There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love...”

I decided to break the seal on a box of notebooks I wrote when I was in my early 20s (that I had packed and taped up in 1996). Reading my 22-year-old self fervently swear that she’ll never fall in love again makes me feel sad, mostly because she didn’t. Almost, but not really.

At 22, I was intensely passionate about many things—not eating red meat (the hormones! The red dye!), writing, feminism, literature (I had just discovered Anais Nin and Henry Miller, if that tells you anything), and love (again, the hormones!). I believed everyone had a soul mate just waiting for them out there in the world, and it was up to me to find him. Over a five year period, I recorded the turbulence of my love life in painstaking detail on page after page. I wrote about infatuations, crushes, obsessions, attractions, and love. Every time, it was the “real thing.” And every time, passion became my poison.

If these notebooks are an accurate depiction of what my I knew then, I can say I have learned a few things in years since. I no longer believe that everyone has one soul mate; I think we have many, and that people are drawn together by fate and circumstance. I no longer believe that such thing as an easy relationship exists or that the level of difficulty has anything to do with love.

I’ve also learned how to protect myself. After putting the pieces of a broken heart haphazardly back together time after time, I decided that spending the rest of my life shielding a heart of glass wouldn’t be a wise move. And I stopped letting other people in. 

Suppose love came knocking on your door. Would you turn it away with a “sorry, all stocked up on that here?” Pretend like you weren’t home? Chase it down the street with a baseball bat? Or would you open the door, smile, and thank it for being so punctual?

What I did was design a complicated mess of a barricade, complete with traps, skill tests, checklists, pulleys, ropes and, I think at one point, even a moat. If someone wanted in, he’d have to run the gauntlet, suffer the proving ground, navigate the emotional land mines, and pass every test. Should he make it through unscathed, I’d make certain he was sorry he even tried.

What I got for my efforts was a series of superficial relationships that never developed any depth or longevity. Or intensity. Or passion. And when they ended, I felt no more than a twinge of regret…a far cry from the anguish I experienced over breakups in my twenties. My thirties were not as melodramatic, but I sacrificed passion for peace.

I am not certain what I expected to find by reading the angst-ridden messages from my 22-year-old self. I hoped to discover that I am better off now than I was then, but I don’t think that’s true. I do mean it when I say I am happy being single, but I’m beginning to understand exactly what I’m missing out on by protecting myself so carefully. Without heartbreak, love and passion are watered-down versions of the real thing. Until now, I didn’t even realize that I missed the full-strength version.

There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love.” At its core is an element of letting go, even if you know there is turbulence ahead, that you’re signing up for an emotional roller coaster ride, and that it might end in tears. The only thing gained by crawling into your shell is, well, a really comfortable shell.

I’ll have to find a happy medium between being head over heels and in over my head if I want to experience the kind of intense emotion the 22-year-old me knew all too well. As for the happy ending, just consider me “in production”—I know that this movie won’t have an ending until I find a way to take heart instead of losing it.

The funny thing is...

Even when you stopped allowing the men in your life to break your heart, the thing that surprised you most was that it could still be broken — by Life, by Loss, by Things Outside of Your Control. Sometimes they didn’t just leave you and go somewhere else; sometimes they really left you and everything else in this world. When that happened, there was no ex. There was no second act, no breakup sex, and no opportunity to wait for him to come crawling back just so you could turn him away one last time.

Instead, you were left begging under the weight of the universe, asking Providence for one more chance, calling Fate at three o’clock in the morning to sob your heart out.

You did what a lot of girls do; you tried to move on. You went out nearly every night, hoping to run into Divine Intervention, or even Chance or Fortune—you weren’t picky then.

But no matter how alluring, no matter how charming, no matter how hard you tried to conceal your desperation, you brought evening after evening to a close with Grief.

I'm just one viewer...

But one that is highly peeved that Comedy Central has canceled The Sarah Silverman show. I looked forward to it every week (I even watch reruns on Logo) and hope that another network will pick it up. I know a lot of people don't get her sense of humor, but I'm not friends with them.

Oddly (or maybe not since rumors of cancellation have been circulating for a while now), I had a dream last night that Sarah was my BFF and she was trying to move her stuff into my house (without asking first) and her sister Laura was helping. She stacked her luggage in my spare room, threw my haircare and facial products on the bathroom vanity in the trash to make room for hers, and started listing the places in Austin she wanted to go. Then we started playing "what's that smell?" because there was a strange odor coming from her luggage stack. It took a while, but she remembered she put a wet bathing suit in one of her bags about a week ago. Laura got disgusted and left and Sarah started eating my chili-lime almonds and asking how long it would take me to do her laundry.

If you love(d) the show, follow @SaveSarahNow and @sarahksilverman on Twitter and Tweet @ComedyCentral to let them know how you feel about them pulling the show. Also, her new book is hilarious and you can buy it now.

I will be wearing black (weird for me, I know) in mourning until another network picks it up or Comedy Central changes its mind. Where am I going to get my tasteless comedy fix now? Don't say South Park.

I get it. Sadly, but I do get it...

Author David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. I just spent twenty minutes writing that sentence, but there is no prettier way to say it. I was in the car when I heard and broke down in tears, partly because the person I most wanted to call and tell first is no longer part of my life. And I have tears in my eyes writing this now.

I fell a little bit in love with Wallace in 1996 after reading Infinite Jest. I cannot count how many copies of that book I bought and passed along to friends. I wanted them to see a part of me through it. I loved him darkly; I loved his darkness. I didn't see the humor in the book that so many reviewers saw - the same book that won him a genius grant - but I did see the genius. And I remember how many times I told fellow writers and friends, "I want to be a writer like that." I meant it.

And I'm sad to have to revise the statement. I've been to some dark places, I've pulled myself out of them more times than I'd like to admit. I know how I get when I allow myself to wade in too deep, when I'm writing fiction, what I'm like when I start acting like the character I'm writing for.

My heart hurts because I do get it, and at the same time I also understand the impact suicide has on the people who love the person who takes his own life.

I don't want to be a writer like that.

Hate. Springing. Forward.

This time of year always gives me a case of the Mean Reds, and I've felt this one coming on for weeks. The change in seasons, the getting up earlier, the morning darkness, the spring in the air that makes me feel afraid and disturbingly nostalgic for things I don't want to think about anymore.

Since my life is in total disarray (I'm not exaggerating), I'm trying to decide which would be more effective: finding a new shrink or re-hiring my cleaning lady. They both cost about the same, but the shrink won't clean my house or fold my laundry or make the dust bunnies in the corners go away. On the other hand, my cleaning lady won't tell me to get the f*ck off the couch and start living my life. Or figure out why I go through these phases of hating myself that literally incapacitate me.

I detest myself even more for complaining, because so many other things in my life are so great. I have everything I've wished for since I can remember. I have wonderful friends & family, a job I adore, and a book deal. I have more things to be grateful for than I ever have in my whole life, therefore I suck for lying on the couch all weekend watching old episodes of Grey's Anatomy on DVD and weeping every 45 minutes or so.

I know it isn't depression; it's fear. Fear of death, success, loss, letting go, failure, dirt, outdoors, people, food, life...everything is worthy of dread. The good news is that I've been here before and I know it won't last. I always get through, push it aside, suck it up, and move on with my life. I need a good yoga class, bike ride, shopping spree, house cleaning, or sharp rap to the back of my head to get going again. And I think I'm going to try and make all of those happen this week.

"... the blues are because you're getting fat or because it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?"
~Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffanys

Often depressed and heart broken we gaze the future motionless...

I'm both mystified by and in love with this site: The home of all post modern urbanite bugs.

We only had a print edition, but teen angst hasn't changed much since I was in high school: Lawrenceville (KS) High School's online literary journal. Life is so full of sorrow. When you're 16.

It often helps to commiserate with others.

Pair off, or die.

Humans aren't the only ones whose hearts can be broken. Robots need love too. I must have one of these.

If you have to ask Yahoo! how to heal your broken heart, you're totally screwed. Or you're in seventh grade.

Be kind. You can't tell who has a broken heart just by looking at them. It would help if we all wore these shirts.

We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. ~Author Unknown

The only thing that counts...

I finally got around to watching The Last Kiss this weekend. There is a particularly stunning scene (I won't say too much in case you haven't seen it) with Zach Braff and Tom Wilkinson, whose character has been married for 30 years. Michael (Zach Braff) says something like, "you can't say you've never strayed." And Stephen (Tom Wilkinson) is quiet for a long moment, then he says: "What you feel only matters to you. It's what you do to the people you love. That's what matters. That's the only thing that counts. "

It reminded me that I once had a boyfriend who announced—in a bar, at a table packed with friends and acquaintances—that he didn’t see anything wrong with cheating because, as a particularly psychologically advanced individual, he could separate lust from love. Granted, he hadn’t cheated on me (trust me, a woman knows), and he said as much, but his declaration made my blood run cold.

My father was a cheater. He cheated on my mother openly and often, with younger women, with any woman who would have him, until he finally left my mother for one of them. My grandfather was also a cheater. My grandmother caught him with her best friend when my mother was only three years old and divorced him soon thereafter. He later married the best friend. My boyfriend knew all of this, including my feelings of contempt, yet he still thought it was acceptable to declare himself a potential cheater.

The conversation had turned to the topic of cheating because one of my friends said she wouldn’t divorce her husband if he cheated on her. I, being in my early 20s and naïve (not to mention earnest, somewhat optimistic, and emotionally immature), suggested that she’d just given him license to screw around.

“What would you do,” my boyfriend asked, “if I cheated on you?” Without skipping a beat, I said “I’d sleep with your friends and make sure you found out about it” (except I didn’t say “sleep with”—and I might have added something about videotaping it for him).

“But lusting after someone else isn’t the end of the world,” he said.

“No, it isn’t. But acting on it is.” How do I know? Because I've been a cheater more often than I've been cheated on. And my actions spoke volumes.