I Give Myself Very Good Advice

"I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it." --Lewis Carroll, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

My mantra is, "Good things take time. Don't rush into anything. Don't get ahead of yourself. Think things through. Don't count your chickens before they've hatched." (Yeah, it's a rather long mantra.) I rarely, if ever, actually follow that mantra. When I meet someone I really like, my mantra becomes, "Just hold on. He's going to do something crazy. He's going to say something to totally piss you off. The other shoe will drop. All it takes is time." Sometimes one or more of these things comes true, but mostly, I just don't connect with the other person after a few dates the way I thought we did on the first couple. I've complained a lot recently about my dating life and bemoaned lots of things about not finding the right person, about feeling old, and about being single.

Well, I met someone.


I sat down about a week ago, wanting to write this post, but I stopped because of my mantras. "It's not going to last, Justin," I told myself. "Don't humiliate yourself again by writing about it prematurely. You'll make yourself look like even more of an ass than you already are." So I closed the laptop. Like a good boy who follows his own advice, I waited.

I was cautious at first, after our first couple dates. I left each of them happy and excited, but scared to feel what I was feeling, scared of feeling too much. Lord knows, I had gotten excited before. But each subsequent time I drove home (we have been hanging out every other day since we first met, two weeks ago), I found that I was increasingly at a loss for words. They eluded me completely. I would say it has been a slow process because that's how it has felt, like we've been hanging out for a long time (how barfingly cliché of me), but it has only been two weeks.

As I got happier and happier, two strange things happened. The first sign that something was changing within me was the fact that I started having great, anxiety-free dreams every night, all night long. I am known for having vivid dreams, and there have been stretches of a few days where I have had great dreams, but this is unprecedented. With the lack of nighttime anxiety came days during which I noticed myself being increasingly patient, yelling at other drivers less, being more understanding of my squirrelly teenage students and their antics, smiling more, laughing more. "But, Justin, it has only been TWO WEEKS," I can hear you say. And yes, I know. But it's there. It's real. It's undeniable. It is true.

When I say that each time I come home from being with him it gets increasingly difficult to describe how I feel, I mean that in a literal sense. This past Tuesday, as I was driving home, I thought, How much more can I feel? There has to come a point when I will stop liking him more and more and more. Things will level out. They have to. I can't just keep feeling more and more like this. Shaking my head in disbelief and smiling like a simpleton, I drove home in silence. Then last night, feeling like my soul was trailing far above me, somewhere up in the clouds, I recalled what I thought my myself two nights prior. I had to wonder again: How much more can I take? How good can one person feel about another person?

It was then that I became fully aware of the second thing that has been happening since I have been getting to know him more, an increasing terror that it will all end. I became horrified that he would eventually break my heart. I wondered if meeting him was yet another joke of the Universe, a big Ha-Ha on Justin: "I'm going to allow you to fall, completely and utterly, for this other person, and just when you think your heart is going to explode with the intensity of your emotions, I will have him cheat on you or tell you that he isn't really into you." One of the reasons I have fallen out--how quaint "falling out" makes breaking someone else's heart sound--of some of my past relationships has indeed been because I have been, and still am, convinced that the first person I truly fell for would break my heart. Tears seeped into the corners of my eyes as I drove. I knew it was happening, and I was terrified of it. You better stop opening up to him, I thought. The more you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the more he will use it to his advantage. Pretty soon, you'll say something to him and he will look at you like you're crazy and ask you to leave. 

But here's the thing, and here's why I decided to finally write this post. (Finally--as if it has been SUCH a long time. But DAMN if it does feel like it's been a long time.) Yes, it has only been two weeks. Yes, it might be premature. And yes, I am scared. So scared. I'm scared of being wrong, I'm scared of failing, I'm scared of being hurt, I'm scared of leaving myself open and raw and exposed. But I'm happy, happier than I've ever felt. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I do mean it. (I'm reminded of a letter I wrote to my mom when I was in my early 20's, telling her that I had met someone: "I've never felt like this before, Mom," I'd said. I've said things in a similar vein in my journal more times than I'd like to admit. It's embarrassing, actually.) I've never been moved to tears from sheer happiness before--and this has happened on several occasions in the past two weeks--never. I've never wanted to drive 30 minutes (or 60 minutes in rush hour traffic) to see anyone. I've never been willing to stay up past my bedtime, on a school night, for several nights in a row. I've never literally counted down the hours until I could see someone again. I have never felt the influence of a person my life when I'm not even in his presence, making me want to be a happier, calmer person. I have never, ever, felt beautiful in someone else's eyes. Ultimately, these wonderful things I'm feeling far outweigh the fear.

So I'm going to go right on feeling them. I'm going to keep driving in rush hour traffic just to hold someone's hand for a couple hours. I'm going to continue to tell him how I feel. He might hurt me. It might end. But I'm okay with that. Because feeling this good, this happy is worth the gamble. Finally.