… the pursuit of happiness

Lately, I’ve been posting a lot more on Twitter than Vox or any of my usual blogs. There’s good and bad to this. On one hand, it’s a lot easier to come up with ~140 characters of updates than it is to commit to a long post. On the other, there’s really only so much you can cram into a 140 character-count post, and learning how to speak in clipped English isn’t doing wonders for my writing skillz.

So. It’s about 3am, and for whatever reason, instead of sleeping off my lingering cold, I’m writing. Hooray.

I talked to Jerimy for a total of about 5 minutes today, in short bursts throughout the day as he had a moment or I had a moment. We talked about insurance, and how I would have to find my own insurance soon. It was a pretty calm back and forth – I can’t really call it a conversation – and there was no blowing up, no tears.

There was no drama because we’re way past that. We’re not even close enough to where I could possibly express those kinds of feelings to him anymore. My relationship with him feels like a distant, dull memory, and yet he still manages to make me feel like crap in these brief interactions. I constantly feel like I’m not getting what I want out of relationship, although historically, this is par for the course and I should be used to this by now. I feel like I don’t know how to get what I want. And worst of all, I feel like even if I did, he would purposely try to deny me those things, even though we’re (theoretically) nearing the end of this relationship and it’s not all that much to ask for.

So it’s more of the same. Which begs the question: How did I spend so much of my life with someone who’s made me this unhappy?

Corollary question: why do I continue to gravitate toward people who make me unhappy?

It seems like such a simple desire for a person to want to be happy – it’s even written into the Declaration of Independence. Why does it end up being so complicated?

Possible answers:

1. I have a tendency to make a lot of concessions to other parties because it makes me happy to make other people happy. This sometimes leads to me mistaking “I can put up with this because they’re happy” with “This is what I want to make me happy.” This is bad.

2. I don’t communicate my needs effectively to other people. I don’t tell people, “this isn’t really okay with me” and I kind of let people do their thing, to a certain extent of course. As a result, I can probably be in a relationship with someone, but be living in a totally different version of it than the other person sees.

3. I don’t really know what I want. I don’t know if I want to be in a serious relationship right now or if I’d rather just date. Part of me feels like I should date around and see what’s out there, but I do miss the comfort and stability of a relationship when you’re with a really great guy. Everyone tells me I should date, and most of my brain thinks that’s probably best, since I’m definitely not ready to settle down. But it is nice to be so closely connected to someone…

So those are kind of three big problems with me in my pursuit of happiness. I most likely can’t solve them tonight, but I’m going to tell myself that I’ve taken the first step by acknowledging them. Good job, fragile ego.