Blog entry for:

between who i thought i was and who i am becoming, is how i deal with giving and receiving love. living in a world where i believed that **love hurts,** it was difficult to accept what i was being given as anything but an attempt to trap me in a place that would leave me more broken and alone, in the long run. love was for suckers and the weak and i was too smart to allow myself to grow dependent on getting love from anyone.
as i stayed clean and learned how to live a program of recovery, i begin to see that my theories about love were riddled with confirmation bias and bolstered by what i believed was the definition of a “strong” man. those so-called theories kept me from getting the gift of love from others and made me wary about allowing myself to give love. it was not until the middle of my third set of steps, when i finally decided it was time to actually explore my theories about giving and receiving love, in an objective manner and see where the evidence took me. my first and very premature conclusion was that i was “too broken” and only had a limited capacity to love. when i tested that conclusion out, i discovered that, that too, was another lie i told myself to assuage the echoes of the past. the fourth round of steps, hammered home that i was quite capable of missing the forest for all the tress, and when i pulled my sights back, everything i knew about the exchange of love was quite wrong and needed to be revised.
that revision process is still underway, but today, i know that i have the ability to exchange love, when i allow myself to get over my bad self. today, just for today, i will be there for those in my lifer, who are anxious about the results of the election. i will be better at letting go of what i perceive as disrespect and stop taking on the opinions of others as a personal affront. most of all i will be as free as i possibly can from the chains of my past that still try and bind me, including all my mixed-up notions about what love is and is not.

∞ DT ∞