Of Fear And Brakes.

My past experiences have made me extremely wary of making new friends. I have a natural tendency to believe that women are shallow and have no interest in investing their lives in the difficult aspects of my own. I have a natural tendency to believe that any man I form a close friendship with is going to result in that friendship ending in disastrous seperation. Yet I still have the desire to spend time with people and share time with people: even if it doesn't get deep. I want to coexist with others, even though I fear relationship. I have appreciated the friendships that have been forming over the last two and a half months: they have been filled with brief encounters of genuine affection, bouts of honest and raw conversation, and long hours of coexisting with lightheartedness. I have been comfortable with them because they have not been both time intensive and intense. This is not the way I have ever been before, but years of life and experiences have changed me into someone I never foresaw myself being.

I fear adding another person to the list. I fear what has happened before happening again, and even though a friendship can sound like something so simple, I have seen good turn to bad and like a car sliding into an intersection it was impossible to see it coming until it was too late. I want to put the breaks on early now. Too early for anything to go wrong. The past few weeks I've been watching history repeat, and entries from the beginning of ASIH are starting to apply to the now once again; they're like a guidebook to me. And with that I am beginning to realize how deep rooted my fear is. I do not want to add you to the list: I'm scared of you, yet my desire to coexist is proving just as strong as my fear. I want to push away and tip toe forward, I want to be completely honest about the now, or maybe hide it indefinitely. Lord have mercy, I am not up for a new mess. I am not up for a new disaster. And a small holy voice from countless characters I have idolized over the years is telling me, "be strong and courageous. Don't let fear rule your life."

I am tiptoeing forward with terror and conviction, ready to put the breaks on at any moment. Ironically enough, I have a new friend who has taken the breaks completely off his bike: less weight. He says he never really needed to use them except for one time: and even then they didn't help him much. I can think of a number of times in which my breaks were invaluable to me. There are some situations though in which breaks are not going to help you: the disaster is just inevitable. Maybe you shouldn't have been going so fast in the first place, maybe you should have been more wise as to what route you were going to take or how you were going to take that corner, or maybe like my friend who got hit earlier in the semester, there is just nothing you can do when things happen too fast.

I like to be ready with my breaks: but maybe in the end I just need to stop paying attention to them. If I pay attention to my speed, am wise with what route I take and how I approach the corners I won't need them. And for everything else--what's going to happen is going to happen: sometimes no amount of breaking can stop disaster. And that's when you have to listen to the voice of God as he tells you: "it is well, I claim this situation and I claim that it is okay."

10/15/11