**

One might think that this situation would make it easier to make friends. I mean, hell, we had lots of opportunities to practice. But it really had the opposite effect, at least in my case. I'll never forget. Moving often was as natural as breathing to us. Well, we moved to Fort Hood, Texas and lived there for FIVE.FUCKING YEARS. It was the longest we had ever lived anywhere in my life.
I was just transitioning from elementary school to junior high when we got there so I was at the age where I started noticing girls. I joined the football team and got involved with other things like lifeguard lessons and the teen center. I really started putting down roots and making friends. Real friends, close friends ... best friends. It was good.
Five years later, my dad came home and dropped the bottom out of my life ... he had put in for and received orders for Alaska. We were going to have to move again. (God, it sounds silly and seems so pathetic now but to an eighth grader who really loved where he lived, it was a pretty significant blow.) That day, my heart hardened a bit. I concluded that no matter how much I wanted it, nothing was permanent. The only person I could count on being there day in and day out was my brother. Friends come and go but family? Family is there all the time because they move with you.
That day I started distancing myself from people ... not allowing myself to get close anymore. What was the fucking point? We'd just end up getting orders, moving again and everybody would be gone and I'd have to start all over ... and it would hurt. It hurt to let people get close, to allow myself to love people only to have to leave them in the dusty past the next time we hit the fucking highway.
That behavior has pretty much been my modus operandi since then. Don't get me wrong. I'm not unfriendly. I do have acquaintances, but very few get really close. I can count on one hand, and still have fingers left over, the friends I let in all the way since that day. (Just so you know, that was 1976.) But those that do get in, I love with a fervor that burns so hot, it can melt steel. They are the TRUE friends that I plan on having for life. Unfortunately, that same love has a tendency to burn them up too.

I guess through the years my social skills as far as maintaining those friendships atrophied. I mean, if you don't use it, you lose it right? So I have a habit of holding on too tightly, placing unreasonable expectations on people. And sometimes? I'm not even true to my self, my core beliefs.
I like to think that I am flexible ... that if you have a point of view that I haven't heard before, I'm willing to listen, think about it and, if I find it has merit, shift my position. Unfortunately this comes off as being wishy-washy more often than not and, fuck, ... I suppose there is some truth to that.
It's just that it's so fucking hard for me to expend all that emotional energy making those friends when I know deep in my heart they will all eventually blow up in my face. I hate the fucking dance. I don't have a lot of faith in myself or the self confidence to pull it off.
Someone I know calls it "self-hatred." She thinks I don't like myself much and put myself in situations, act in ways, that will ensure failure. Maybe she's right I don't know. I do know I wore her down like the fucking river cuts through mountains. Wiped her out emotionally. I think that part of the reason I'm getting divorced after 21 years of marriage is that I never let my wife get in to that part of me that husbands and wives are supposed to share. I never really let her get that close. The same thing, to a certain extent, is true for my kids. I love them more than anything else in the world, but they don't know the real me either.
Sometimes? I think it would be easier to fucking shut myself off completely and consign myself to being alone for the rest of my life. I know it would be far less emotionally exhausting for both me and the next victim. It just seems to be a perpetual cycle I can't break.
I don't have any answers right now or have any idea how to fix it. I'm also not trying to get anybody to feel sorry for me or play the victim. I think I do what I do automatically, just like breathing and I don't know how to change that.
These are just some things I've been thinking about lately and needed to put them down here. Writing helps me think and there's something sobering about seeing a problem in black and white versus the Technicolor fog that is my thought process these days. I know I'll figure it out eventually and things will change. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.
Aren't you glad you stuck around now? Me too. Thanks.