Reflection

For those that read this, I'm sorry for my prolonged absence. I've been taking sometime away from this blog to try to put some of the issues of my life into perspective.

I did get married, almost 3 weeks ago now. Since that time I have gone through a lot of emotions. The day after we were married I awoke in a panic with the thought of "what have I done" because I do believe that marriage is for life and I had just binded myself for life to a man that I love yet feel so distant from.

We've been getting settled in our new home and things are pretty much back to a normal everyday schedule. On the outside I appear normal but on the inside I feel that my heart and head are in turmoil. I wonder if maybe everything just happened too fast and if maybe we should have slowed things down but it's too late for that at this point.

We watched a movie last night, Shopgirl, with Steve Martin and Claire Danes. It was strange how that movie spoke to me. In the end of the movie Steve Martin is reflecting on his character's actions and the consequences of those actions and he says,

"As Ray Porter watches Mirabelle walk away he feels a loss. How is it possible, he thinks, to miss a woman whom he kept at a distance so that when she was gone he would not miss her. Only then does he realize that wanting part of her and not all of her had hurt them both and how he cannot justify his actions except that... well... it was life."

I had started to cry for the obvious reasons (I'm a girl and I get emotional in sad movies) and for the reason unknown to my husband which is that I feel like maybe I am like Ray Porter and I push him away because I am so afraid of losing him.

That makes no sense and I know that I am my own worst enemy and that makes me weep.

Calm

As the wedding draws closer I am starting to feel an inner peace. I'm thankful for this. I' not sure what it means but I'm glad for it.

A couple of questions though, one that I posed to a pastor on his blog:
How do you forgive yourself for the things in your life you can't get over?

The other:
Is it possible to lose the ability to find pleasure in sex?

I ask this question because after my years of sleeping around and abusing my body, I have lost the ability to find pleasure in one of the things that God created to be enjoyed. Any thoughts?

Hollow

As I sit here and type this in the silence of my of my apartment I feel empty inside. As the wedding draws closer I feel less and less like myself. There was a bridal shower at my church this afternoon thrown in my honor and it was the most surreal experience. While I was truly touched at the outpouring of love that was shown, I felt so bad for not being able to truly be a part of the experience. It was like watching someone else smile and thank everyone for the gifts.

What is wrong with me? Why am I so frightened? My fiance is such a wonderful man and I do love him. I just have so much fear. I do not know where this fear comes from, it's something that's buried deep inside of me and it's eating me alive. I have just under three weeks until the wedding and I hope to reach some sort of answer before then. I never dreamed it would be this way.

Shadows

I'm feeling incredibly down today. I don' t know if it's because I'm ready to go home but I feel very alone.

Truthfully though, I haven't missed my fiance. Is that wrong of me? Should I have missed him? Is it wrong that I've enjoyed being out of town and away from him? I felt the same thing back in February when I was out of town on business. I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong with me.

I was speaking to a friend today and he believes that I do not want to marry my fiance. I explained to him that while I love my fiance, I'm just not passionate about him.

This leads me to the question, "Have I ever felt passionately about anyone?"

My initial response would be yes, but then when I stop to think about it I'm not sure I have. In high school I experienced the puppy love that most adolescents feel. In college I craved love so much I slept around. Then I met my fiance, and that special spark just isn't there.

He fills all the roles in my life that a life-partner should, yet there isn't that spark or that special something. I'm so confused, so scared and so alone.

Solitude

For the first time in a long time I didn't sleep well. I couldn't get comfortable, little sounds kept waking me up. Not even the comfort of my fiance's arms could soothe me. When I woke up this morning I felt like crying.

I feel like I'm at a cross roads in my life. I'm getting married in 4 weeks and to me marriage has always meant commitment until death. I love the thought of marriage, I think that marriages that last until death are amazing. But in the last few weeks, maybe even months, I've been wondering if marriage is for me.

To preface this statement I have always been an independent, free-spirited person. I had friends growing up but I was not the typical girl with 50 girlfriends to confide in. I hid things from even my closest friends. To this day I do not know why.

At 17, I became a "loose woman". I slept around a lot, sometimes looking for love, other times it was simply because I was horny. As I got a little older I saw the problems I was creating for myself and how unhealthy and dangerous my lifestyle was and decided to change. I became more selective in the types of men I chose to spend my time with.

Then I met him. A sweet, wonderful, caring man who had just enough life experience to be entertaining but enough naivete to be endearing. We met in school, like most people who get married after college do and we formed a friendship. I let him pursue me for awhile, because he was seeing someone and I was still licking my wounds from a previous relationship.

When we came together it was a wonderful thing, he opened up parts of me that I believed no longer existed. We went through that dreamy, wonderful stage that all new relationships go through and once reality set in we still loved each other very much.

Six months later, he proposed.

The last year has been all about planning this wedding and I have never felt more alone in my life. I yearn for the freedom I used to have, I yearn for the men I spent time with, some in bed and others just out having fun.

For so long now I have been playing by everyone else's rules and trying to live up to the expectations of everyone else that I have lost the sense of me, of who I am.

I hate this.

I feel trapped. I don't know what to do and who to turn to, so I'm writing in this blog for anyone out there who can possibly understand that this just isn't "cold feet".