The Voice of Love

There’s a voice that speaks to each us from deep inside our souls. A quiet unobtrusive voice that has only one request...listen. It is the voice of sympathy in our sorrow, the voice of comfort in our loneliness, the voice of reason in our impetuousness, the voice of calm in our raging anger, the voice of laughter in our sadness, the voice of understanding in our frustration, the voice of clarity in our confusion, the voice of rest in our weariness, the voice of relaxation in our stress the voice of courage in our fear, the voice of giving in our need, the voice of love eternally.

Excuse Me???

Codependent relationships are a bitch! I say this looking from the outside in of course. When I was smack dab in the middle of “them” (took me awhile to catch on) I thought that I was just being nurturing…miserable, but nurturing. I was wrong, plain and simple.

So, how in the hell did I manage to keep choosing guys who were addicted, mentally unstable or just plain emotionally unavailable? Or, were they choosing me? They could see me coming a mile away. I’m convinced that there was a sign on my head written in ink that was only visible to these losers. It said “If you are emotionally unavailable, I’ll take care of you!”

Now, I realize that it had nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. My self esteem was in the crapper for years. This sent me on a quest for fulfillment and happiness in a man (like that’s gonna work). “Real” men could sense my desperation and went running for the nearest exit, with me in rapid pursuit. That left me with; you guessed it, guys with big “L’s” on their forehead. Too harsh?? Shall I share what prompted this tirade? An ex-boyfriend, key word here being ex, has been asking for my help lately. He is going through a rough patch but “we” are not. There is no "we". When I got a phone call and told him “No” he wanted an explanation. Excuse me? Since when do I have to have a reason to "just say no?"

Now, at half-a-century old, I hope I’m finally getting it. I propose that the word fulfillment be replaced with “self-fulfillment” since the only real lasting source of fulfillment is self.

What I Know vs. What I Have Been Taught to Believe

As a teacher myself, it’s impossible to impart knowledge into students. We simply condense our experiences along with those of others and gather them for our students to harvest. Eleanor Roosevelt said “Learn from the mistakes of others, you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself"...my mantra. The key word here is “learn”. It is the student’s responsibility to learn. A keen observer, I am a perpetual student…of life. It is important to not only observe but to absorb. To observe is to be outside, to absorb is to go in. It’s the inner learning that leads us to become who we were meant to be. This I know, not from teachers in a classroom, but from life’s encyclopedia. Like the Internet, my questions are queried through my internal search engine. I always get an answer albeit not necessarily what, when or how I expect. We are so amazingly intricate that I believe our bodies innately have everything they need to heal themselves, if we just get out of the way. The same is true about the human soul. We already have the answer to life, we merely need to ask the questions and listen.