Saving the World

I am super frustrated today by people unwilling to budge a little to admit a bit of responsibility and do something to solve a small problem.

It is my belief that I am an unexceptional (though awesome) human being, and that everyone cares about other people and systemic functioning as much as I do. But time and again, I am proven wrong. Should I trust people selling me their used car? Probably not entirely. Should I assume that other people want to help as much as I do? Probably not. Perhaps I should pay a little less attention to global problems and a little more attention to my own.

I didn't become this way on accident. I was raised to depreciate my own health in the interest of the well-being of others, and this seems to be an issue I'm still working through. Now, my occupation is evidence that I care a lot about other people, and it offers me opportunities to continually manage boundaries, but it is also evidence that my "helping others before myself" attitude is not easily ignored - it's something I deal with regularly, and something I often have to keep in-check.

Call me a fascist commie, but I think that we, as human beings, need to pay attention to one another a little more, and ourselves a little less. We need to think about how our actions affect others a little more, and our smart phones a little less.

Have you ever been in love?

I don't have relationships with exes. I imagine that some people do. As I said before, I am like a sponge, and I don't do well managing feelings without slipping into old patterns. I doubt it's always the healthiest option, but for me, it's the best one. It protects my heart, and in odd cases, the hearts of other people (I just don't imagine anyone is too hung up on me post mortem).

And it works well. I leave, try again, mess up again, and no one is destroyed in the process. I was finding that every time I went back to my ex-boyfriends, my heart only became more attached, and more difficult to pull out of the relationship. Where once we might have been able to make somewhat of a clean break, re-entering the fray only made it more difficult to leave a second time without major trauma to my heart. Maybe our hearts were made for monogamy. I don't know. Sometimes I imagine that they are. But I don't think that our human-ness makes us able to not hurt eachother, and sometimes moving on is the best thing for everyone involved. Maybe in a perfect world, we could all mate for life, but I doubt anyone makes it to adulthood without breaking a heart or two.

Be kind. Being a grown-up means sacrifice, usually the sacrifice of things we thought we needed to survive. Maybe it can be okay to let go, if it means that in the end, you save a heart or two.