Opportunity Knocks

So, first, some news – Remember the “SOLD” blog when I asked all y’all to pray for my childhood home to sell so my dad and his fiancé could move to Florida and retire? Well, 10 days after that blog, the house sold :)!! Thank you ALL for your prayers and kind wishes! I’m really happy for them, even though my dad is still shocked he didn’t get the price he wanted… Oh dad, you can’t win em all.

Next on the horizon, date # 2 happens tonight (this is the first 2nd date I've had in almost 2 years), and lord have mercy, I’m trying to ground myself in every way possible. Stop tripping out. Remember that I’m worthy of love and am able to give and receive love in an appropriate way. Stop trying to script or plan. It’s not about “him.” I mean, it’s not about wanting this person or not. It’s so much more about how do I show up and stand in the experience of something new, trying something new. To stand with integrity, and self-esteem, and awareness, and that fair and balanced view thing that keeps coming up.

I don’t need a person to validate or complete me. I need to be able to allow myself to stand without armor. I had a pretty funky meditation/shamanic journey this morning. Unexpected, but right on track. About my ability to receive love, and the melting of my resistance toward it. Overbearing or absent were the ways that I learned love could show itself. Overwhelm or rejection. I’ve carried out that pattern with my own partners, and with myself as well. I’ve believed, and have stated in the past, that my fear is that my needs are too great – that my needs are like a barely held back tidal wave, and that to let them go, even in the slightest, to let them out, would be an invitation for drowning – particularly, drowning someone else. So, better to keep the dam contained.

It all comes back to what is the evidence for that today? Is there evidence of that today? And again, back to, I’ve never let myself try, or others try, so really, I don’t know. Again, I could be more capable of a thousand things, but having stopped and shunted them all, I’d never know.

I am grateful for this “obstacle to practice on,” as is written in a lot of the work I do with a woman one-on-one in the city. But I said recently to someone else, that I think I’m going to begin using the word “opportunity” rather than “obstacle.”

For a while, when I began writing that phrase with my friend, it tasted so bitter and awful in my mouth – obstacles, fuck obstacles, I don’t need no steenkin obstacles. I was pissed. How many more f’ing obstacles did I need in my life, I asked her. And she told me that it wasn’t up to me. It wasn’t really my choice. These were being presented to me, whether I wanted them or not, and it was my choice on how I chose to use them for practice.

She was right. What do I know about my path? I want to get from A to Z, but the “path” needs me to stop at H, J, and O on the way to garner skills and friends and love and esteem. So, I wrote it. Thank you, G-d, for this obstacle to practice on.

But, be it the “law of attraction”ish believing part of me, or simply a framing shift, I don't want to see or write them as obstacles anymore. They’re not. They are opportunities.

These are opportunities for me to choose – Turn Left, toward freedom and serenity, or Turn Right, to well-worn misery. These are all mental paths, psychological paths really. And in my phone right now, on my cover screen, I set the display to read, “Turn Left.” It’s a reminder to me that in every given moment (what a phrase! “given moment,” these moments are given, even gifts, if I can see it), at any time, I can remember that I have a choice. I have the choice to obsess about tonight or not. I have the choice to believe in my inherent worthiness or not. These are all choices. And my choices are reflected back to me in real time.

I’d like to choose to not obsess, to remember that I am talented and worthy, and don’t have to sleep with people I don’t know well, and that my house can still be off limits even though I said I was cleaning it to make it “guest appropriate.” I was told that I am the czar of my own experience, and further, my own body. That I don’t owe anyone anything. Repeat. I don’t owe anyone anything. A date is not a promise. A date is not a sexual invitation. It is an invitation to get to know someone better. To vet each other for each subsequent date. A friend once told me that a first date is just an interview for a second one. And so on they go. That’s all.

So many years of believing I was promising something I didn’t want to deliver, or was obligated to do because he was hard. Not my problem. Sure, don’t be a tease on purpose, but he’ll live. An erection is not an obligation. 

This is an opportunity for me to hear that and feel that in a way that I haven’t. For me to try to see that I have assets beyond my physical self. And for me to allow those assets to be shared and seen. Dating can start so physically, and that part is critically important, but physical attraction is a dime a dozen, really. (I mean it’s not exactly that easy, as I’ve realized that too) – but sex itself is a dime a dozen. I don’t want that. – as in hell yes, I want to get laid, like every other hot blooded person on this planet, but I don’t want only that, and my experience has taught me for sure that when I go to that part too quickly, I undermine myself every time, and I quash any ability for me to learn that I am worthy for more than my looks and my pussy.

So, here’s to an opportunity to try something different. To try to believe something different. And I am excited for tonight, and that’s all well and good, but I’m also going to pay attention to my own music stand, and Turn Left toward the tasks I have ahead of me right now.

Wish me luck.