This might not be one for the book, but it is one for me to write instead of making a fool of myself being locked in the head with these thoughts.

I had a dream. In that dream, an ex called me. She was very drunk. She had friends who were there helping her to get past me. She wanted to call, and she did, but her friend took the phone. Her friend explained to me that she had moved on. Her friend explained that she has been sleeping with other people, that she is free now, and that she won't be getting the phone back because the friend is protecting her from me.

The protecting-her-from-me very much hurt my feelings in that moment. It felt like a gunshot went through my heart. The sleeping with someone else actually hurt less. But what she wouldn't say, and it's only through the power of universal vibrations (telepathy perhaps) that I was able to sense that she would think of me as the Chip to her Maggie. If she were the Ian to my Maggie, I was the Chip for hers. She won't say this because she is still too nice and trying not to hurt me. She doesn't want to tell me that she has had one night stands, that she found someone that could actually give her the pleasure she was looking for. And now that she found this pleasure, she thinks back to how it was with us, and she knows that it can never be. Her sexual desires for me are no longer there, and the freedom to explore the sexuality is a freedom that she is not ready to abandon. The love is lost. The feelings that once existed have been evaporated. It was going out and drinking and fucking that she found she wanted to just be out there doing whatever and living this "free" life.

The more she has been with these friends, the more she has been encouraged down that path. She had longed for the support to do what she wanted to do. The sex just sealed the fate.

All this came through in the dream that betrayed me. It was a difficult waking up, and a painful experience to wake and wonder if any of that had actually happened. I thought to myself, "nooooo!" But the mind had picked up on a frequency, and it tuned so intensely to that one. The other signals were lost in this loud moment. The mind wants to scream at me. There is a piece of my head that is trying to protect me and it says it must be true and it must be accepted, because continuing forward without accepting that "truth" would just be harmful. The mind wants to look to all the red flags and convince me that this was bad from the beginning. There is another voice in the head, a much quieter one, that says this cannot be so. The heart feels what the heart feels. But the head can do its tricks. The head can convince me of something, and I run the risk of classifying the entire thing as a mistake. The entire thing was not meant to be, the mind says. It was only a brief interlude on the way. God bless the broken road, that led me straight to you. Then the broken road continued, and she became more gravel for the broken road. There I am alone again on this broken road, wondering who it is actually leading to.

This doesn't have to be the case. It is not my choice though. I cannot force this particular outcome. I can only wait patiently and be the awesome person and great friend. Teasing that once felt playful now feels like it's crossing a line. The empathy inside me causes me to question any of these moments, wondering what the effect on the other person might be. I have doubts in my messages now. She is guarded now. She doesn't share now. She is still trying to do what she thinks is for me. That's a form of love, but it's not true. Withholding cannot be the basis for love. Open and honest communication is the only basis for love and a future. Anything less than that is a betrayal of the other person. If I withhold, then I am not doing them any favors. If they withhold, they are just leading me down a path. If one cannot step up to let the other one know that there is nothing there, and will be nothing there, then the "love" is misguided. I cannot string someone along just to cut them out, knowing they never had a chance, hoping to never have to say the words. That's not love. That's fear. That just feels like a repeat of the pattern that got to this point in the first place.

I believe in honesty. I believe in telling someone else that they have something in their teeth. I believe in telling someone else that there's a stain on their shirt. I believe in telling someone else that there will never be a future here the way the other person sees it. That level of honesty is brutal, and it cuts to the core. It rips away hope for the future. I agree, it does those things. It is also the most loving thing I feel I can do for another. Can I let them live with this false hope, knowing the entire time that nothing will come of it? I cannot do that.

I fucked it all up. I sent some messages that were like we were friends again. My mind is yelling at me and berating me for saying something about her instead of about the book. My mind tells me that it was too much, I went too far, I got too comfortable with her. I should have been on my guard and not joking about something that went beyond the book, that went to us. I crossed that line, and now I cannot go back. I should have... Catch myself there. Should is a judgmental word. There are what I could have done, but there is not what I should have done. I did my best in the moment, and there was laughter on my side. But that was the complacency setting in.

Everything becomes so difficult when playing with the heart. My heart is set on one thing. That one thing is her. My head is trying to protect my heart and use the logic to overcome the feelings. Once the feelings are gone, they are gone, never to return. There's more logic for me. But it is also affected by those around. The people around would judge me if I took her back. Hell, I don't want to take her back in that way. I want my friend. Whatever happens after that is up to the universe. What I see today is possibility. What the other might see today is a road of pain. The mistakes of the past are not being healed because they were never addressed in the first place because of fear. Now that same fear is in place and it prevents the truth once again. I cannot see the future. I fear that I am hurting someone else because I keep trying. I fear that I might actually show that I have changed, that I listened. The other might see how they were too late when they finally do come back around. There is no chance that the other can go back and find the love again because they spent all that time erasing the love. The other voice in the head has become so loud, and it has so much encouragement. That voice loudly proclaims that it was never good from the beginning, and this was some test from the universe that was getting me ready for the next thing. If I continue to convince myself of the delusional path, then I will walk down in ignorance, only to find there is nothing there, it was all made up in my head. That's the protector again attempting to move me along from the current state. But the protector is wrong. The feelings exist. There is nothing to protect against. There is an honesty and safety that exists in this moment, and I cannot allow the mind to override the heart. The anxiety and fear are very loud. They have a lot of control. There is chaos in my mind, and a battle rages between who might offer the correct guidance. The battle calms, and I breathe, with a hand on my heart, and the assurance that I am safe. No harm can come to me. The anxiety need not control. The pain need not be protected against.

It's the half truths that hurt the most. If there was a love like no other, a feeling that overtook the body, then it cannot be whisked away in a moment. There exists in me the recognition that those things are true. But love is a verb. Love is not some feeling that can fade. Love is not the intense passion that we feel. It is not the desire to be next to another. Love is what I do. Loving someone else should definitely come in the form the other would like to be loved. But it cannot be overshadowed. She stopped loving me long before she left. It was the shift away from doing for another that caused the loss of the feeling. Or was it the other way around, the feeling was gone and so the love stopped. Not sure that I'll be able to figure that one out by myself. This is a conversation with another, this is not something that I decide in a vacuum by thinking through all the pieces. I also cannot trust myself because of my own insecurities. The filter through which I see this other person and their actions has direct affect on my characterization of the relationship. My own lens shapes my perception. If I never question the lens, then I can never know if something is what it was or just what I thought it was. It's like being color blind. I knew the color because I saw the color. No one can tell me different. When I find a group of people that will support me, they are supporting my wrong belief. They are supporting and not questioning. The ones who question, those are the ones who care. At least, I can see how the ones who don't question are caring in their own way. They are caring for a different part of my being, but they are not caring that I see the world in color. They are caring that I feel supported, no matter how wrong I might be. There are those who have told me that I women suck, this particular country's women are even worse, and someone else's experience is being used to classify this person in that group of people that should be avoided. There are those who would tell me that I dodged a bullet and got lucky. Although, it doesn't feel like I dodged the bullet. It feels like I got hit by the bullet and am now trying to convince myself that it wasn't right all along. The others are there to support me past all this. They don't see how I actually played a part in this because they are on my side. They will say that I did nothing wrong, they know me, and when they hear about what that other person did, then they are on my side all the more. The story that is being shared has two filters, one when the information came into my head, another when it came out, and wait there's three filters, the one from the other person why the receive the information. Then we can classify in the way that fits my narrative best. I can be fuly supported and find justificaiton in the decision. The one who says, "are you sure you're doing the right thing here," that's the one that is trying. But that one won't push much beyond the first question. A therapist might dig in and say, why would you feel beneath them? Why would you see their actions that way? The good therapist will question my lens.

I write it here so I don't make a fool of myself and put too much on another. As you can see, there is way too much for a text or a phone call. This is a lifetime of days spent talking together. The healing that is needed doesn't come in a call or a text, it comes in the safety of the arms of another. It comes through the truth, not half the truth. It comes when I am questioned. If my insecurities don't allow me to move beyond some of these things, and my insecurities prevent me from having a conversation, the fear prevents is, the "love" prevents me from pushing this person or sharing the bad news with them. This inability to hurt someone else is not love. It is a weakness that is born of fear. That fear is that I will hurt another person and experience a loss. That fear keeps me stuck.

The one that jumps out at me is a conversation that was never had. There was once discussion about how I couldn't tell certain things because I feared how the other person might be affected. I shared that fear with the other person, and they took offense to the suggestion. They were offended that I might think they can't handle what I am going to say. They told me that I thought so little of them that they couldn't handle it. I listened, and I started to share all of the things because I trusted that they could handle it. I did not want them to think that I think less of them, and they can't handle the thoughts. This was my mistake, and it is what I was referring to when I said I should probably stop saying all the things in my head. The things in my head triggered the insecurities of another. When I would say that I don't want to tell them because I worried it might trigger their insecurities, they would be upset that I thought they couldn't handle it. Guess what happened... My words triggered insecurities and echoes. The other person filtered my words through their insecurities, and they internalized what I was saying as judgment rather than a loving push in the right direction, which was the intent. However wrongly executed, it was what they asked me to do. When I didn't do it, I was thinking so little of them that they couldn't handle it. When I did do it, the words were internalized as judgment and criticism rather than the loving and caring observation.

I didn't want to change this other person. They thought that I thought they were beneath me. My words were encouraging and uplifting, most of the time. My words could also be harsh at times. The love was there, and the only thing that needed to change about this other person was that they would be able to stand up tall and feel confident in their own body and mind. It is not my task to change anyone. It is my task to love and support them as they are, and that love and support sustains them until they can do it for themselves. I know how to do that with financial support for them, but I did not know how to do that with emotional support. That stemmed from my own upbringing. It was my own misguided mother and father that instilled these wrong ideas. I am now questioning my own lens. I see how I learned it wrong, and I see that the intense independence and forced evolution that I experienced is not the secure way to develop a relationship. I also have a new theory that I don't treat children different from adults, and people operate from where they are. They operate on a basic set of needs, adults and children. There are definitely topics and boundaries that should be set with all people. Those boundaries are different with adults and children, but the provision of love, kindness, support, and safety does not differ.

That'll be all for now. I'm not sure how much of this one will make it to the book because this is more of a realization about how things went so wrong because of my half truths, the result of fear, and the way my parents loved and supported me. I was never given credit for just being. It was only when I performed. I made the mistake of trying to judge others on their achievements and to rank them. My Chinese name is YiLong. It means one dragon. There is a Chinese parable called one dragon, one pig. It tells the story of two children who started with the same advantages and all the same ability. The story is one comparing laziness with sustained effort over time. The small daily choices are what make us into either a dragon or a pig. Being disciplined through sustained daily effort results in grand rewards. There is another story of an old woman who was grinding an iron rod on stones. A boy found her at work and asked what she was doing. She replied, "I'm making a needle." The boy was in shock. He couldn't believe that a large iron rod could become a needle. He asked how. The old woman replied, "if I keep grinding, little by little, it will become a needle." These are the stories that give me hope that my small daily efforts will get the result. These stories are told to children to impress upon them the importance of doing the daily hard work. It is only through the daily grinding that the rod becomes a needle. It is that same effort that makes one into a dragon. There is a balance to be struck. My problem is that I heard of the old woman grinding little by little. I took that to the extreme and neglected all else to grind constantly, lots by lots, to get the needle faster. I neglected my health, my friends, my family, and I told myself that I was making a needle. When the needle was done, then I would be able to have time for the other things. My mind took this parable and twisted into a perverse adaptation that caused pain in other areas, but that pain was ignored. Because the logic of the mind gave purpose and meaning behind it all. Those who could not see it were ignorant, and I was the only one willing to sacrifice myself to make a needle. I'm starting to see how that went wrong.