This past year, I got in touch with whom I now consider my soul mate because of all the similarities we have between our lives. I feel that we have more in common than most people, and the fact that he can handle or more accurately, not handle or get caught in my mom problems is a plus for me. Since we've talked on Facebook and Skype truly since the middle of February, it has been an interesting journey in the inside of my mind and heart... Initially, I felt like I couldn't trust Dustin, due to the many young men I have been with in my past who have either let me down or I didn't let myself become emotionally open with. He was the first person who I had told myself, "I don't care, I'm going to be honest; if it doesn't work, then it wasn't meant to be." Surprisingly, after allowing myself to essentially be who I thought I was and spoke my mind, I was pleased to find that we connected on a deep level. So deep, that I knew it was real.
It may not have been actual love, but whatever it was, it was real, beyond anything I would have experienced in closed off emotional environments with past men. The problem is that I felt more open to say what I felt in the context of an online relationship, but only when I felt that I owed Dustin nothing, that is, when I didn't want anything from Dustin either. I began to feel like I owed Dustin the person that I thought he wanted in order to keep receiving the approval, which is truly a relaxation that I had experienced from simply being myself. The issue with this idea is that perhaps I am projecting my own desire of the way I would like to be as Dustin's desire, when it is truly my own. For some reason, whenever I experience relaxation from truly being myself and sharing my honest thought, I become addicted to that relaxed feeling and I try to control it. I try to control my relaxation, even though it came upon me in an uncontrolled, unpredictable fashion. Perhaps I am identifying too much with good feelings.
I have a pattern of closing people off completely or- as in the case with Dustin- being unabashedly open and honest with who I am, until I get to a point when I feel I must meet their needs in some case. I have considered that maybe I have been addicted to others approval, and that's why I have allowed people to have sex with me when I didn't want to, or have given people too much of myself when I wasn't wanting to give. However, the fact that I have had sex with people who have meant literally nothing to me, who have not been connected with me in any way, shows me that it is not really other people's approval I am after.
A thought that has come to my mind multiple times this summer is that I am actually after the approval of myself. In those times when I had sex with people who didn't matter to me, I could have been after an image of myself that I approved of and wanted: an independent sexual being, someone who decides where and when they have sex. Unfortunately, in the process, after having sex, even months after, I still felt used, even though I had also been active in the soliciting of sex. This has brought me to the conclusion that perhaps I was and maybe still am using myself to create an image of myself that is desirable in my own mind, which may have come from previous conditioning.
This concept of using myself as a means to create a desired image reminds me of a part of Awareness by Anthony De Mello which I have been reading and rereading this summer after Dustin had suggested the book to me. Anthony De Mello speaks about how people gain the world but lose their soul. The worldly feelings Anthony describes as validative feelings which people crave in order to feel safe and secure from other people. The soulful feelings are pleasures based on experiences such as working a job that you love, connecting deeply with someone else, and being out in nature.
This has all been confusing in the context of my relationship with Dustin. I wonder if I am still trying to create a desired image during my interactions with him, such as during sex. The whole time that I have spent with Dustin over these past three months or more, on Skype, FB, or in person, I have been so focused on feeling good, that I have not allowed for honest feelings of what I really feel or allowing space to listen openly for how Dustin really feels- therefore not experiencing my time with Dustin to its entirety. My actual worries are related to the experience of losing. When I connected so deeply with Dustin by surprise, I wanted to hold on to those good feelings, and I was used to holding onto good feelings in the way that I used to, that being obsessed about them and centering my life around them. Perhaps my struggles of feeling connected to or not feeling connected with Dustin has to do with me not being used to experiencing good feelings and also identifying too much with those feelings. I am hoping that if someday I have the opportunity to take mushrooms, I will do so, and the experience may scare me out of my attachments to desires or my idealized view of my life.
While I feel that I have connected with Dustin on a deeper level than with anyone else I have talked with online, I realize that maybe he is one out of many people that I could potentially connect with. What makes Dustin so special is that he is awake, and while I should simply be grateful that I am with an awake person that I connect so well with, I am still not awake as he is. I probably shouldn't compare how awake each of us is, since there would be no way for either of us to tell what experiences either of us are having exactly unless we express that to each other. When I say that I am worried about how awake Dustin is compared to me, what I am truly worried about is that I am addicted to searching for good feelings in a self-compromising way, while I assume that Dustin would never be dishonest or hesitant about showing who he is, how he feels, or what he truly thinks. What I am actually worried about is that Dustin is experiencing something different than I am. However, it is a fact that no one is having my experience and that indeed I am alone. Mushrooms may show me more of this. I worry that Dustin and I are not on the same page and therefore we are not sharing with eachother. As long as I am honestly sharing, I guess Dustin and I can share and connect.