One for the road.

Well, I managed to do it again. I fell asleep while watching the news and just woke up. I was gone from this world, as they say, and oblivious of everything. I may as well have been drugged and knocked out for all I know. Comatose is a word that comes close. I think a small horde of people could have entered the apartment and emptied it of nearly everything but the sofa and I wouldn't have known about it. They might even have been able to move the sofa with me on it.

My sister and I took the dogs for a brisk walk at noontime. It was near freezing, but the sun was shining and it was nice as long as you didn't walk in any shady areas. Still, I should have worn my gloves and alternately put one hand in a pocket. A walk is just long enough for my sister to tell me all that's going on in her life and I listen and make the odd remark and comment. I tell you, I'm a good listening post. In my next life I'm coming back as a therapist.

It's always been my job in this life to be a listener to people and to be patient and to absorb whatever is said to me without becoming overloaded. I seem to have that sort of attraction to people because I don't judge. I just listen and try to understand and not condemn them. It's always been that way and grew even more so when I gained psychological insight and started to understand the motivations of people, but I have always had this patience to listen and calm people down. Having had complex parents probably prepared me for that role.

It gives me the appearance of being very competent, when in fact I am not always. People have high expectations of me, because I seem to have a lot of knowledge. Nobody knows that I sometimes survive by the skin of my teeth and that understanding and logic applied to other people's lives, doesn't mean you can always apply it to your own life. On the contrary, I come up short often when it comes to dealing with my own problems, although I must say that there has been a vast improvement these past eight months since I've been single.

That's a funny thing. When there is nobody else in your life to muddy the waters and to muddle your thoughts, it is amazing how quickly you can put your finger on the sore spot and come up with the right solution. You get to the point where you want to be much faster. When left to your own devices, it turns out that you are more ingenious than you thought you were and far less helpless. When faced with an immediate problem, you have to figure it out on your own and reason it out in your own head without any outside help and you get it done quicker and better.

It makes you wonder how much of sharing the load is really true when you are in a partnership. I wonder how much help the other person really is in soothing your fears and worries. In helping meet them head on. I think in my case I've never found the person that really made things better and easier. It may have seemed so at the time, but looking back now, I am convinced that it wasn't. Looking back, I see that all the so called 'help' was only a prolongation of the problems and that there was never a solution or a teaming up together to eradicate the difficulties.

It's made me very weary of relationships, for me in particular and those of other people in general. All I see is the potential dysfunction of them. I think you have to be very healthy to have a good relationship. Or agree to the degree of your dysfunction and the seriousness of it. Now that I'm single, I feel that I've escaped from some terrible fate and I would never willingly go back and take that relationship up again.

At this point, I think I will stay single, because I like it too much to give it up and I do not feel the desire to share my life with anyone. I don't miss there being a person in my life that is always hovering in the background. Right now, I don't think I am generous enough to share myself with anyone else. I am too greedy of what is mine.

I have been married twice and both times it ended in a divorce, although the marriages were very different and so were the husbands. In between those two marriages, I had a serious relationship that was also very dysfunctional. I don't have a very good track record up to now. I think it is more important that I learn to live with myself than that I learn to live with somebody else. At this point, that's the most important thing and, oh yes, the fact that I get along well with the Überhund is very important too. Hee, hee.

Well, so much for philosophizing. It is late and I will go to bed and sleep for a while. I hope for a long while.

See you tomorrow morning.

Ciao...