The Tao of Surviving

There are days where all I can focus on is subsistence. My life is unbearably survivable. I get home from work, I drop into low-energy mode. I'm trapped in a gravity well, sustained indefinitely in some fraction of a life.

Experience made me excellent at enduring the untenable. It's a powerful skillset, and not one I seek to lose. Violence and torture can't stop me. Being without friends won't end me. Fear becomes courage. The price of this limited immortality is living half a life, separate from the ability to enjoy purposeless moments. I avoid the bad without being able to steer towards the good.

I ache for a romantic relationship. Everything comes back to that, circles around it. Now that my apparatus for avoiding bad relationships has been refined, I can't bring myself to go on a date. I want a new kind of love, the kind that doesn't rely on caretaking, but I have no idea what that looks like. How can I seek something when I don't know what it'd look like?

The Mommy Effect

I want to make a family that will take care of me. But, in the process of putting that family together, I put myself at the head of it so no one can victimize me. I place myself in a position where I give more help than I take. There's safety in that; I don't have to admit my needs and face the possibility that they won't be met. I'm still not taken care of. I'm still satisfying unreasonable demands. But now I can blame it on others and their needs rather than the ones who made me this way.