I’m scared. I’ve owned up to that fear so many times in the past few weeks. I’ve spent so much time saying that I need more, and I’ve not really got it. In three weeks, I am supposed to walk away from my life, from everything I know. I am supposed to move to this shiny, sunny place that I never really wanted or imagined I would live in. Mostly, I am excited by that. Mostly. But it’s scary too. I am literally giving up everything that I thought my life would be if I get on a plane in three weeks from now.

I am leaving my entire life behind, completely changing what I thought my imagined life would like, while his imagined life is staying mostly intact. How am I not supposed to resent that a little? How am I not supposed to resent the fact that where I can move to is dictated by where someone else works? How am I not supposed to resent the fact that I feel completely powerless in this position? I hate that feeling. It’s a feeling I wanted to leave behind in the hospital waiting room.

I’ve spelled out, in big bolded letters, that I need more lately. I need to feel wanted physically and mentally and emotionally and every other way that ends in ally apparently. I’ve said I need romance… sweet gestures that are out of the ordinary. I’ve been honest about being afraid, about needing constant reassurance.

I have a history of dealing with people that change their minds after a while, of people that decide I’m not good enough or not worth the effort. After basically every single person you have ever cared about walks away from you or is taken away from you, you try to not be afraid of leaving the few stable things in your life behind. You try to not be afraid that history will repeat itself. It’s even more terrifying when thinking of the person that you love in a way you never thought you could love anyone will walk away, will decided that I’m not worth it. My fear is a completely justifiable thing to me. I realize that this distrust of people caring, of people being present is my baggage and I am learning to deal with, to carry it, as best as I can.

I want so badly for things to be perfect and I want so badly to believe that everything will be. I want more than anything to take this step. I know that my fear is putting unnecessary demands on things, unnecessary pressure. I just can’t alleviate it on my own. I know that there are other things that effect the situation. The distance, the time difference, the work, everything is getting in the way. Right now, more than ever, I need  to feel like I am more important than everything else though. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but regardless, it’s what I need right now.

There is a difference between hearing someone say that the things in the past don’t matter, that it’s different now, or that everything will be ok and actually believing that. Believing it because you see it and you feel it. Maybe I am overreacting, maybe I am just being too scared, but all I know is that right now, in order to take this step, I need to feel it completely and I need to be unafraid.

Even my freshman year of college, when I chose not to go home (because there was a boy involved), my mommy sent me a box with a fluffy little bunny and some chocolates.

Last year, my mom’s partner got me an easter basket (I think at the urging of my aunt).

This year though, I’m not at home and my mom’s not here and I am almost certainly not getting a magical easter basket tomorrow.

There are so many people that trivialize the importance of religious holidays for those that aren’t religious, but seriously, I didn’t even know that eggs and a bunny that like to hide them had anything to do with Jesus until I was like eight or nine. This holiday is not merely a Christian one, it just has a different meaning for those that are. For me, easter is about being with my family and dressing a little nicer than normal. It’s about watching my little cousins excitement as they run around looking for the prize egg. It’s about eating too much chocolate that I steal from said little cousins and enjoying the nice weather.

I’ve not seen my family since Christmas, before Christmas actually. I miss them in that achy way, that way were a phone call doesn’t suffice. I miss them more and I need them more during the times that I can feel my mom’s absence more than anything. It’s almost suffocating, the awareness of the fact that she is not here, and my family helps me relax and breath a little.

It doesn’t help that in a little less than a month, I will see my family for the last time before moving all the way across the country. They won’t be only a 2 hour drive away then.

I wish more than anything in the world I was home this weekend. I wish more than anything I was with those people that drive me insane but make me laugh at the same time.

I’ve always kind of lived for the future. Growing up, I constantly imagined what my life would be like in a few years. And I waited for that. The only problem is, I never really stopped waiting.

Until recently.

Every new phase changes something, even just slightly. Of course, from a distance those changes are wonderful and better than whatever phase I’m currently going through. That’s not always true though. Different doesn’t mean better. It also doesn’t mean worse. I really don’t know if this makes sense outside of my head.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love to think about the future. I think my life will be great in five years or ten years. The important thing though, is that my life is great right now. Something about being with D and ending this long distant phase of our relationship (less than a month!) is making me realize how I much I value what our relationship has been.

The things that I have gone through, that we have gone through in our relationship have caused me to grow up and to learn to love someone in a way that I didn’t ever think I was capable of. In the beginning, it was a relationship built on him supporting and protecting me, and I needed him to do that then. I needed someone there to be completely dependent on and completely wrapped up with while I was dealing with all of the emotions that went along with having to bury my mom. Then we broke up. And it was terrible. But I had a chance to grow and to live and to not be dependent on my boyfriend for my emotional well being. It was necessary. Now, we are together but far away, and as much of that sucks sometimes, our relationship is solid. Yes, we fight. We fight a ton! But seriously, I want to see someone that has a completely different schedule from the person they love and has to deal with coordinating phone calls and skype sessions that doesn’t get a little grumpy every now and then. The thing is though, we don’t fight to hurt each other. We fight to fix it, and to be stronger. We fight because we love each other.

I so value all of the phases of our relationship and I’m glad that each of them occurred because they are why we are us today. I want to continue to value the different phases of our relationship forever. I want to recognize that even when the phase might be a little sucky, the relationship is not and the sucky parts are necessary. I want to make sure and savor every new phase.

I want to remember that always. I want to remember that when I start being able to call him my kitten co-owner, my fiance, my husband, my baby daddy. I just want to always savor the moments, even the bad ones. Not just in my relationship (my relationship and the soon occurring change are just what prompted the realization).

(Yes, the title is a reference to Buffy, but no, this post will not have anything to so with Buffy.)

Recently things have happened that have made me think about feelings and intentions and all that sappy emotional stuff. I have been accused more than once of being cold and emotionless. From the outside, I can almost understand how people that don’t know me well can throw that accusation at me. It seems true. I don’t like to show any vulnerability to people that I don’t trust completely, and even then I hesitate. This isn’t some plea for pity or oh poor me, I’ve been hurt before thing. It’s just the way that I am. Sometimes, I wish I could change it, and I am trying to, but it’s scary and difficult. I don’t like doing scary and difficult things.

All that being said, I do care. I care more than I should most of the time. I don’t believe it is possible to go from loving someone to being apathetic towards them, at least not without many, many years passing. I think people hide behind apathy as a way of protection, typically while still trying to hurt the person their feigned apathy is directed at as much as possible in order to get some sort of justification from the whole process.

I have watched others do it and I’ve done it myself. My form of hurting others is to just cut them out. I remove them from my life without giving them a chance for explanation or apology, and then I claim not to care. Even when I am lying in bed at my boyfriend’s family reunion having some crazy meltdown, I maintain that I am apathetic towards the people I have forced out of my life.

Other people aim to hurt in other ways. Snide comments about sore subjects, openly regretting time spent with you, and just creating situations that result in bad feelings are just some of the ways. It hurts. I can’t pretend like it doesn’t. When someone you thought was there, was going to be a somewhat permanent fixture in your life, turns into someone that purposefully hurts you it’s a little hard to stomach.

I have to believe the apathy is fake because I have to believe that the feelings that were there once were real. The alternative, that is was all just some shame, is too hard for me to accept.

I just get scared so easily. I don’t mean to exactly. I just can’t help but be afraid of being hurt. People have a tendency to let me down, and so depending on someone makes me uneasy. I don’t like being that vulnerable.

There was a moment yesterday in which I thought about what reality would be like if D and I were no longer together. It made me shudder. If something happened between us, my entire life would be kind of turned upside down right now. I’d have no place to live for summer and no means of supporting myself (I’m not using him to support me but moving their for the summer means that I couldn’t exactly find a job beforehand like I do when I stay here). That’s what I am depending on him for right now. But that stuff doesn’t really matter. I could figure that out and I would be ok.

It’s the things that I don’t depend on him for that would really hurt the most though. What would hurt the most are the things that I can’t exactly articulate… the sleepy way his voice sounds early in the morning, the way his laugh instantly puts me in a better mood, the way his arms feel when they are wrapped around me.

I guess I am just realizing that loving someone, depending on someone, giving so much of yourself to someone else is frightening. It is terribly frightening but so very worth it. I’m making a conscious effort to own up to being afraid but to be brave enough to just get over it. I’m making a conscious effort to just love. Everything else will work out.

When my mom died, I thought that would give me some magical understanding of grief, some ability to fix it when bad things happened to other people.

I know of a few people that have lost someone close to them in the past two weeks and I all I can figure out how to do is say I’m sorry. I mean it completely but it doesn’t feel like enough. I feel powerless and I hate that. I keep trying to remember what helped me the most when I was so sad. I don’t remember anything helping for very long, but I felt best when I didn’t have to think about it. I hated when people told me it would get easier or it would be ok because it the time, those felt like the biggest lies ever uttered. So, using that, I am trying to be as supportive as I can but still normal. Sometimes, when bad things happen, people don’t want to talk about it. They want to forget it for a little while, and I understand that. Hugs are almost always helpful though.

I still wish there was more that I could do.

I wish I could take away all the sad. I wish people didn’t have to die.

I have been anxious about almost everything for as long as I can remember. As a child, I had all these stomach issues that the doctors eventually told my mother were the result of a highly stressed child. I don’t know exactly what caused the anxiety but it was always there. If I dropped a plate and broke it, I’d immediately jump and have this almost scared reaction. It usually led to me crying even. It’s completely illogical because I never once got in trouble for breaking anything as a child. I got anxious over everything though.

My nervous childhood trend has definitely carried over into adulthood and it has manifested itself into a need to be in control, to have a plan. As much as I want to be one of those people that can wake up in the morning and take an impromptu trip or something, I’m just not. The only things I can do without a lot of planning, are things that are familiar and routine. If I have certain expectations about how something is going to go, but then it doesn’t, I feel like I’ve lost that control and it makes me nervous. I have to be overly prepared for new situations. Thank god for the internet, in that regard. Before trying a new restaurant I will spend hours reading the reviews on yelp or looking at the website. I look up every little detail of flights that I am going to be on, including obscure information about the model of plane. I map out airports before I have layovers in them. The list of things I do to try and be more comfortable in a new situation goes on and on.

Social situations make me so anxious I freeze, especially social interactions with people my age. I remember meeting D’s friends for the first time and I was just awkward. I wasn’t prepared for the situation and I was overwhelmed by anxiety to the point that I just wanted to leave. My best friend’s boyfriend said he thought I hated him after our first few interactions. Thankfully, my best friend knows that it takes me a long time to be comfortable enough in a situation to become myself, so the boyfriend was reassured appropriately. I have not made any “connections” with my professors because by the time I am comfortable enough to speak up in class, the semester is half over. I hate that I get as anxious as I do in social situations, but I don’t really know how to fix it, and as of now, it doesn’t prevent me from doing anything really, it just makes doing things especially awkward.

I can’t help but wonder if maybe it’s genetic. My mom suffered from a severe anxiety disorder, after all. I don’t know what causes it really, but I wish I knew a way to stop it.