These are some ramblings I composed in an email that I never sent, but it seems better suited for Blood and Guts anyway.

The only difference between feeling lost
and feeling free
is a state of mind.

Earlier tonight that thought got into my head and I've been mulling it over since. That one day the very things that give your life meaning can become your shackles. Then I read a blog talking about a teen marriage and why the girl who had wed so young was selling out her dreams in order to resign herself to "pumping out babies," as one commenter put it. But the teen countered she had done no such thing. Because she said that she was living her dream--to be a good wife and mother.

This aroused such a cacaphone of conflicting voices in my head (one wears a bra, and one wears birkentocks) that I had to put it all down on paper.

I've done these things. I've both thought that the only reason worth living was adventure and change, then thought that the only reason was to find love and create a family full of it.

I was an independent kind of girl. Always looking for an ideal relationship that never came, feeling I was destined to end up a drunk old maid with a typewriter in a single room. There was a time when if you asked me, I'd have said the only thing I wanted or wished for was to love someone. But I honestly thought I'd never find it.

And then I did love someone. And all I wanted was to have a life with him. Visions of picket fances filled my mind. Sure, it meant a few little changes, here and there. But slowly, the more I cut away these parts of myself in the hopes of achieving the idea (my idea) of domestic "bliss," the more I felt lost again, like I wasn't even me anymore. I wanted to blame that on a relationship--on domesticity, complacency--things that I thought a relationship was supposed to entail. I wanted to feel my oats, have a chance to live my own life. To have freedom. So I wrecked it all and started over again.

I know now that the Beaver Cleaver life I'd envisioned was just one more way to search for an unattainable happiness--one peak that was so high and mighty that getting to the top would take me ages and ages. See that top of the mountain, Helena? That's happiness. That's love. Go for it. See you again Never, sucker!

But once I get to the top of the mountain, it's just me up there. And hey, I've got all the same fears and scars I did before. It isn't a magic potion, it isn't an abra cadabra. Leaving one mountain behind for the next is just another way for me to keep running away from the issues that have been plaguing me for years longer than that relationship even existed.

Now that I've spent two years doing just that, again my vision has shifted. What used to feel like freedom feels like being lost, floating without a purpose. That's because now when I think about my priorities in life, I believe that the love I abandonded, the warmth and support of someone who cared for me unconditionally, was the greatest achievement I could ever hope for the rest of my days. Fuck careers, fuck houses, fuck the Pyramids, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower, too.

Making connections with people, more specifically, making a connection with one special person, is the only thing worth caring about on this worm farm. Yeah, I know that there should "be more to life" than that. But frankly, after all the soul searching I've done, I can confidently say (though I speak only for myself) that while all those other things are great, and I want to experience them--they're not worth shit if there's no one to share them with.

What's a bigger dream? Which is more valuable? To know everything you can about the world and the things in it, or to find it all in someone's arms? I'm hoping there's a place in between, but sometimes I wonder if I'll ever get to it.

In any case, I'm tired of being afraid to really put my emotions on the line. I have to go back out there and deal. No flinching. No hiding. No finding one more excuse to make sure people don't get close to me, and love me, and (yes, most importantly this) have the power to hurt me because of it.

These are the things I'm trying to figure out the last few months. Things we've all tried to figure out always. Why we're here, what love is, how to live our lives.

Yeah, I know. I'll be here with the typewriter and the bottle if you want to drop in and share your thoughts on the matter.