24 hours of silence

I am a bit scrunched up.

But I am in a far better place.  I’ve just read through the past couple years of my blog and it started to hit home that I’ve been doing my best being a negativity slayer and didn’t realize that I needed to be a better vampire slayer.

My closest friends pointed out that I’ve collected a string of leeches these past couple of years that have been compromising my energy and goals.  Several had shared words with me trying to save me some grief much earlier.  But I had tangled myself in social circles that took time to extricate myself from.  Anyone who knew me during my pre-L the roommate times knew that I had been living independently and was doing well and it was bringing a roommate into my life that paved the beginning of a path that would shut down jnetsworld.

“This is my favorite restaurant.”  Someone joked while I was busy in the kitchen.  Everyone left, leaving the dishes for me.

It was nice to have my place buzzing with life.  But I see now that it was a poor substitute for what family is… and real friends.

My real friends were busy with their respective lives and could only check in with the occasional phone call between projects and traveling.

It was hard to have my boundaries respected…  it got to a point where I had to let them know to stay away and at regular intervals.  People didn’t want to wait to be invited… since I have a habit of disappearing… sometimes for weeks at a time.  And so… they persisted and insisted upon my attentions.

Try living this way for two full years to oblivious” well meaning” people that love you best when you have a party hat on and don’t understand that you wear many other hats…. some that are really really quiet.

I didn’t have enough quiet time to collect myself and be able to celebrate them.  In the past two years, I’ve danced at the Ford Theatre, at the Hollywood Bowl and in Acapulco.  In the past two years, I learned a lot about photography, got into underwater photography for a summer, took a shark dive and was part of a project called Candy Wax Cutie and recently enjoyed a huge gallery event where my behind the scenes stills for fashion shoots flashed on television screens through out a fashion show event.

And I never wrote of these huge events because I allowed people to impose themselves on me that I had little thought and energy left for myself.

Running off to my work gave me some time to feel like myself; feel like I was creating success..  And now that I’ve been on that jacked up space of workaholic / chasing solitude to recalibrate whenever I can squish a thought for myself for so long -I’m only beginning to return to that quiet place where I can write and begin thinking again at the piano… and not feel like a ghost of a person.

And it is so strange that I had tried to build friendships with people who didn’t endear themselves to me.  I remember many moments where I did share with them my frustrations and made requests and in that space of trying to be forthright, I didn’t see that the whole friendship was on their terms; conditional.

They are no longer in my life.  I could no longer sustain myself under their conditions that I invited them out the door indefinitely.

I see now that what I was hoping to enjoy was a sense of family.  I gave these people a safe place to land but they took me for granted.  They never got to know me nor what my world meant to me.  They never got to know my dreams and because of that, they will not be part of my future.

E-moo “Why didn’t you just ask me to leave?”

JNET:  “I never invited you to come over.  Why couldn’t you have waited for that!”

R:  “He set the energy going …. that neediness.  And lots of people took advantage as he did.  You’re just getting to a place where you are leech-free.”

I don’t think I’ll ever let people get into my life like that ever again.  It wasn’t my style.  I explored making new friends to stretch my world and found that jnetsworld stopped belonging to me.   I’m reclaiming myself and my world.  I want to enjoy my life and have time to write of a life worth writing about.  If you see me drop off the edge of the world again…

Then maybe you’ll know like my closest friends knew and were concerned about…. that I’m not doing well.

I’ve just spent over 24 hours inside intentional silence to heal myself and counter the choking silence that a noisy life created.  I’ll be spending the next season rebuilding JNET… and rebuilding jnetsworld…

IngridMichaelsonBreakable.mp3

I can breathe now…

JNET

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Henry David Thoreau

~ by jnetsworld on May 31, 2010.