I am sitting here alone. I just read a post by a friend who writes a wonderful blog, and this time she wrote about having community and friends. She talked about the supportiveness and the importance of participating in those friendships. I've lived in this city for 28 years. I haven't created a deep community like she has. I'm not sure I know how. My previous post referred to how I found that I have friends who love me - and I do have them, I know I do. But they are disparate and few. I should count myself lucky to have them, and I do, I do. They are special to me. But in the end, I am alone. I want so much to look for support, but I dare not. I know what they will say and it's not what I want to hear. I can't even bring myself to write here, where I am almost anonymous, about the thing that is bringing me pain. It feels disloyal, and I am fearful of advice or counsel I would get were I to reveal it. So I am sitting alone and sad. Seeing no end to the sadness. I don't like myself when I am like this. I am not proud of myself. If I were to offer myself advice, I would tell myself to do what I don't want to do. What I won't do. So there is no help for it. I just have to endure. People I work with and know casually think I am upbeat and happy. Sometimes I am. And I do a good job of pretending, I always have. Then I get in my car and the tears come on the drive home. And then I rattle around my home, finding things to do, to try to make the time pass.

Come Friday, my circumstances will change, and I think, I hope, I trust, I will start to do better. Then the circumstances will change back, and I will be alone again.

Sometimes I think I am a complete idiot. But other times I am more compassionate to myself. The softening I wrote about in my earlier post has vanished, and I am hurting again.

Return Again

I have started so many entries and then discarded them since my last post nearly a year ago. I don't even know if anyone will be reading this, so if I treat this merely a note to self, maybe I'll finish it.



Work is over for 2008 at the end of next week, and I will have a couple of weeks to wind down and contemplate the last 12 months. The largest event for me was dodging a bullet. My surgery to have part of my colon removed, which resulted in a finding of cancer in the piece that was taken out. No further treatment necessary. I am blessed. And in the process, I felt so loved, by my sons, by my lover, by my friends and family. By my co-workers.



In the last year, I have lost a friend - the person I described in the last entry - but it was clearly coming to an end, and I do not mourn the loss. It was a wonderful friendship while it lasted, but it's over, and that's that. This year, I have reconnected with an old friend, developed deeper connections with others, and my relationship with my lover has grown and flourished, despite the challenges that beset us from time to time. There is in our relationship a characteristic that is painful for me, but that is so much a part of who my lover is that it is my task to develop an acceptance of it, rather than his task to let it go. I understand that. I knew it going in. He has never been anything but honest. And we have worked over the time that we have been together to find the best way to manage things between us. Just as we are deciding to get some counseling, I am feeling a shift that is softening the pain, and that is such a relief. I believe that counseling will still be a good thing, but this opening of my heart will make it work so much better.