Sad

I feel like someone has died.

How can you reconcile the open handed welcome of a group of people you sincerely want to be part of with the sadness that I feel right now because I have learned that they don't represent what I had hoped they were?

Perhaps I am more to blame than others because I don't fit the mold.

The issues at hand are personal and tender to me because I have ALWAYS felt like I am living my life on the outside of the group looking in at a setting that I desperately wanted to have, but couldn't.

I am blessed to have family who understands the quirks and character flaws that I am compelled to wade through until I learn to 'do it right' - whatever that means.

Equally a blessing are the friends I have who know me well enough to love me even though I am not worth loving a lot of the time. They have a piece of my heart and likewise, I hope, I have been granted a tiny portion of theirs.

What is so upsetting about this particular loss is that, for the briefest of moments, I felt like I had an online home comprised of people with whom I had much in common. While we do share some things, there are others that totally blindsided me to the point that I am left wondering what I saw to compel my interest in the first place.

Before the pity party leads you to places it shouldn't go, I am guilty as sin when it comes to creating disharmony. Seldom do I intend it. Sometimes, I deliberately seek to make someone feel as they have made me feel, but then the inevitable boat load of guild prevents me from taking any pleasure in the actions I have committed.

More often than not, just me being who I am and seeing the world through my own poor eyes and understanding my limited truth is enough to set other people off into a foaming frenzy.

What I have yet to understand is why my truth is disposeable and their truth is not? What makes them so cocksure of the rightness of their course and the wrongness of mine? Ego? Knowledge? A dynamite infused combination of the two?

And the same can be said of my own volatile nature. More likely to blow up and destroy relationships than to nurture them into a vibrant offering of my care, I tend to make things much harder than they have to be.

Part of that is due to my stupid past which is like an anchor around my feet keeping me tethered to emotions that would best be cut free. But I haven't learned that lesson yet and it doesn't come without a personal price that often affects innocent bystanders who pay a price themselves by just being near me.

Either way, something that could have been good and fine and noble, has been killed. Perhaps it died due to suffocation or it was simply never allowed to grow at all.

No less sad in any of the above options than from the truth that I perceive about the whole thing. The relationship began and ended for the same reason. It began by me trying desperately to move beyond a mere ringside seat and into the action at the Carnival of Life and it ended as I learned that sometimes the tigers DO bite and sometimes the trapeze artists fall.

Now I know why those who run away to the circus seldom stay.

Although it comes to town all colorful posters and exciting noise, it is never what it looks like on the poster and the noise is never as fun ringside when the animals are being whipped and the ringmaster isn't all that he appeared to be.

Maybe that is why moving from child to adult is sometimes a sad process, too. The delicate truth is finally revealed in all of its terrible majesty: life is seldom as advertised and eventually it's time to leave the party and just go home alone.