Pick-up-sticks

Pick-up-sticks. That's what my life is like right now. Every single one of the things that I do has been dumped into a huge messy pile, and I'm trying to pick them up one at a time without making the pile even messier.

Having activity-ADD isn't helping either. I can't decide which stick to pick up first, and halfway through extracting one stick I'll drop it and move on to another one. This has to be the least effective way to reorganize my life, and honestly I haven't seen any real progress. I keep telling myself that I'm not going to see immediate results, that this is like the knot in Maniac Magee (which is an amazing book) ... that I have to do things a little bit at a time, then take a nap, than wake up and finish the job.

I recently revisited Stuff Christians Like, amazing.

Relationships are confusing me. Especially since I recently took another look at how my parents relate to their brothers and sisters. They're friends, they call, email, visit, friends. So what are friends? I don't even know if my parents still talk to their childhood friends. Well, I sort of do, they talk about them occasionally, and sometimes we use them for host housing (and they use us for the same so its okay.) But, c'mon, these people were BFF's when they were kids, and now they barely talk to each other. That's so sad. Am I going to be the same way? I remember when I was younger one of my best friends moved to Colorado... I wrote them once (I was about 8, I didn't have email) and they wrote back and we didn't say anything to each other for years. Then, at the Colorado Open (was that three years ago? I think so... ?) we stayed at their house. It was so weird, we were both so different, and although we had common memories, we had a huge gap of time that neither of us could relate. They've since moved back to NH, but we're still not friends like we used to be.

If a friendship can fall apart that way, was it ever really a friendship?

It used to be a joke between Andrew and I, that we were acquaintances. People thought it was funny, that we had been duo partners twice (three times now) and we still "hadn't been introduced". It was a laugh. But is the reason it was funny because it was true? Andrew will go to collage, I'll go to collage, we'll move to different places in this country (or out of it) and... we might just fall apart.

And the really sad bit is that I have to fight to care. Apathy is telling me that that is normal, that I'll make new friends, that I can let my life fall apart, that I can get rid of this old set of pick-up-sticks and get a new set. That's what I'm telling myself. That I can cope, that I can manage, that it will hurt a little but it will only hurt more if I try to hang on. That I'll only make things harder for myself by resisting the inevitable.

And... that's not okay. What if I don't want new friends, what if I don't want a new life, what if I like this set of pick-up-sticks? What if I don't want to cope, don't want to manage, what if I want it to hurt? What if the pain of hanging on is worth it? What if I give up and let go and then find that I could have endured the hurt? What if things aren't so inevitable? What if making things harder will be the best thing that I could ever do? What if the bittersweet pain of keeping the life I have is better than the pain of loosing it? I love you people, and even though I know that I'll meet other people that I'll love just as much, my love for each of you is different and unique and - I think - a beautiful thing.

I hardly talk to my sister anymore. I really should. I remember that her departure from home was gradual. It started with camps, a month, missionary trips, two months. And everybody around me missed her more than I did. I missed her, but I shut that up inside me, hid it, put on emotional armor to protect me from the hurt of the time when she would leave for good. So now, I hardly miss her. I've told myself that it's normal for her to go, normal for siblings to drift away, normal not to miss her. I've given myself a heart of stone, locked my memories of her inside it, never to be let out, because they'd make me miss her. And because I'm protecting myself, I'm hurting her.

I'll be honest. I've done it with countless others. If I ever loved you, and lost, I'll hide it. I'm good at hiding what I feel. I have an emotional poker-face. And whenever some emotion flits across it, it hurts, so I work harder at keeping a straight face. Odds are, you've never really known what I was thinking. Odds are, there are countless blog posts that I thought about making but decided not to because that would make me vulnerable. I've taught myself to think that to display emotion is to display weakness. That to feel pain means that I am not strong enough not to feel it.

Which is so sad. And part of me feels that I should care more. But again, Apathy tells me that to care is weak. I am a mind divided against itself. And only the smallest part of me really knows that what is happening to me is wrong, and that the winning side of my mind is the wrong side. But that smallest part is to small to do anything about it. Yet.