh and blood embodiment of Indian vitality. I found I couldn't speak. I felt all the words stuck somewhere in the back of my throat and we drove in silence as I clung to the Kola toy that you had given me.

What had made me feel so bold that I could leave my home and travel around the world to find you?

But I was there and we ended up parking in the driveway of a house on stilts. Amazing to me was unlocking the chain that went from one side to the next of it.

The house! I will never forget how strange and foreign it seemed. The carpet, recently cleaned, so thin and so seemingly ancient. The furnishings, so sparse. I re-evaluated my conception of wealth, and poverty. What was really needed to live well. I remember coming into your room, the curtain waving in the breeze. Your little stash of books and water in a jug. It was hard to imagine sleeping on that bed, but then you removed the mattress and placed it on the floor. I placed my suitcase next to it and laid down.

Remember that first night? Sleeping intertwined, sleeping deeply, crying out when you left my side. I remember.

The peaceful morning, strawberries and yogurt. Sitting on the porch, sipping tea and watching the people pass on the street. Walking and biking by... hardly anyone in a car. So different from home where passing people in loud impersonal cars is the norm.

Unfinished memories, I will write more some day...

SG

Jealousy

What is jealousy?

Jealousy, jealousy, jealousy.

In some ways it's the perception that someone has what you don't. It's the inner child jumping up and down saying "Notice Me, I am Important!" It's insecurity. Some part of it is sadness at times.

Sadness that life has moved on, circumstance have changed...

I feel it has a bit of regret and frustration built into the mix.

I suppose it has a bit of a diagnostic aspect to it. However it can eat a person inside and out, consume the mind, consume the emotions... and turn one bitter.

Bitterness is a flavor, a flavor that is a part of life... but not a pleasant one to continually taste.

So I'm striving to feel my jealousies, and to move on.

~SG

Interdependence

I usually find myself in front of a blank screen after having many varied thoughts and conversations going on in my head about my life, why I've done certain things and where I want my life to head.

It's difficult to pinpoint sometimes what the desires of my heart are. Perhaps it is the ever aching need for fulfillment that drives me on. I am looking for fulfillment in my pursuits, in my thoughts, study and in love. I feel deep sadness when people that I love move on from my life. When I become irrelevant to their present happiness. I feel frustrated and empty when I cannot fill the same niche. There is an achy place inside that wants to be relevant to others. However I've found that becoming relevant to others is sometimes an infringement upon my own relevancy. I become a model of their expectations and lose the sense of who I am. This paradox is the mysterious source of struggle for me to maintain my identity and to subvert or become part of a larger, more intimate identity, me + someone else.

I'm 34 years old and still do not live with a sense of mutual interdependence with someone else. Is it ever going to be?

Silence and Thoughts

I'm going to attempt to put into writing my thoughts about my life the past couple of years, what has driven me to stay silent when speaking up would have been a good thing, why sometimes silence is a temporary answer to a baffling situation and why speaking up is painful.

I've gone through a transformation, no doubt about that. I've come up from a somewhat difficult childhood to a point in my life where my day to day struggle to function as a responsible adult isn't as difficult as it used to be.

I've written before about my belief that I have been harmed by eating a Standard American Diet (SAD for short). I've written that I believe a large part of that harm was caused through the consumption of wheat products. It's hard to quantify how much of an impact diet played in the decisions that I've made but it's easy for me to see that what I lived with before is different from what I live with now. Though some of the traits I've learned over the years have stuck with me.

Personality wise, I have stayed very similar to what I have always been; determined, studious, kind... perhaps a bit too kind. What has kept my silence has been a desire to be kind.

In a way silence is a form of protection. People make assumptions of their own and if they are good you benefit, if they are wrong you at least know that they are wrong and move forward regardless of how they view you. In a way silence is kind. You refuse to throw peoples faults in their faces, you forebear to speak until they are in a better frame of mind. But in some ways kindness is suffocating and killing. Refusing to speak up means that you swallow the hurt and pain. It requires a certain amount of your soul to forebear and speak later. It can make someone strong, or it can slowly deteriorate and kill a free spirit and independent will.

In some ways I'm afraid to speak up, especially when I believe that the other persons reaction to my words will be negative. I'm afraid to lose love, I have lost love and it's painful. But it isn't as painful as having to live with a lie, when it means giving up self-respect and dignity. It isn't as painful as not standing up for my daughter and my sister when I had to... nor is it as painful as what would have happened in Ajey's family and in mine if I had married him. In his case, his sister could have lost a chance to marry well, his parents would have lost their son to America and would have lost his support for their business. Else I would have had to give up my life here in America to move there. My children would have lost home and family and would  have been in a state of confusion. I spoke up and I had to let go of love and friendship.

When I spoke up I did the right thing. There were so many reasons why I wasn't ready to keep going with such a serious and difficult relationship. So many things that I've been able to accomplish for my kids, my home and myself that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Hopefully I will come around to being the person I am meant to be.

Some quotes about "Thoughts"

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.” 
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” 
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Sometimes, I sit alone under the stars
and think of the galaxies inside my
heart, and truly wonder if anyone will
ever want to make sense of all that
I am.” 
― Christopher Poindexter

“There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.” 
― Gayle Forman, Where She Went

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” 
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” 
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don’t understand. Thoughts that aren’t even true—that aren’t really how we feel—but they’re running through our heads anyway because they’re interesting to think about.

If you could hear other people’s thoughts, you’d overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random. And you wouldn’t know one from the other. It’d drive you insane. What’s true? What’s not? A million ideas, but what do they mean?” 
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.” 
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” 
― Albert Einstein

“You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.” 
― Hermann Hesse

“I don't know, I don't want to talk as much. (...) It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over.” 
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables


“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live... surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

"Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.” 
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden