I’m the Queen of Unrequited Love.   Since I’ve been old enough to stop thinking boys are yucky, I’ve almost always been in the throes of a crush on some male or other.  Most of my crushes were on men with whom it was virtually impossible to form a relationship.  Either they were unavailable for some reason, or they were totally uninterested in me and the possibility of a relationship was as remote as the possibility of my suddenly sprouting wings and flying to the moon.

There was, as always, a method to my madness.  Crushes gave me a way to experience all the excitement of being in love without, you know, actually having to “be” in love and experience the vulnerability that entails.  Forming crushes on unavailable men also gave me assurance of what I was pretty sure was going to happen anyway, a sad and lonely ending to the love affair.  Since the guy in question was never going to love me, something I always secretly believed would happen because I wasn’t that lovable,  I didn’t have to wonder if I would be hurt or anticipate a bad ending to things.  That bad end and the hurt that came with it was a certainty.

Compounding my little crush problem is the fact that I’m totally clueless when it comes to determining if a man is actually interested in me.   I’ve been places with friends and been told after the fact that a man was flirting with me and I was totally oblivious.  I’ve identified a few times myself when I was given an opening the size of a Mack truck and I completely failed to see it or take advantage of it.   When it comes to the logistics of love, it’s like my radar is off and my navigation is completely screwed.  I tend to focus on men who most likely would never be Mr. Right, or to get involved with men who clearly are not Mr. Right while a potential Mr. Right is standing off to the side vainly trying to get my attention.

I’m sadly in need of advice and counsel.   Those of you who are in a relationship, how did you know Mr. or Ms. Right was right?   Those of you who aren’t currently in relationships, how are you planning to go about finding Mr. or Ms. Right?  At this point I’ll take any and all suggestions, since I don’t seem to be doing to well at this on my own.

I’ve never been nostalgic about high school.  I don’t, in general, look back fondly on those days.  I wasn’t all that good at being a teenager, and I remember trying desperately to fit in and feeling like I was always failing.  For me high school nostalgia has always been something to be avoided, simply because in my memory it wasn’t that great a time in my life.

What’s weird is that when I really start to examine those memories, I realize that high school wasn’t the problem.  During my high school years my parents were on course for the final crash that would derail their marriage during my freshman year in college and my family life wasn’t that great.   It was in high school that I was targeted and abused by a teacher whom I should have been able to trust.  My high school years were also the beginning of my long spiral into a depression that would derail my life for a year when I was in my early 20s.  None of those things specifically had to do with high school, but all those events have infected my memories of high school.

Oddly enough what started me thinking about all of this was making use of a Facebook account I’d started a while back but never really maintained.  Enough people whom I trust and listen to had told me that Facebook was fun and useful, so I decided to give it another try.  Several people with whom I went to high school had contacted me on Facebook, but I’d mostly ignored them, thinking that they would have the same memories of me in high school that I had.  As usual, I was being harder on myself than anyone else could be.

Reconnecting with some of the friends and acquaintances I had in high school has allowed me to see that time in my life and myself in a different light.  There was fun and laughter and friendship.  I wasn’t as much of a misfit as my memories tell me I was.  The connections that I formed during that time still hold, even after years of benign neglect.  It’s like being handed a different mirror that allows me to see a part of my life in a whole new way.

In the last few months I’ve had several experiences that have allowed me to see that what I thought about myself, or what others told me about myself and I accepted as truth might not be as truthful as I thought it was.  Having that realization is freeing and a little bit sad at the same time.  It’s freeing because that means I can drop some outdated ideas about who I am, and some of those ideas really need to be banished.  It’s sad because I’m now wondering what opportunities I missed because I believed something about myself that wasn’t necessarily true.   Since you can’t go back and change the past, I guess I have to let that one go.

One thing I know I won’t let go, at least not again, is the new connections I’ve made with my old high school friends through Facebook.  I fully intend to stay in touch with these people so we can share old memories and make some new ones.   I may never be big on high school nostalgia, but I’ll always be big on keeping in touch with old friends.

It was the dining room chairs that finally drove the point home.

Just before Christmas the family announced that they wanted to come to my house.  Unfortunately, my house was far from ready for guests.  I subscribe to the “don’t rush into it” school of decorating which means I have the bare minimum I need to be comfortable (loose translation, a bed, a couch, a television and a computer) and I add the rest as funds and inclination dictate.  In this case that meant I didn’t yet have a dining room table.

It’s absolutely obvious that you don’t have people for Christmas without having a table around which they can sit.  I had to have a table so I gritted my teeth and bought one which, while not the admittedly expensive one I had my eye on, seemed to be one that would do.   It would have done nicely, except for one thing.

Three dreaded words.  Some Assembly Required.

I don’t do some assembly required.  The light on my stovetop has been minus a cover for almost a year now because I took the cover off to change the bulb and couldn’t figure out how to get it back on.  The list of my DIY attempts and failures extends far beyond that.  I’m just not handy, and I’ve made my peace with that.

Still, the table was there and guests were coming, so I ripped open boxes and read instructions and gradually and painfully assembled my new dining room table and six chairs.  It turned out pretty well I thought.  Nothing wobbled, much, and everything seemed fairly sturdy.  The only issue I had was the cushions for the chairs.  They didn’t seem to want to be attached.   There were screws that were supposed to attach them, but I couldn’t figure out how to make them work.  I tried and failed and tried again and finally had a brilliant idea.  I’d do the easiest thing in the world. I’d get some sticky tape and stick the cushions to the chair frame.  That was sure to work!

Except it didn’t work.  My family arrived, one chair was moved and the flaws in the sticky tape were quickly revealed.  After a lot of laughter and incredulous looks from my DIY savvy sister, she marshaled her troops (her daughter and two sons) and set to work putting the screws in the bottom of my chairs.  Like magic, all the cushions were secure.

And, sadly, so was my DDIY crown.

Back in November of 2008, I wrote a post where I set myself a challenge.   I was going to pursue 40 goals in my 40th year and hopefully in pursuing and achieving these goals, I would change my life.   It was a sound plan, if maybe a trifle ambitious.   Truth be told, I wasn’t ready for that much change in one year.  I could cite the pressures of work, the insane hours I work, health problems and a lot of other reasons why I didn’t accomplish everything on the list in a year, and they’d all be true, but the real reason is simply this:  I wasn’t ready.

Despite my lack of readiness, I still believe in the list, and I still think the goals on it are good ones for me to pursue.  I also know I don’t want the list to turn into yet another thing with which I can beat myself for not being good enough, not completing the list in the time frame I set, or whatever other transgression I can pin on myself.  If the list becomes an obligation instead of a privilege, then I’ll never get it done.

Probably one of the largest unwritten and unspoken items on the list is changing the way I think and giving myself a break on occasion.   I never specifically wrote either of those goals on the list in those words, but if you read between the lines, those goals are there.  Given that, I’ve decided to change the way I think and  give myself a break.  I’m expanding the time frame on the list.  Instead of a year, I’m giving myself a decade.

A decade will probably be more time than I need, and I may find that just taking the pressure of a shorter time frame off my shoulders will help me get back to working on the list on a more regular basis.  The goal here is to get some momentum going and hopefully once movement starts it will pick up speed as it continues.

I hope you guys will stick around with me as I work through my list.  I certainly need the encouragement, as well as people to keep me honest and on track.

As we all can see, I have a lot of things to do.

When I started this blog I was so gung ho.  I thought this would change my life.  I thought I’d finally found the philosophy that would set me on a new path.  Like a lot of people who have indulged in magical thinking in the past, I thought simply creating a blog called Settling for More, would instantly help me learn how to do that.  I thought making a change would be as easy as stating my intent.  By now, I’ve realized, as many of you may have realized, that simply starting a blog and stating an intent doesn’t make it so.

Truth be told, I never really knew what this blog was supposed to be.  I knew I wanted, and still want, to change my life.  I wanted to jettison the chains that I felt were holding me back, chains formed of memory, and a mind that wouldn’t let me forget every hurt I’d done or every hurt that had been done to me.   I’d stored up all the slights and digs and doubts and forged them into this shield that I thought would protect me from everything.  In reality, it protected me from nothing, except perhaps the stuff that had the potential to make me happy.

Because I didn’t know what this blog should be, it has mostly languished these last few months.   I couldn’t tell the truth here, the truth being that I had big goals but I was afraid to pursue them, and I didn’t want to lie, so I didn’t say anything, except that I was too busy or I had other claims on my time, all of which were true and lies at the same time.  I can make time when I want to,  but telling the truth seemed to hard, and lies seemed to shameful.  Silence was the easier and, to me at least, more honest option.

Given that this is a new year, and given that I still want to change, I figured the beginning days of 2010 were a good time to start as I mean to go on.  That means telling the truth instead of avoiding it. That means setting goals I can live with, even if they aren’t as ambitious as I’d like them to be.  That means calling a spade a spade and accepting that I don’t always do as well as I would like, but I’m a good person anyway.  That means making mistakes, absolving myself of them and moving on, without the mistake clanking behind me like another link in the chain of my failure.

I’m not sure I can do this.  I’m not even sure I want to do this.  Telling the truth, my truth, has never been something I was particularly good at doing.  Keeping quiet and staying low always seemed safer.  Despite that fact, or maybe because of it, I’ve come to realize that no one much cares what I think, and that keeping quiet and staying low won’t get me to where I want and need to be.   I created the outlet when I created this blog.

Now I just have to make use of it.