and so it goes until it goes no further

There are so many studies about emotions and evolution, emotions and neuroscience, emotions and whatever the heck.

When I feel my heart breaking, all I want to do is hide from myself.  But there's nowhere to go. I'd say there's nowhere to go but forward, but that's definitely not true.  You can definitely go backwards. I suppose the only time I ever felt my heart truly break was when I found out that Traci had died.  I can understand why the heart is associated with love and pain and all the agony and all of the ecstasy. When your heart breaks, it hurts...in your heart.

And in a way it's very much like a physical injury.  It takes a lot of time to heal, and you are going to be worried about testing it again, and going out there with a weakened heart and making it worse.

I wonder if some people are born with stronger hearts than others.  Or if one can make their heart stronger through some sort of effort. Or if it will get stronger on its own without any effort whatsoever.  I don't know. Surely there are different degrees of fracture.

When I think about how broken my heart feels sometimes, and I know that as I go on in life, loss is inevitable...sometimes it's hard to even want to try. And of course, blah blah blah happy times and blah blah blah.  But still.  Just the very knowledge that I'm capable of feeling this bad and this broken scares the shit out of me. There's no way of preventing it...at least not for me. I'm terrible at pretending I'm ok.  And mostly I'm proud of that.  It takes a lot more strength to admit when you are not ok than to pretend that everything is peachy.

Sometimes I really miss her.  There are some things that only a sister would understand.  I'm not sure if never having one is better than having one and losing her.  I miss her when I see other people hang out with their sisters.  Even if in reality she was so sick that hanging out with her was very hard, I suppose at least there was the option, and always the hope that she'd get better.

So I don't really know what this post is about.  I'm thinking about one situation and writing about another.  And that's fine. People who know me know that I'm writing in layers about several different things. But isn't that how it always is?

Actually maybe not, and maybe it's a mistake to make that assumption. Assigning real value to something that should be taken at face-value.

What I do know is that I'm not gentle with myself.  So fucking hard to stop blaming myself for everything, and taking everything on.  Someone tells me that I suck and I believe them.  Questioning their judgement is an afterthought.  First I have to check myself to see if I've been shot, and where the damage is. What if I really do suck? And even though it doesn't matter, it's just heinous. Letting go of someone else's judgement oddly difficult. Why don't I trust myself? Why would I trust someone else before I would trust myself?  No clue.  Actually, it's only hard to write someone off if you've made the leap of faith to trust them in the first place.  Losing that trust is really effing hard.  You have to admit that you made an error in judgement and then reevaluate everything.  And even then you know that it's so much more complicated than you wish it was. All efforts to find simple reason and rationale are going to fail. And that sucks. Accepting the complication and shades of gray is much harder than making sweeping proclamations about the way things are. Placing things into fixed categories is often a symptom of youth.

I'll never have it figured out. God that's depressing.

But the sky was beautiful tonight.