Raising my bar - why has it taken me so long

This is for me and also for a good friend of mine here. You know who you are. :)
Say it with me:

I deserve a partner who is an emotional adult.
I deserve a partner who willingly and freely offers support and care, without doing it just to garner something for himself.
I deserve a partner who does at least as much giving as he does receiving (and no 'taking' - an interesting and notable difference), and heck, maybe even a little more. :)
I deserve a partner who encourages me to grow and to become my best self.
I deserve a partner who wants to grow and become his best self.
I deserve a partner who strives for authenticity, who is self-aware, and who is open to looking for blind spots in his self-awareness.
I deserve a partner who is generally happy, optimistic, and positive, and who doesn't approach life from a "victim" position.
I deserve a partner with whom I can share my deep creative and emotional passions, and also my intellect.
I deserve a partner who will treat me with compassion, grace, and selfless love, and who can internalize it when I do the same for him.
I deserve a partner who brings his own store of life energy to our relationship, rather than expecting to ride along on mine.



More to come...

And I thought I was so alone in it

It has been the height of folly or self-absorbed foolishness on my part to think or ever have believed for one moment that my sense of desperate aloneness has been something wholly unique to me, as in some scourge with which I alone - oh woeful victim of the universe, I - have been plagued.

This from a favorite author, David Richo, in this case in his introduction to "When Love Meets Fear":

"We will look at some major fears... [including] the fear of aloneness. We will discuss the void: the inner sense of total emptiness in which nothing works and we feel hopeless in the grip of desolation and desperation. I feared all these things myself in the course of my life - with many currently on the screen - so I share what I have learned with you."

I've been encountering it left and right in my readings of late. This horrid lost aloneness bullshit, the subplot of my life, turns out is just... a regular 'ole common part of the human condition, the human fragility born of fear... born of being human.

Who knew.

Open, close, implode

Thought my life was opening up... I really did. So I took a risky step forward into the unknown to embrace it... and then KABLOOEY! ... Everything blew up in my face. The whole damn thing imploded, just like that. Reduced to shell-shocked rubble. All the energy that had gone into building it up - for naught, wasted. All the hopes, the fantasies of what might be - foolishness, mockery.

Reading this book right now about learning to live "consciously," and the author promises how life will open up with new creativity and aliveness when you get it down. And I just want to say, "Fuck that! Am I really supposed to open up to such foolish, narcissistic hopes again? How long have I been on this train of life?"

Damn long, that's how long.

Alone alone alone alone alone

I'm about to go crazy from aloneness. Alone alone alone alone alone.

I have a dog in distress laying at my feet, and enough adult capability to deal with and take care of him - but just barely - and he is and has been my closest and most faithful companion these last two years, and all I can think (secondary to thoughts of anger at the supposed "pet sitter" who is responsible for his injuries) is how I don't want to be going through this alone, how I want and need some comfort and assurance in this, the safety of someone else by my side to cope with this with me and to offer comfort in my distress about it all. And yet there is, as always, no one. No one.

And I'm just weary. Weary and trying to maintain an adult state and be present and available for the care of my buddy when what I could more easily do is regress into the giving up state of depression. I've been fighting it up to now for my own sake and with small steps of hope, but this latest painful trial has come when there is nothing ahead to look toward and I'm confronted with anger, with the heartless selfishness of humanity on so many several sides, with the emptiness of ALL... I feel like a balloon never tied off, released accidentally, whirling around with a screech and as the air inside starts to finally runnnnnn out...

I heard the Governor of Colorado today offer this quote - am I the only one who thought he offered it soooo misguidedly and without understanding the context around which the author wrote it? - He offered only the very first line but the rest is so very important from the author's intent and mindset! "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Ernest Hemingway

Should I break? Someone tell me how and maybe I'd do it. I think I keep resisting... and here seems to be my fate spelled out.