Opening up

Every relationship progresses through a series of stages. Each new state in this progression has a gate, fitted with locks of differing degrees of complexity. Needless to say, since every relationship is different by the originality of its creators, that the gates and locks are always different for each level in every relationship. That is to say, level one might be unlocked by trust in one relationship, but needs a key of communication in another. Sometimes several stages pass with little difficulty, and the participants in the journey grow easily together. Other times each new gate becomes a towering inferno, a trial by fire where both participants barely make it out alive. Other's still drowns one or both of the adventurers and thus end the journey together.

The way we navigate these levels, and conquer the gates at the end of each, define us and forces us to grow. Sometimes the more imposing the complication, the more room for growth that can be attained. My partner and I have recently tackled a gate that, for some, would have been the end of the line. I would like to feel that we both navigated the locks rather well. New breakthroughs were made, secrets revealed, and fears made public. When such things are drug out from the caverns of the soul, and exposed to the light of day they explode with great force. That isn't to say you can drag every demon from it's lair, or even if removed that it wont manage to slither back. Sometimes fragments and shadows remain, they lurk and continue to seed insecurity.

I'm currently quite weakened. The energy it took to navigate the last gate has left me with but a specter of my normal mental defenses. Instead of telling myself that he chose to share this part of himself with me out of trust and love, in my weakness my low self worth and poor self image twist my thoughts into my not being good enough for him. I vacillate between being perfectly calm and alright with things, to feeling like the end is near and I have no control to stop it. Normally this special brand of crazy is kept all-to-well tucked away inside my head, but with the barriers down it's affecting what I do and how I act. I can acutely feel my clinging. It's irritating to me, so it must be grating to him; Another layer added, where I now fear my clinging will push him away. Spiral of spirals. Someone slap some sense into me, please.

For all my words, I'm a very poor communicator. I get so bogged down in the motivation behind a question that I'm often unable to answer right away. Then, should the question be complicated or deep, it often requires a significant amount of time for me to sort through all the nebulous data in my head in order to formulate my response. Often my responses are tempered by who I'm dealing with, how much I care for them, how I feel they'll think of me after the fact, etc. That doesn't mean I'm dishonest with my answer. It does, however, mean that I can often make my answer insufferably complicated, when really a simple yes or no would suffice. On the flip side, I temper my own feelings and withhold them for fear of hurting others. Often times it's because I know my feeling is a guttural response generated from inexperience, and by extension ignorance. My hope in those instances is, that by closing up and allowing some time to pass, things will be revealed and my opinion will change. Sometimes I'm right on. Other times I end up compounding issues out of fear that my timing is ill-placed, or my fears misguided. In reality I should probably just bring them to voice for the sake of confronting them.

I apply my own mental and emotional clockwork to the action of others. I believe everyone does this. We all tend to think, at least superficially, that everyone thinks and reacts as we would to given situations. On a deeper level, I'm aware this isn't true. Honestly, if everyone were to analyze things as much as I do, we'd never accomplish much of anything. True, there would be no war, but there would also be almost no wonders in the world either. My partner is an action oriented person. So in that way, he offsets my analytics by doing what he feels is best at the moment. This has made us confront some issues that I would have otherwise kept locked away until absolutely necessary. Sometimes you have to bring something up because it's not yet an issue, and the otherwise quiet air of the moment makes a better backdrop for open discussion.

Still, it's hard for me to grasp that there doesn't have to be any deep reason to "why now". The answer of "it is just time" is the answer. The hardest part is, now that it is "just time" I have a whole lot of crazy that I have to drag out in the open and deal with. That crazy has to be dealt with, and preferably before the hypothetical can/does become reality. I need him to bring the holy water, crucifix, sage, and prayer. Really, I just need to be able to find a way to express them in an open manner. Do you suppose this was sufficient?