I picked up my passport today, and as I opened the envelope and looked at the book, saw my picture, the pages for visas, the blue and gold binding... I started getting really choked up. Having that in my hand represented so much about what is to come in the months ahead.
I've uprooted my entire life. I've released so many things to make room for this. WHY?
Because... well, I'm really REALLY in love. I'm not just IN love... I FEEL loved.
Why do I feel loved all of a sudden by someone when I have been surrounded by love all of my life?
Well, it's said in metaphysics and self-help philosophies that we only feel love from others to the extent that we truly love ourselves. If I love myself (i.e. truly embrace and accept me) at about 40% and someone else truly loves me at 100%, then I will only allow myself to feel and experience up to 40% of all of that love being freely given to me. It's not that we aren't actually loved 100%, but that we don't integrate all of that life-enriching energy as a part of our structure, our perspectives, our lives.
See, it's one thing for me to feel love for someone. Ohhhh, I am SO good at that. Oh yes, big-hearted me is so perfect at loving others, but what about poor little me? Who loves ME?
For most of my life, the love I do feel from someone seems to have to be manufactured. I intellectually grasp that my friends love me, that my father loves me, that my ex's all love me (well, most of them) and that my best friends truly love me, but in the end, it has always felt like I kind of had to just pretend the love into my life. I didn't really FEEL it. I know it is there, but I just let it glide over the numbness I feel in relation to others. It's a shocking revelation, but yeah... as animated and alive and free and open and loving as I am, if looked into more closely, I carry a beautiful, gorgeous numbness that's glossy, shiny, and perfectly happy to remain untouched.
So, again: why do I feel loved now? Why do I truly feel loved by my boyfriend now when I have always been loved by others in the past?
Because he bravely and lovingly calls me out on my bullshit.
Okay, maybe someone has tried the same in the past, but that was MAYBE one person. This is the first time, though, that someone has a language that can get through to me. What he says to me is not something new to me, but are truths that I have oh-so-carefully found ways of moving around in me like crowded passengers in a subway car. I have them step aside as I move in and I make plenty of room for whatever I need to do and be, but... they are still there; shuffling around me with excuses and courtesies that have become an art.
What my boyfriend does is make absolute room for my insecurities without shaming me, calls me out on my "higher perspectives" and on my oh-so-perfect way of loving that is just a slick effort to sabotage us. He helps me to accept the room and expression needed for the emotions and feelings I may have that are sometimes a contradiction against my intellectual salves.
Seriously, this is AMAZING to me. I have never had such an invitation to safety in my life. Actually... I've never had safety in my life. Ever. I've found my sanctuary in me, in my giving, in my helping people and animals and life, but... I've never felt... SAFE.
God, this means the world to me. It means the world to me because it means something has changed in me. It means I'm starting to embrace these shuffling parts inside me that I've always protected and I'm allowing them to integrate into me. What I've been doing is keeping these parts of me safe, dividing the core of me away from these parts as a form of protection, but never really BEING safe.
It feels a little embarrassing and vulnerable to talk about not feeling safe, not feeling loved, and recognizing a kind of handicap that has gone unattended for so long. It makes me feel like I've been a fraud, or guilty for the efforts others have made in trying to love me in the past, but that's just another form of self-sabotage... and I can let it speak its heart and not lie about it; I can embrace it, and bring it home... safe and sound.
It's not my boyfriend who is doing the work for me. He can't. But he finds the words I need to hear from outside of me so that I have the opportunity to no longer ignore them from inside. I feel such surrender and peace when he calls me out on this stuff, but it's ME who has to do the actual work after that.
And I do.
Because. It. Feels. LIBERATING!
There is a huge age difference between my boyfriend and me, and despite the fact that nearly everyone, including his mom and my dad and my friends and his friends are all being very supportive and encouraging, I still had to question this time difference between us. Of course, I've also questioned the seeming insanity of leaving the country to follow my heart into a gamble that may or may not last in the way we would wish, looking closely at the risks and distance between us that had to be overcome. It turns out that the time and space are not obstacles at all.
When I look at why I am giving us a chance, it's because of the kind of love that is shared between us that I've never really experienced before. It hits me every day. It washes over me like warmth and trust and soothes my feathers of fear as I near my flight of no return. How can I NOT give this a chance? Some people may think it's crazy to uproot your life and move through space to another country, and to find common ground in the time that exists between our age differences... risking everything for the sake of a gamble on Love... but I say:
it's fucking crazy NOT to do so!
We live in a world that doesn't do enough for the sake of Love. We are so quick to develop the art of courtesy and acquaintances, or to devastate another person as a way to fill the vacuum of loneliness we carry, but how often do we take the necessary risks for LOVE? No conditions, no demands, no intent but to experience more love... in the giving and in the receiving.
The Entity I channel, Michael, has said on many occasions that most of what passes for Love is far from what love really is. I've always been able to see that in others, but only recently did I see that I was playing the same games, maybe with more finesse, but the same games, nonetheless. It's only been in the last year that I started seeing clues that I had tricked myself into thinking I was being so loving, when all I was doing was being protective.
I look forward to who I may be in the years ahead because of this recent revelation. I have lived so long the way I am, I almost can't imagine who I will be in a world where I feel safe.
But I am ready to find out.
For the longest time I was doing just fine, as if living from a room that was bright, sunny, warm, and inviting, but what has happened is that I now realize the floor I've been walking on for so long was just a layer of linoleum, dented, pitted, and worn, but working just fine. I may have gone my whole life with this layer, but now... now me and my boyfriend are pulling up the sticky mess and finding this glowing, protected hardwood that I forgot existed in me.
IT'S UNDER THERE SOMEWHERE
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4 comments:
It was so strange to read this post because it mirrors my own experience with uprooting to go to someone so closely. My husband does the same thing as you wrote your partner does. He calls me honestly on my BS and does it in a way that is non threatening and fairly neutral. I have become such a better person for it.
I know that we were meant to be together. I waited for him for most of my young adult life to show up actually. (long story there)
When I decided to move to Germany there was no real questioning it, it WAS the right thing to do at that time. It was the journey I had to make. When people would ask how I could do it my answer was usually how could I not? What others didn't seem to get is that no matter the outcome, the journey is what really matters. It is not a mistake, it is a choice to go in a direction, to grow frmo new experiences and not sit in a corner and be scared to change. I knew it was right.
This doesn't mean it was easy because looking back I don't think it was and my time here has been very up and down but ultimately in a good way.
I hope that it goes well for you, there are a lot of adjustments to make as a North American living in a very open European country but in many ways these differences are more freeing than restricting and I have found for the most part that, for some reason, Europeans seem to be more forgiving, more tolerant.
I should caveat this by adding as a white heterosexual female I kind of don't have to face a lot of prejudice than many do, but every great move comes with it's issues.
I personally love living in Europe, and I feel very free from the weird constraints that seem to abound in North America right now. I have a partner who does his best to support and care for me teaching me to do the same in return, teaching me how to love my own faults, my negatives and my positives.
He once said to me that 'you are a storm and I am a lake, storms need lakes to calm them down and lakes need storms to stir them up.'
This is not to say that we don't have our own issues and problems of course we do, but for the most part we work together to achieve something, not sure what that is yet but it's been a positive journey so far.
I thik if you dig beyond the fear a little bit you will find excitement at what is to come, at least I did. The trepidation i felt and worry was only a surface thing. I knew that if things went belly up I could always come home but if I never took the chance, well... I would always have to live with that 'what if?'
Embrace the change with love and open eyes, it is a magical thing despite the homesickness, the language barriers and the differences, underneath there are similarities and great connections to be made.
I wish you absolutely all the very best for a smooth and positive move!
-merly
MERLYN GABRIEL WROTE:
"'you are a storm and I am a lake, storms need lakes to calm them down and lakes need storms to stir them up.'"
TROY:
Ohhhh wow. This is so Jip and me! Except, I think we each can be the storm or the lake at different times, but ALWAYS seeming to bring what is needed and it always feels so perfectly balanced.
I feel as you do/did. The anxiety is totally surface. My anxiety mostly comes from issues of money and my worry of that being an issue, but the question of my commitment and love is not an issue.
Thanks so much for this post!!
troy
wow.
to open yourself so completely to love.
to go bravely and with trepidation and with faith that it is the right thing to do and with fear that it isn't and to just GO!
wishing you the best on your journey through space and your journey into love.
It has been my experience that when a thing is right it works, there is no 'resistance' it flows.
Money will come, love will abound, etc....it is all there.
But i sure know about fear and worry and above all right now lonliness of not being home... though home becomes a strange conecpt when one moves around so much. No matter where you are, when you move around there is always something or someone you will miss.
In German the word is sehnsucht.
I am certain the Michaels have tons to say on stuff like this. But to my mind you *know* when you are on the right track and when you are not.
It is very exciting!
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