One of the saddest things in the world is to feel, after years and years of thinking there is something wrong with your heart and that you have closed up shop for good to your emotions, you have finally met someone you could really and truly love only to realize they can never ever be someone who would or could feel the same way back. When it first happens, you tell yourself that you will get over it, that it is just a passing fancy, then when it gets stronger you still deny what you're feeling, like that guy in that 10cc song "I'm Not In Love."

But once you realize that the feelings are here to stay, that you will always like this person but (it is so obvious it goes without saying, but just in case) never ever tell her, the thing isn't (as I used to think) to throw yourself into other people, but to throw yourself, your mind, your heart and your soul into other things (volunteering, finding a new hobby, making new friends.) The heart is very stubborn and wants what it wants, but I still think there is hope for the mind...in knowledge and in realizing you still want to learn new stuff, still love your books and music, still have hope that someday your heart will follow your mind and join the land of the living.

Some people believe unrequited love is merely a result or a side effect of being afraid and/or unable to have real and lasting mutually reciprocated relationships with people who are actually interested in you and could even love you back, but I sincerely do not think that is the case. The thing about unrequited love that people who have never experienced it before may not realize is that most people would do anything to get rid of it and want to be in real and lasting mutually reciprocated relationships. 

Unrequited love is not 'cute' or a school girl crush or a Lifetime movie, it is really caring for and respecting and having genuine feelings for a wonderful person and hoping that you can emotionally move on one day and make peace with what is still in your heart, but carefully tucked away in a strong but safe corner...

 

 

"Appearance should not be mistaken for truth." That is so very true. People who talk but cannot always get their thoughts out very well may actually be secretly and painfully shy and not as idiotic as they appear, private people hiding their hurt may come across as aloof and...jerks, well, jerks may actually really be jerks, but they also may be people who just do not how else to behave. They may even do jerky things not realizing they are acting like jerks.

These are not excuses or justifications, but just the differences between how things may seem and how they actually are. I know because I think you really can just tell sometimes how someone truly sees you and I have seen the politely contained look in someone's eyes that lets me know they think I am an idiot. I know that I unintentionally can most definitely act like an idiot, but I never mean to and I think just maybe, deep down, that I am not as dumb as I feel when I am around people. It really is both weird and horrible that you can really, really like people and yet just be no good around them...

 

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

I was reading a book for work and it referenced the above, without attributing it to anyone. The way the author wrote about it I knew the passage must be well-known and so I typed the words in Google and discovered they are from Jane Eyre, which I have never read.

These words jumped out at me with a vengeance because at the time I was reading them I was experiencing a huge amount of self-loathing and I have been going through this solitude lately that feels both good and bad. Good in that I cannot possibly make as many social faux pas (or worse) if I am not around others and bad because, well...after a while solitude can just feel so lonely and as the passage that follows so aptly puts it:

"No: I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don’t love me, I would rather die than live—I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen."

I feel like I cannot really write about these words more, or truly know them, without also knowing the full context and more about Jane Eyre. The words are so haunting me that I went into the Kindle store and just downloaded it for free.

I hope to get to it after I finish a book that I have been purposely taking my time with because it has so much to say and I think that it may really help me embrace solitude better without embracing the self-loathing. It really is a wonderful book:

 




 

This is such good advice. Sometimes, when we really want something to be a certain way, our heart can almost make us think it is that way but, in the end, that is neither practical nor very good nor fair to anyone involved. Things that cannot be changed just are the way they are and accepting that is crucial to a healthy well being and state of mind...easier said than done, but something I really, really want to work on in my life...

I wish more than anything this were possible. I have long wished this could be so and have always found this to be one of my favorite Proverbs. My mother, if she knew, would be so happy that I have been reading the Bible tonight. It is so weird how sometimes, because of things I have read and heard from strangers and from people in my own life, that I feel like I do not have the right to be both gay and Christian.

Wanting to guard my heart would be the same no matter whether I was gay or not. I have been struggling in my feelings now for a few years on and then things recently grew more complicated when I started getting attached, in a different way, to a different person while also still feeling how I do about the first person.

There are so many ways to care about someone and still get hurt because you got too attached and they did not. It can be romantic or platonic, familial or work-related, no matter what the context, letting your heart open up to friendship or love is still risking getting hurt very painfully and I do not think you have to be cynical to believe that.

But wishing you had better guarded your heart only after your heart got too attached is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube after it has popped out or closing the barn door after the horse has already fled.

I do not know why, exactly, but I find it kind of sad-funny that the very book that has been used to vilify and hate gay people is the very book that is comforting me right now.



 New International Version
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.
New Living Translation
Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.
English Standard Version
Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.
New American Standard Bible
Watch over your heart with all diligence, For from it flow the springs of life.
King James Bible
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
Holman Christian Standard Bible
Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.
International Standard Version
Above everything else guard your heart, because from it flow the springs of life.
NET Bible
Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it are the sources of life.
Aramaic Bible in Plain English
Keep your heart with all caution because from it is the outgoing of life.
GOD'S WORD® Translation
Guard your heart more than anything else, because the source of your life flows from it.
JPS Tanakh 1917
Above all that thou guardest keep thy heart; For out of it are the issues of life.
New American Standard 1977
Watch over your heart with all diligence,
            For from it flow the springs of life.

For many reasons, I have not dated in a long, long time but when I used to and certain topics would come up in conversation, the other person would often be bewildered (or worse, horrified) that I felt waiting was important. So when I read this article, so, so much of it speaking to me, the relief was almost intensely overwhelming...and even though I no longer date nor plan to, I still feel this immense relief and less freakish and alone for having some of the views I have as a single and celibate lesbian:

 
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/gay-waiting-for-marriage/414984/


After I read this article I did some online searching and I discovered that there are more women than I thought that feel this way...and the advent and legalization of gay marriage in our country has made this even more apparent and an actual reality. There would have been a time (there was a time) when people (including other gay people) would have looked at someone sideways and with great skepticism over wanting to wait for marriage.

Articles like the one above and others I found are nice for me because they comfort me that I am not only the 'old-fashioned' lesbian out there, something a friend of mine once told me was an oxymoron. Because of certain circumstances in my life I have just always known that I would most likely end up single for all of my life.

Even so, just knowing that there are other people out there like me, people who value love above all other aspects of being gay or lesbian, well, that just makes me somehow feel a lot less alone...even if I really do never met the woman with whom I want to spend the rest of my life.

https://www.yahoo.com/health/some-gay-couples-putting-off-sex-until-after-205248087.html

I am not a big fan of Madonna herself, though I really like a lot of her music. I do think her quote below is so very true and something to hold on tightly when you are struggling.

When it comes to worrying someone has stopped liking you, there is insecurity and then there is instinct. Maybe your anxiety and worries are false and simply just feeding your concern that someone no longer wants to be in a friendship or maybe there are subtle but still very real signs that just about break your heart. I do not think even the most quiet shifts in tone and how someone once communicated with you and no longer quite does the same way are to be ignored. You hope so, so, so very much that you are wrong and yet you worry. A friendship that has come to mean so much to you is not something you want to lose nor that you want to even think about losing :(

I always, always silently tell myself that I will not get attached to someone and yet I do, anyway. I think The Wizard of Oz was so right when he told the Tin Man he did not know how lucky he was not to have a heart...

I was putting away books tonight and one dropped on the floor and when I picked it back up it was as if this one page, in particular, wanted to be "seen." And I ended up checking it out and taking it home from work with me and now I almost wish I had not. It is both compelling and unsettling and also (it seems) caught up in Gone Girl fever. I told myself I was going to read it because it might work as a possible book club selection for work, but really all it is doing is making me uncomfortable :(

I really think that all you can do when you have unreturned feelings for someone is accept that they are not going to ever be a part of your life, to take peace and happiness from knowing they make your world brighter and to just silently pray that they are okay.

Sometimes, I write quotes down from books that really really affect me and this is something I read that was powerful enough to help me on a very bad day:

“Don't be ashamed. Yes, this is not easy for you. Yes, it is unexpected. But I don't think any one of us should be ashamed of who we love…but even then, peel back the layers, disregard the circumstances, and love is love. Some of us just have the good fortune of finding it under less taxing circumstances.”

--The Look of Love, Sarah Jio

Also helping me (greatly) with this is the support I get from 
a very dear friend I can confide
in, even as I also worry that I am growing to care too much about her and how all confusing and weird and unnatural it seems to actually worry because you care about someone. In both my situations I have to wonder: what is so wrong, anyway, with deeply caring about someone? And which is it that hurts more: the thought of losing them or the thought of them finding out?

I wish I could be like Spock, but C.S. Lewis is right...

If only you could turn your feelings off like a water faucet...if only you turn love off like a water faucet. I have never known that to happen, though, no matter how much I have wanted it to be so.

one of the biggest (but well-meaning, I am sure) lies ever perpetuated in tv shows and movies...

Not being able to sleep plus loneliness plus watching something unbelievably heartfelt and genuine yet still hard to swallow equals pure misery...and may lead to a cynically-infused post like this one.

Up very late and catching an episode of "How I Met Your Mother" that I never have seen before I can not help but painfully remember why I stopped watching the show. Its main character's unbelievably steadfast and goofy and adorable belief in "the one" was just too much for me sometimes.

I do not think I ever stopped watching a show before because I liked it TOO much, but that is why I stopped watching HIMYM. And the goodness and the happiness and its unshakable conviction that true love does exist just eventually became too much for me and much too painful to believe in.

Maybe it is easy to still hold to such beautiful sentiment as this in your 20s and 30s but by 45...not so much. By 45 if you are single (no matter whether you are gay or straight) and still holding on to thoughts like these, you either waited for something that never happened or your "one" was not the one who felt the same.

Lovely and magical and sincere, yet somehow still more a fairy tale than not, these words strike me as actually almost harmful to one's sanity to believe...because if you go through your whole life thinking this is an absolute then you may be in for some really, really heartbreaking and devastating disappointment when it does not happen or the one you feel this way about is not the "one" for you...

Klaus:Victoria is wunderbar, but she is not my "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz." She’s my "Beinahe-Leidenschaftsgegenstand"… It means the thing that is almost the thing that you want, but it’s not quite. That is Victoria to me.
	Ted:	How do you know she’s not "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz?" Maybe as the years go by she’ll get "Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz…ier?"
Klaus:	"Lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz" is not something that develops over time. It is something that happens instantaneously. It courses through you like the water of a   river after a storm, filling you and emptying you all at once. You feel it throughout your body, in your hands, in your heart, in your stomach, in your skin… Have you ever felt this way about someone?
Ted:	…I think so.
	Klaus:	If you have to think about it, you have not felt it.
Ted:	And you’re absolutely sure you’ll find that someday?
	Klaus:	Of course. Everyone does eventually… You just never know when or where it will happen.

unrequited feels like unrelenting...

...or her

I was reading on my iPhone last night and saw this and though it is directed to straight women, this advice (good advice, I think), of course, can apply to anyone who has one-way feelings for someone. I am really, really thinking about seeking therapy because how I feel has gone on far too long and having to be around someone you like so much on such a regular basis can be extremely difficult and painful sometimes...

I was looking up information on an author for a science fiction class I am taking through work and I discovered that the writer killed herself, in part because she struggled much of her life with having feelings for other women. I guess maybe this hit too close to home for me and I have been overcome with such sadness, more than is probably reasonable or that I can even explain, given that I was much worse off with struggling when I was younger than I am now.

I really do not know many people in my own life who know the despair of struggling with being gay. The only other lesbian I know (and with whom I am not close friends with, but I have had conversations with about all kinds of topics) was warmly accepted by her parents when she came out to them. 

A couple of months back at work I helped a young lady find young adult novels on coming out. I guess she was about sixteen or seventeen. She quietly said thanks and, afterwards, I could not help but notice that the young lady went over to a woman and called her mom and that as she showed her the books, the woman hugged her to her side and told her it was going to be okay. I was so happy for the girl, I truly, truly was, but after that I excused myself from the reference desk and went to the bathroom where I ended up crying for a little bit.

It has been more than a quarter of a century since I first told my parents I am gay and they still will not accept who I am. It may be the 21st century, but some people are still living in the 19th. I am so, so happy for anyone whose parents and other loved ones in their lives wholeheartedly accept them, but I also hope they know how blessed they are to have this.

...

A recent issue of a science fiction magazine I like devoted its main topic to LGBTQ characters and stories, something that just really jumped out at me because science fiction is not always warm and friendly to gay and lesbians (think Orson Scott Card). These two passages are ones I really, really relate to: