.

"too many people hurt by me trying not to be hurt"

In my young adult days I travelled (ran) a lot and left several people behind without a goodbye. When I saw them again I was totally surprised by their anger at me leaving them without a word. I never once considered that they would care if i left, never once imagined that they would care enough about me to want me to stay in their lives. I just needed to run!

"too many people hurt by me trying not to be hurt"

Many of us can write a book based on this one line in your poem. It took a lot of years for me to realize that building walls to protect myself from the evil that existed in people also barricaded me from all the good that radiates from them. For me, I learned, it was impossible to fortify against one without blocking the other especially sense we all seem to have the capacity for both good and evil in varying degrees.

.

MarkK -

*** or do we wall off the bad and the good along with it.
***

That has definitely been my experience. I never learned how to separate the good from the bad feelings. So i shut down completely and lost them all. now, with feelings coming back, sometimes i still can't tell the difference and even the good *feels* very painful. But they are starting to separate and i'm learning now - very late - to recognize and appreciate BOTH.

Regards,
Lee

I'm not sure that I saw the choice early on. I don't think I was aware of what I was doing until I had been doing it for years and losing a lot of good things and people. Hearing things like "Desperado" among others and slowly beginning to work on becoming conscious of what i was doing was when I started to change.

The sign of a wonderful poem is the conversations it sparks – nicely done MarkK.

I don’t think there is much question that each individual has to assess their own needs and desires before deciding what price they are willing to pay to find connection and free affection. It varies for me. When it comes to my wife I’ll chance everything to keep our connection tight. I have found to hold back only serves to create more pain and discomfort. Here it is a mixed bag. I’ll open up and then withdraw and I can’t seem to find my comfort zone. When I open up I feel the pain which clearly outweighs my ability to remain vulnerable so I withdraw for a few days to up to a couple of months. Then I miss being amongst you and the few who have embraced me so I return and try to open my defenses only to find myself withdrawing again. It’s crazy making for sure and I don’t understand how I can be so successful with my immediate family and fail so miserably here with guys I want to feel a kinship with.

Earl, when you speak of failure you must be speaking
in the past tense.

Dancr6,
The past, both good and bad, never leaves us it is part of our permanent foundation. Unlike a building there is no taking down the structure and starting over or relocating away from it. No, we can never move, it is one of our only possessions. One can reface it so to make it appear beautiful by hiding the damage which I’ve tried and it didn’t go so well. We can try denying the weaknesses within the structure but doing this has proven to lead to crumbling disaster. Or, I guess, one can spend hours drilling into the cement that supports us and bolting above and below the cracks so as to strengthen the base which is what I’m trying to do. The problem is I have no training, I’m not a human engineer so I don’t know how best to go about it. What looks good to me is often seen as a blemish or out of square to others. But I keep drilling and plugging because the alternatives of denial or polishing the exterior hasn’t worked.

So to answer your question – no it’s not in the past and it never fully will be. But this realization does not leave me feeling hopeless, far from it. I just can’t keep denying the cracks and blemishes that are part of who I am.

I have no intention of denying cracks and blemishes, nor do I hide my shadow side, but I have come to a place where I see it all as a whole. I have a shadow side and a glorious side, they are only dichotomous when i chose to view them as such. I am good and evil, beautiful and hideous, compassionate and cruel. I want to respond from the side that I see as growth producing, I might love you and simultaneously be annoyed by parts of you, but I chose to respond to the parts of you that I love.
I know you, as do we all, have a shadow side, I want to show compassion for him but I want to communicate with your glorious side and talk about the shadow in the third person, i think we will accomplish a lot more.