Digital Love.

This past weekend, I read an article from New York Magazine called, All My Exes Live in Texts. It talked about how our generation is so linked electronically, that millennials never really "break up". It's always been a problem for me in general, that out of sight doesn't necessarily mean out of mind; but having constant access to people from your past by way of social media, cell phones, digital pictures, etc. means that these characters from your supposed closed past, become a part of your permanent present whether or not you want them to. The past can spring up really anywhere, whether its a song on pandora, or an auto-fill-in of their name, or a picture on Instagram, or a tweet or a...the list goes on and on and on. It's exhausting, really. There's no avoiding someone who was ever a part of your life, and even if you can physically, they live on forever in the digital world. 

Not only is it easy to have constant access to these people at your fingertips at any hour of the day (aka 3 am on a Wednesday night. Oops!); but it has made chivalry and courtship fall by the wayside. It has become easy to create whole relationships without ever even physically meeting someone! Our generation has made it easier to open digital screens, if you will, rather than holding open actual doors for someone. You can send a pretty passive aggressive message to someone via your subtweets or a simple "like" of something on one of these social apps. I'm not bashing them, because clearly, I use them just as frequently as your next overly informed girl (although I did delete my Facebook and it. feels. great.), but when are we going to stop making excuses for people? Call me old-fashioned, but we have to start blaming ourselves, not the social media world, for our lack of chivalry, respect, and communication when it comes to relationships. We rarely stand up for ourselves in terms of demanding what we deserve, and more often than not, we are too passive aggressive with our needs when it comes to other humans. We subtweet, post song lyrics, "favorite" something someone says, etc. These moments of intentional digital  connection have become how we manifest our emotions. We have not killed courtship and chivalry, we have just given it one too many facelifts, and it doesn't look the same anymore. It has become the Amanda Bynes of dating. Yuck. 

Because of all this, "goodbyes" aren't ever real anymore. Although sometimes, I wish they could be. (How awesome would it be if we could all "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" ourselves?!). How can you ever really say hello again to anything else when you can never say goodbye to the past? Riddle me that. ❤

Wonderwalls.

It is human to feel. In these feelings, we tell ourselves the stories that make sense to us. There's no fault in that. The fault lies where we think that other people are totally in on those stories. What we don't realize, is that the stories are only our own, and to make others a part of them, they have to want to be. Most of the time, we get upset when these tales don't play out, but in order for them to fail, they had to be real anyway, and quite often, they aren't as real as we think they were. But we continue to create these images of what we want and when there are blank patches, and others have no intention of clarifying or filling in those blanks for us, we fill them in with the little wisps of hopeful smoke we can grab onto. In doing so, we dismiss our own feelings, to accept the feelings of others. When did we inherit that quality? I'm all for compromise and love, but when you deny your own feelings in the process, we begin to lose ourselves. 

A good friend once told me, when you love hard, you hurt hard. That's something that's always stuck with me. You take the risk of pain when you set out to give anyone or anything as much love as you can. And would you do it again? Of course. Because those brilliant shining moments before the darkness are always, always, always worth it. You may continue to put up walls, but its human to feel things-- good or bad. We must remember that lying next to someone is completely different than wanting to keep them warm, and becoming the awareness behind that realization is a hell of a lot more important than becoming a vault of those emotions. Your lack of emotion just makes me resent your disregard and selfishness even more. Revenge is not in my plans, because the way you act will only hurt you in the end. And that's all the revenge I need...your self-inflicted emotional failure. So, my friend, keep building your walls higher. 

We all have walls. They are necessary. But hiding behind them is cowardly. Whenever I see a wall now, I will laugh. I know what needs to be done. Say nothing more than thank you. Because silence, as it turns out, is the most powerful wall breaker...it screams. So thank you, if nothing else, for providing me with that wall of silence. Whatever you were, you were not good enough to hold onto, and so I will let go and realize that life gets easier when we accept the apology we will never get. In doing this, I now know that I will no longer keep welcome mats and sparkles where my spine should be. ❤

Almosts.

So I began documenting each of my days this year as a New Years resolution. In this hyper-electronic world, we can't document enough. From apps, to tweets, to pictures, to status updates, we have to not only inform the world of the mundane details of our lives, but be able to look back and see where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. History always repeats itself. I created this so that I could record every interaction. Everything that means anything-- because sometimes, it's easy to lose track of what's really happened, and what I've imagined. But we have to see that right this moment, we are creating our next moments. This is what's real. We are only the sum of all these moments and we may as well have it documented to guide us through this carousel of life. 

Which leads me to this...this blog that I've created. What does it mean? Sometimes forever and almost always...it's the premise that things are transient. And the ideas of "forever" and "always" take away from your ability to live in the now...something I've always struggled with. But at a certain point, we have to do as The Gambler says, and know when to hold or fold 'em. Why waste your time on things or people that wont ever care enough to do the same for you? There are no safe investments in life. But we invest anyway, because heartbreak, like most things, is transient; but regret is eternal. And even when things aren't about a love, if it means anything to you, its still a matter of the heart. What is forever? What is always? Neither of them can be true for everything, always. So we have to learn to laugh at the planning process of life and accept that our forevers and always' don't always mean just that. Things, people, relationships, jobs, dreams...all of them can be forever...sometimes. And almost always, it's that tiny glimmer of hope found in that word "sometimes", that keeps us hanging on. We make our lives out of that chaotic hope. 

Remember--there are a lot of good almosts out there. But almost isn't good enough. ❤