fuel

In prehospital medicine, as in life, pain can be a valuable tool. It's a primary indicator that something is wrong. It helps us to know where the problems are. It helps us to help.

I wonder, sometimes, how much of my life has been lost to anesthetic. Food, wine, the comfort of pleasant company. It has many faces; it takes many forms. But by dulling myself to pain through lovely distraction, it seems I may have done myself a terrible disservice. I haven't been able to get to the heart of the things that most need help.

Quite simply, I have to be able to feel, to heal.

Today, I discovered that I had some parting influence on the gentleman I broke it off with on Saturday: less than two days later, he's exclusively with the other girl. He's always seemed to want the other girl-- even when the other girl was me, initially, and I'd told him that I wasn't interested in getting in the way. It still hit me hard in a tender spot, on a day of hormonal vulnerability. It felt physical, acute-- as if I'd stubbed my heart by carelessly bumping into the wrong things. But I am grateful, if nothing else, for the sucker punch back to reality.

When it comes to dating, I have a world of choices right now. It's as if I've lit up like a porch lantern on a dark summer night, and potential suitors-- if most of them can seriously be considered that-- swarm around like eager night insects. I don't even really want them right now. I realize that I would only be numbing the pain, and depriving myself of this chance to hone in on the problem. That's how we know what's wrong. That's how we fix it. 

This is what I want right now: I want to learn to live alone, to be fully independent-- perhaps I'll feel loneliness sometimes, but within struggle is the potential for growth. It's a sad thought, but it's the healthiest I've had in a while. I'll be better equipped to know what's real when it comes along because I won't feel reliant on someone else. It won't sway me when a boy calls me pretty, or laughs at my jokes. Boys say plenty of things, I've learned too well. Men mean them.

I'm going to take inventory of where I am, and where I want to be. I'm reprising my "lifestyle change" that I've been too lax with for the past couple of weeks, getting my body into its healthiest, though Khloe-esque form.

I'm going to make my living space my own, and learn to feel at home in what Virginia Woolf called "A Room of One's Own."

I'm going to go back to school for something that utilizes the natural gifts that I've been wasting for too long.

I'm going to be better, and, radically, I'm going to get there by feeling the things I've desperately avoided feeling.

I thought, in a weak moment today, that I might finally cry, but I realized: at my core, underneath the marshmallow-fluffiness of my gentle, doe-like demeanor, I'm a badass bitch.

This is fuel.

And I am fire.