“Yeah…

…I’m an oak alright.” -Wyatt Earp in Tombstone

The ancients always praised fortitude.  Fortitude, to my way of thinking is standing on the pillars of your beliefs.  That type of unsung courage that comes from deep-seated conviction.  We seem to have forgotten fortitude in our times.  Subjectivity has undercut fortitude.  But this isn’t going to be a philosophical rant.  I need to vent my brain a bit.

A long time ago, I made a bunch of decisions.  A bunch of them.  I decided what I wanted my life to be about, what kind of a man I wanted to become, how that would play out in my experience.  Most of that stuff, you could guess pretty easily.  A large portion of it had to do with my religious convictions about who Jesus was and is.  But there were a bunch of smaller things I decided about too.  I’ve already written about some of them.  I’ve written about the kind of life I wanted–self-sufficient and average, with a few perks as the reward for hard work.  I don’t like to be given anything…my pride won’t let me take charity.  I have a very difficult time taking help from people.  I was raised to be independent, to not need help.  And that’s the way I am currently.  And I didn’t and don’t want help.  I refuse to be a pity case.  I believe very strongly in my ability to get through whatever life throws at me.  I’ve not had as much to deal with as some–I’ve probably been lucky in that regard–but there have been some curve balls I’ve had to deal with.  Regardless, I’m not here to compare my experience to anyone else’s.  I don’t know enough about how people deal with their lives from their own frames of reference to comment and be right, so I’m not going to bother.  I’m stalling.

Growing up, I believed that relationships worked in certain ways.  I built a structure for friendships based on what I saw after the horrific middle school experiences I had that I’m sure are at least somewhat commonplace.  I decided that I wanted to be a man’s man–stoic, dependable, trustworthy, loyal, etc, etc.  It might sound cliche, but it’s true.  In high school, I only grew deeper into the conviction that is what I wanted to be when my other beliefs about relationships (namely my relationships with girls) got thrown back in my face and used against me.  I had to change my paradigm, and it caused another shift under my feet.  After high school, my freshman year of college, I had to correct my view again, because the corrections I’d made to my system were causing other people pain.  That shift was painful, because I had to face the pain I’d buried after the disasters of my high school relationships.  It took me a couple of years to even be able to think straight about it.  It seriously threw me into a tailspin, and I had to hit bottom before I recovered.  That whole period, looking back, was very self-absorbed on my part, and I’m kind of ashamed of it now, but I guess we all go through stages like that.

The place where I ended up on the issue of where I fit in relationships changed in regards to my female friends after that.  I wanted to stay aloof as possible, so I made a bunch of rules to keep them and me safe from the nastiness I’d seen developing in my life.  Some of the rules were obvious.  You don’t get into a relationship unless you’ve thought about it and prayed about it first.  You don’t tell anyone your feelings about another person unless you can take them finding out.  You avoid the women you like and care about, because they deserve better than what you have to offer.  Some of the rules weren’t quite as obvious:  No one gets within arms distance, because touch is something you can’t deal with constructively.  And I made the rules my protection.  No one gets too close if you keep the rules.  It’s the perfect bubble.  It’s like a disconnect from the world of relationships altogether.  And it worked.  In time, I healed.  I had to dig out of the grave I’d put myself in, but I did and eventually, I found myself back on my feet.  It took a long time, and it was a painful process, but I did it.  (With lots of help along the way, as you might well expect.)

That isn’t to say anything to how I see myself except that I don’t trust me.  I don’t think I’m a bad guy.  That’s not what this is about.  I think I’m a pretty decent guy.  At some point, I think I’ll make a decent husband, father, etc, etc, etc.  But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about protection.  You have to protect yourself.  The world is full of people who aren’t interested in protecting you, so you have to take care of that yourself.  At least, that’s what I told myself.  That I had to keep myself protected, and I left the grid in place.  The rules were like a warm blanket–comfortable, safe.

I’m pretty staunch in all my beliefs.  I believe I do pretty well with the fortitude, for the most part.  But there is one place where I have never really been able to convince myself to demonstrate fortitude, and it’s with my rules.  It’s almost as though, even though my rules are comfortable, I don’t really believe them.  I simply practice them out of fear for what would happen if I didn’t.  I don’t really believe that touch is bad.  (Quite the contrary, in fact.)  I don’t really believe that I can’t talk to anyone about my feelings.  But I believed them for so long now that I find myself at an impasse.  I am so frightened of putting the rules down and living that I can’t let go of them.  I know I have to, but I don’t know how.  And so I need some help.  (Yeah, you have no idea how uncomfortable that is to say for me.)  To put it another way, imagine that you’re on a mountain, and you’ve got a rope to catch you if you fall.  So, you fall, and the rope saves you, and in the process, you grabbed it as though your life depended on it.  When you get to the bottom, back to solid ground, you don’t need the rope anymore, but your deathgrip on the rope is such that no amount of thinking will get you to release your hands.  Does that make sense?

So, all of a sudden, one day, I’m going about my business, and I sense fingers working on my grip on the rules.  I have no idea how someone got close enough to be there without me knowing it.  It’s like they were invisible until they touched the rules, and then all of a sudden, I panicked.  I gripped the rules as tightly as I could, but it didn’t change the fingers working on my grip.  I’m still trying to figure out how they got under the radar, because that isn’t an easy thing to do.  The problem only compounds when I realize that the person wasn’t even trying to get in, they just kind of got there by accident, and might not even want to be there.  (This is starting to get kind of abstract now…I’m sorry.)  But again, I can feel my grip being fiddled with and I know that I’m going to have to let go of the rules.  So I wig out, come up with excuses for the rules, justifying both them and me in the process.  I rationalize, I come up with reasons I need to maint