More thinking

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Somewhere along the way I learned to believe that no kind of love lasts for me. (And therefore either that I am unlovable, or that love is not worth feeling, whichever, both?) This means, frankly, that I spend a lot of time acting like a hysterical jerk. And it is, after all, very hard to love a hysterical jerk. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces its own wounds.*

I've spent a lot of time drilling down to discover this, the core problem; now I am learning how to change both this basic operating assumption and all the behaviours it inspires. I am building something, very slowly, and sometimes there are tremors that knock down structures and show me how much I have left to do. But I am building something.

* Ugh, mixed metaphor, yuck.