When I was younger, my father always taught me that we create our realities. Whether we are concious of it or not, we bend and form the energy that surrounds us to become what we need. At twelve, I said, really? That is so cool! At sixteen, yea yea, whatever. At 20, man, I wish that were really true; there's no way my unconcious really wants something this hard! At 24, my god, he was right; that is exactly what I needed at the time. And now, at 25, all I want is peace, all I need now is peace, and so I have some, though I need to earn its permanence, which is right because I need to own whatever peace I acquire. I wonder if that makes any sense. I'll explain more.

This woman I've met, Jess, well... I just feel calm when I'm with her. I often relate my life so far to a hurricane. I've been beaten by incessant fierce emotional blows and debris to the point that it became my comfort zone; and then, every now and then, I'd get some reprieve, some bit of peace, though it was never real because I always knew the worst of the storm was shortly to come so I spent the time refortifying myself, building up my walls and sheilds. Day in and day out this was how I lived, amidst this fury. I look back on it now and I'm suprised. See, to me, that's just how life was supposed to be, you know? There was no other way to live. So when Susan came around, I saw love intertwined in a chaos, much like my life had been. It was all I could understand at the time, all I could endure, so that's what i surrounded myself with.

Ah, but then years passed, and somehow it became clear to me that I did live in that constant state of survival. It was the anxiety. I could tell intuitively that wasn't right. I am not naturally an anxious person, though I'd lived with OCD and generalized anxiety my whole life. And eventually, as the relationships in my life seemed to culminate to a certain peak, I realized that the only way I would get through would be to either fall into myself even deeper to a point I may never have returned from, or to give up my constant fight and to let that storm wash over me, to let it do whatever it had to do. To accept whatever came with as open a heart I could manage. I was scared shitless, though, that it would never end. That I'd been right all along and this is really how life is supposed to be.That fear is why I fought against it so hard and for so long, but in the end, I didn't care anymore. I gave up. Let it have me, I've nothing to lose anymore.

I would say I trusted the storm to not kill me, but that would be a lie. And, in fact, it did. It destroyed the person I was. I am neither the person I was before the storm or during it, nor am I the person I would have been in its absence. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am exactly who I should be, which includes that particular experience. Maybe I was supposed to learn early that lesson in peace, who knows. But I've had enough chaos and strife to last a lifetime. I don't want any more.

And when I say I need to own whatever peace I acquire, what I mean is that I can't expect it to fall out, like it always had before. It can't be part of that eye... I need to live in that peace, not use it to survive the rest. I need to draw strength from it, not just use it as time for a breather.