I feel a little sad and hopeless about love this morning.

Dan_the_Man submitted a great comment last night. He said:

Short, sweet, and beautifully stated. I was talking to a friend about how all this stuff just comes from within.

The example I gave him is: Suppose you’re watching a movie on on your wall, using a projector, and on the picture you see a fingerprint smudge, that’s affecting your enjoyment off the whole movie.

When you try to move around all the outside factors in your life, ruminate, develop a theory, and change your actions up, you’re basically spraying some cleaner on the wall and trying to get that large fingerprint off the movie picture. This can literally take decades of your time, trying to wipe off that smudge.

All you ever really needed to do is go to the projector and clean the lens. Then the picture would come out just fine, like it was meant to. Sure your wall will get a bit shinier from all the work you’re doing on it, but you won’t get sizable results until you go to the source.

It’s so true. It’s all perception, so if something is not going the way we want it to, we need to clean up our inside rather than focus on the outside.

And then I started feeling sad. Cuz sometimes it seems like no matter how much I clean up the lens, there’s still too much left of the fingerprint. Sure, things have improved dramatically. My life is five hundred times better than three years ago when I had my near-death experience.

I’m just worried that no man can ever really reach me. Even if he gets part way in, I’m likely to get scared and shut down and not let him in the rest of the way. I’m likely to “project” something bad happening, which gives me an excuse to bail before he even has a chance to bail. It can start so wonderful, but wouldn’t it be nice if it finished wonderful also?

I’m worried that I wrapped barbed wire around my heart a long time ago to protect myself, and that no matter how much I try to set my heart free, maybe it’s never going to be enough. And I’m worried that my man isn’t going to be able to reach me.

Which feels really sad. :-(