Navigating the Roadblocks

Once in a while things happen where you run into roadblocks.  They’re either set there by you, for yourself as a stop gap in the journey to indicate that you know whats down that road, and you have no need to wander there.  

They could also be put there unintentionally by yourself not realizing you’re roadblocking yourself from getting somewhere.  These ones are usually the most frustrating ones because you know they’re there.  But, you may not necessarily realize that you’re the one that put them there.  If you are self aware enough to know that you’re the one that put them there, the last question is why are they there.  This honesty with oneself is a very difficult pill to swallow. 

I have a few very active roadblocks along my path, in my case I call them guard rails, because they aren’t blocking a particular path, they’re keeping me on the one that I’m on. These road blocks can be anything from a decision to stop allowing yourself to use someone as a filler, forcing you to actually identify what is happening with yourself to seek out something that fills the void.   Others examples could be that you believe that someone or something will cause you pain or try and harm you, because they haven’t figured out what they’re looking for so you put road blocks up preventing them from getting back to you.  These ones are the tricky kind, because obviously the person has power and control over you to get you to reach to this extent to protect yourself.  If you think you might be doing this to yourself or someone, ask yourself this; “Would someone who genuinely cares about me make me feel like I need to put up obstacles so they can’t get at me?”  It’s a very difficult question to answer honestly, and only you can do that for yourself.  I can’t tell you what the right answer for you is.  It all very much depends on the relationship you have with yourself.  We aren’t here to judge you for that.  

What we are here for is for me to share some of my struggles in a fun and happy anecdote so that people identify with someone else to feel less isolated.  That’s legitimately what I want to achieve here.  

Let me tell you about some newly discovered roadblocks in my life, these ones are ones where I’ve been have found road blocks when trying to maintain relationships with others.  A few years ago, I was out with someone who (now I realize) had developed feelings for me when I wasn’t at a point where I could even like myself, let alone fathom how anyone else could.  I kept them at arms length, encouraged their progress towards relationships, and one day I went to contact them to get an update on their life I found they didn’t know who was contacting them.  This didn’t shock me, what followed was complete silence, that’s what shocked me.  Knowing that not everyone is particularly good at dialogue and communication I dismissed it this time.  It wasn’t until a subsequent attempt to contact them ended the same way that I found that there was a definite road block up and I wasn’t welcome to wander down that path.  In fact, the freeway exit had been removed entirely and the highway had been re-routed.  Now, obviously this type of thing can be upsetting, you might feel angry that someone doesn’t want to share their life with you.  I didn’t go there, at no point did I blame the individual for anything other than not telling me what I did.  Which lead me to believe that whatever I did was beyond reproach in their mind. I didn’t deserve any explanation from them, even if I had asked.  (Which I did, and was  unanswered.)  So, to walk away from that, I internalized it and wondered if I had done something to self-sabotage the relationship, or if I just didn’t give them what they wanted and they moved along in a very definite way.  What’s troubling about this whole thing is that we had a friendship prior to any feelings being developed. Granted, the attraction was immediate. I don’t think that’s changed. 

There are many relationships we look back on and see how they fizzled off, how they ended abruptly, and how they will never be what they were.  This is an indication that we need to give ourselves closure.  It’s not easy to forgive ourselves when we blame ourselves for something when we don’t really know what we did.  In order to grow from it, we can reflect, as much as possible, try better next time.   The best course of action if it will make you feel better, is look in the general direction of where you think the person might be, whisper the words “I’m sorry, goodbye” and let the wind carry your message to them.  If you’re a believer in the powers of the universe delivering your message it will get there, and may just be the weight that gets lifted off their shoulders and carried away to make things better for them.  I mean, you initially hoped for good things for this person, that shouldn’t change just because you aren’t in their life, should it?

Being roadblocked is a form of rejection, it’s a challenge to accept and carry on from.  However, creating roadblocks for other people is commonplace and is just as rejecting for them as it would be for you.

I place roadblocks in a variety of ways.  The simplest is the “I’m really busy, too busy to contact you, even though I’m thinking about you every minute of the day, and not contacting you is really hard.” way of road blocking someone.  This is more of a test of the infrastructure and to see if they’ve picked up on how needy you are.  Most people know how needy other people in their lives are, so you may as well just let the gloves fall and either walk away all together (applying the Brad Pitt Rule) or fall on your sword and reach out.   If you’re playing either version of this game you need to ask yourself a couple of questions, “If they cared about me the way I want them to, I wouldn’t be going through this bullshit.”  Hard pill to swallow, but that’s the long and the short of it.  Especially if you feel like someone is just feeding you sporadically like a garden.  The key to a successful garden is daily nurturing and attention.  Watering some flowers once a week and hoping they flourish into a lush and beautiful landscape is likely going to lead to disappointment. 

The other roadblocks can range from placing people in the friendzone, or spending time with people who don’t have an interest, or distraction with projects, basecamps, or becoming a workaholic.  All of these things are effective for one thing, being alone.  If your end game is alone then there’s a recipe for that.  Hit the local pet shelter, adopt fifty cats, wander to a thrift store and pick up a few town gowns and some slacks for the front yard.  Become the eccentric that lives on the block watering their shrubs with a fedora and a tweed.  If you’re me, your end game isn’t alone with a tweed.  Your end game is someone who is adventurous and active that will motivate you to get out there and enjoy the world with someone.  You want someone you can show your favourite corners of the world to, Netflix and chill will be fine for the down time, but essentially, someone with stamps in all their passports is going to win your heart over.  They’re out there for all of us.  We just need to be at a point where we are ready to love ourselves enough to have that amplified by someone else.  Until then, keep watering that flower bed, renovating those houses, wandering hiking trails, going on adventures by yourself.  You might feel like the person for you will never be found because they are on the other side of the world doing what they love, while you’re over here doing what you love.  That’s why they invented layovers, and magical bumps in the road to shake us onto the path we were destined to. 

Karpe diem, have faith that the rougher the road the more right the path.  If success were easy, everyone would be successful.  (That’s a lot of cliches)

Yo-yo's and super bouncy balls

Welllllllll, Remember as a kid you would try to master the art of the yo-yo, or try to guess where the super bouncy balls would go when you threw them?

Meanwhile over on the other side of the yard you saw people playing Hackysack and never really understood why?

As you get older those memories fade and so does that innocent curiosity.  You become more calculated, your risks become less risky and your faith in others is less a matter of faith but more a matter of proof. 

I've found myself thinking back to my younger days a lot lately, there are a number of possible reasons. One of them could be that I yearn for a world where people just allow others to be.  Be happy, be alone, be moody, be in control of their own lives. Who are we to stop anyone from being, unless that state of being is hurting someone or infringing on rights. 

Everyone has an opinion and feels that that opinion is to be shared. We never think of how our opinion may be received, we just think it's our entitled thought and we are compelled to share it. We become critics of others lives, sometimes from armchairs, other times from right beside them. It's almost like we forget that people are genuinely doing what feels right for them. No one should get to stop that, so then, why is it people try so hard to steer others along the garden path.  Maybe that's not their garden path to walk? Maybe they're allergic and don't have any antihistamine.... who knows, so, do yourself a favour and stop trying to run other people's lives and just let them do what they do, and you do the same. The world will be a more beautiful place if we all just did what felt natural and right. 

Speaking of doing what feels natural and right, let's talk about someone that has the propensity to make you feel like a yo-yo. The typical folk out there that feels that when they need their validation they pull you in, when they don't need it they push you back out. The great part about these people is that they're not even aware they do it, but you are.... and it kind of hurts you to know that your just a filler. Why are you letting it happen? I'll tell you why.

We allow people to treat us badly because truly in our mind we believe that life is full of ups and downs and if we get some attention and validation from this person, it's an up and when we don't get that validation, it's a down. So the ups help us get through the downs. Here's a silly question..... what happens if they aren't there to give you the up at all? Would you still feel the down?  Why are we enabling this behaviour, it only hurts us.  We sit waiting for them to come around and sprinkle us with some pixie dust and hope everything will be perfect.  Fast forward two days, and we wonder where they are and why they're not available.  We are effectively their yo-yo. Cut the string and move on.  

The odd part about the other end of the string is that what's there is one of those bounce balls. No one can predict what's going to happen next, and we might be in the trajectory and could get hurt with the bouncing all over the place. Why not exit stage left and call it a day. Let the super bouncy ball whip around in a room that's got nothing in it except an abandoned yo-yo in the middle of the floor. 

We are all here for a finite amount of time. Spend it in ways that make you feel great. Don't invest more in people than they can return. There is such a thing as bad people stocks and you can lose a lot of time and energy with the wrong ones. 

Losing Street Games

You ever play one of those games where the fast talking guy has the marble and three cups and you're supposed to follow the marble as he moves the cups around.  I've never been very good at following the marble or winning games in general.  The answer I always have in those games is.  "The marble is under the cup that it's under" and I walk away.

I think that I'm like this in life to some extent as well, I don't deal well with subtle.  I need people to be very direct with me.

I also assume that people are deceptive by nature. I trust but verify just about everything that people tell me. 

It's a pretty shitty way to be, and verifying everything does absolutely nothing for my insecurity. 

So there's that.

I'm out of things to say today.  I'm just mad, and annoyed.  Mostly with myself, and with how unfair things feel this week.  Two deaths rocked my life, showing me just how delicate life is. More importantly, it forces me to have that dialogue with myself, forces me to question everything I'm doing to make sure that I'm on the right path and I'm pursuing my happiness. The reality is, that part of my life needs work.