and the 199 rolls into a 200

well if i were monk, i would be ecstatic right now. this is my two hundredth post. a good number to end on. meaning one hundred and ninety nine times before this right now, i have felt something enough, thought something enough, and known something enough to write about it. do you know what i find interesting? this blog has mostly been about pain. the loving, learning, and growing i've experienced from it - the heartbreak i've endured because of it. i started this over five years ago, when i was fifteen years old and was so angry with my dad for making us move. pain. my recent posts have been about the heartbreak that comes from being in love and then knowing you can't be anymore. pain. and all in the middle, there has been some great happiness, some wonderful announcements (i'll say it again - i'm going to be an aunt!), and some sarcastic bite. in many ways, the last one hundred and ninety nine posts are me. they are... many people. the feelings that make us here, the feelings that make us real. and i truly have no idea who reads this, when they read it, or if they find it interesting. but on the occasion that someone emails me and tells me how much they received from it, or writes me just to encourage me... i find a lot of value in that. so because i love writing, and because (most of the time) i feel like my story is nowhere near finished, i'm not going to be monk.

like i said - i started this blog writing about moving, and lately this has been mostly about my relationship ending. both were/are versions of heartbreak, different in the way they felt, but both remarkably awful. when we were moving, i was so angry because yet again i was leaving my best friend (moving is more like a longer lasting fire drill in the abare household... comes often, feels automatic but strange still). i was always the one to leave. and when my relationship ended, i was not the one to leave. humbling as it is to say, i was left. and this was the strangest thing to me. i'd never been left before. ever. i had always said goodbye on my terms, and was never bid farewell when it wasn't my own choice or partly my choice.

oftentimes when i was a kid, i would resolve to not make friends upon arrival at our next destination. i was young, and in my limited view of pain and growth, i saw making friends and leaving them as a horrible routine and didn't really want to have any part of it. each new location i would think, 'alright, if i don't make any friends this time - it won't hurt when we leave!' and every time, i would make friends and have a blast and then leave them.

after we broke up, it was an automatic resolution to never love again. my heart went into crouch mode - like a spider who is chillin' all happy in its web and then someone comes near it and all their legs go in and they roll up into a little ball. i thought 'good God my heart could never ever do this again. my stomach could never feel this bad again, i could never lose that much sleep again, i couldn't possibly cry that much again.' guys have asked me out since, and i have literally shuddered with fear, like physically shuddered, thinking about the possibility of opening my heart up to that much pain.

but there is also a deafening/entirely deeper aching that comes in resolving to live in this 'locked up' mode. c.s. lewis says, 'To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.'

my dear friend taryn said that no one tells you when give your heart away that you'll never get it back in its original condition...

i could keep my heart locked up in this safe casket of my own selfishness - and like i mentioned in the last post, never experience the wonder, the joy, the awesomeness of being in love or loving. but i would experience a different kind of pain. one detrimental to my very living. one that would hold every other relationship in my life hostage. one that would hold me hostage. taryn's right... you will never get your heart back the way it was after you've given it away. and in many ways, that is the worst thing in the world. but if you allow love to change you the way love is supposed to change you, it can also be the best thing.