Succumbing to the Pressure

While my last post can be summed up basically by saying that I am confused and don’t know what I want, I am really feeling the pressure to figure it all out. While I’m doing better than I was a couple years ago, sometimes it still feels like it’s all a little too much. I just want things sorted. After years of purgatory, I just can’t stand feeling lost anymore. At the same time, in my “old age”, I know better than to rush myself because that can simply lead to being more lost than before. I am overwhelmed.

Now that I’m in my late 20s, a lot of my friends are getting married, some are having children, and others are seriously looking for relationships. It seems like every day, someone announces a pregnancy or an engagement on Facebook. A lot of people around me seem to be finding a direction and committing to it. I can’t help but feel like I’m being left behind. It feels lonely.  People are coupling up left and right and I feel left out.

On top of that, while they try not to give me too much grief, my parents are worried about me being alone here in L.A. They know I have a GREAT group of friends and that I’m independent and self-sufficient, but I think they sense that something is missing from my life: a person who I can totally share myself with, rely on, and enjoy my life with. My parents have an incredible marriage and are truly, deeply in love with and committed to each other. I know they want that for me, and I think they’re worried that I’m not open to finding it.

In all honesty, I’m a little worried too. I don’t like feeling the pressure to find someone, but I also don’t like where I am. I suspect that I want a relationship, but that I am confusing being confused about what I want with being afraid of getting hurt again. While I know that I need to do what’s best for me and move forward at my own pace and on my own terms, I can’t help but feel apprehensive. I went from knowing all the answers, to not knowing anything, to being thoroughly confused and feeling afraid. I can’t live my life being afraid though. As such, even though I have reservations and am honestly not sure if I’m ready, I’m going to dip my toes in the dating pool again. I am starting very slowly. While I’ve had plenty of dates over the past few months, they’ve just been pretexts for sex.  This time, I am going to try to find some sort of real connection.  I changed an old online profile, explaining that I’m not sure what it is that I’m looking for but that I want more than sex without connection. We’ll see how it goes.

Emerging from the Darkness

As I mentioned in my last post, as I emerge from a rough period, I am feeling lost when it comes to my personal life. I feel the need to explain that a little more.

The darkest part of the last few years was my struggle to get over a nasty break up. Before the Great Recession, I didn’t really have a hard time with matters of the heart. I was so focused on moving forward in my life, I didn’t stop to think about what I wanted in a relationships and, frankly, wasn’t really all that in tune with my emotions when it came to them. I just knew I was going to be in a relationship and that that was all that mattered. Of course, my being out of touch with my emotions led to a few breakups, the last of which was extremely nasty. Shocking, I know. Having not yet learned my lesson about moving forward without questioning things, I mostly ignored my feelings about the nasty breakup immediately afterwards. Things ended a few months before my law school graduation. I was worried far more about school, finding a job, and studying for the bar exam than I was about letting myself get over a relationship that I wasn’t happy in. When I graduated and finished the bar exam however, due to the Great Recession, I had a lot of free time. Volunteering for work meant that my schedule was extremely clear. Having no money meant there was very little I could do to distract myself from myself. I was miserable, stressed out, and I felt alone.

I, of course, tried to fill the void by having a very long string of flings and one-night stands. I told myself I was just having fun and wasn’t in the place to find anything serious. I was half right. I most certainly wasn’t in the place to date, but I also wasn’t having any fun. Every hookup blurred together. Sex became impersonal. Every guy became a faceless penis to me. I was only looking for dick and treated my various hookups as such. Some of the guys were extremely nice and actually interested in more than just sex. I fucked them and then ignored them. I was hurting people, all because I didn’t have any connection with my emotions and didn’t care about anyone else’s. I was a complete and utter jerk.

On top of that, I almost convinced myself that relationships were pointless and that the people looking for them were foolish. To me, relationships were simply a conduit for heartbreak, disappointment, and misery. Why commit yourself to someone when, inevitably, one of you would disappoint and hurt the other?  Why put yourself through that when life is so hard already? Why do we even need or want relationships? Were we all just brainwashed from watching romantic comedies?

Of course, all of this was simply in response to me not understanding how deeply affected I was by the change in my own life circumstances. It was completely out of character for me. Before the economic crash, nasty break-up, financial problems, and subsequent stress, I always wanted a relationship and a partner.  I pictured myself working in a great career, getting “married”, settling down, and living happily ever after. I thought that if I committed to a relationship, everything would be peaches and cream. Wasn’t that how life was supposed to work? Truth be told, I let myself get into a bad relationship because I wanted that future so desperately. When that all came crashing down, I was angry and I felt foolish

I was a confused, depressed, fucked-up mess.

While the career and financial part of my life have gotten much better, my confusion still lingers. The decreased financial and career stress has given me the opportunity to think about the past few years and gain some perspective.  Naively, I thought that once my career was back on track, everything would go back to normal – meaning my feelings about dating would come back too. I thought I would simply be happy again. The “problem” is though, that life is far more complicated than that. The last few years changed me.

I know now that being the slutty jerk I was for the past few years was wrong. I don’t want to be that guy. At the same time though, I don’t want to be the guy I was before: the guy who desperately wanted a relationship, who rushed into things when he wasn’t ready, and who didn’t take the time to think about what he wanted because he had some misguided fantasy of a happy-ever-after that he never questioned.

While I know what I don’t want, I also don’t know what I want. I do have some suspicions though. I know that I want more than just sex. I want some sort of connection. I think I might want some sort of commitment. I am not sure what the extent of that commitment would be however. Part of me is still hurt and extremely wary of relationships. The other part of me, however, still loves the idea of finding that one person with whom I can walk through life, hand-in-hand. 

An Introduction

I turned 27 a month ago today. It's probably safe to say that I'm an adult now. This has me completely and utterly freaked out. Adulthood snuck up on me. 

A lot of people would say that, at 27, I've been an adult for a while now. It doesn't feel like it though. After high school, I went straight to college. Upon graduating, I went straight to law school - basically an extension of undergrad, but with more stress and more student loans. I then had the pleasure of graduating in the worst economy  since the Great Depression. As a result, while waiting for the job market to improve, I worked for free for almost two years as a glorified intern to get some more experience and (quite gratefully) lived off my parents' dime. Not exactly the picture perfect image I have in mind of an independent adult. While my situation was certainly not unique, the past few years were really tough on me. It felt like I was in a holding pattern, waiting for an adult life to start. I struggled to keep hold of my confidence, dreams, and ambition.

I am doing much better now. My career is moving forward and it seems the worst has passed.  I am supporting myself and starting to feel a little more like me again. In all honesty though, sometimes I still feel completely and totally lost. In my survival mode, I became so used to feeling hopeless, I lost sight of the things that made me happy. In other words, I was so focused on saving my career, I lost sight of the other parts of my life. A major relationship went down the tubes, I began sleeping around in an effort to distract myself from impending doom, and it seems I forgot what I wanted for my life outside of my career. That is why I've started this blog. This is my effort to figure things out. I think that thinking through my feelings, writing them down, and getting some feedback will be good for me.