Falling out of Sadness

I've had a fluent stream of thoughts since Sunday. I've wrote a little here and there while trying to figure out what my thoughts actually meant, but gathering them into a whole idea and putting them into words has taken some time.  I realized that sometimes you just need an amazing friend to tell you to snap out of it, get over it and be realistic. I have that friend, and she isn't shy to tell me how it is, even if it hurts. I respect that.

This past Sunday I spent the day with this verbal friend, and this Sunday changed my perspective tremendously. It saved my sanity. Now, this makes me sound completely unstable, but I'm not, I just have had a dark cloud hovering over my life for a couple months now. It's hard for me to let go, especially after losing someone, but it was put in perspective for me perfectly on Sunday, "You're no longer in love with what you lost, but you are in love with your sadness." This might not make sense to everyone, so let me explain...

Sometimes we become so comfortable in our state of being that we don't want to change it, even if it means remaining sad, mad, depressed or hateful. These are all horrible moods and emotions to continually feel, right? But we can actually find comfort in these emotions, so much comfort that we keep them around to protect or restrict us from feeling the opposite emotions, because the opposite emotions like happy, make us vulnerable again. And if we just continue to be sad then we don't have to go through the roller coaster of being happy and then completely crushed again. We just find ourselves being happy with being sad. Contradicting? I know, but my past reality. It was refreshing to know that I don't need anything or anyone, just a change of perspective and an attitude adjustment. 

While trying to come to this empowering and optimistic conclusion, a friend asked me what I thought love is and to define my ideas of love for her. God, the never ending question that people have been asking for generations and generations to understand why they can feel so surreal and then so shitty again and again, lover after lover. I truly thought about the word love and came up with this definition: "Love is a word, yes. But more of a category for other words and emotions. It's comfort, companionship, lust, adoration, affection, routine, interest, hard work, friendship and family. Settling is not a negative thing when it comes to love, just a reality. With each lover we lose, it is human instinct to improve upon their loss with the gain of a better and more fulfilling lover the next time we choose to love. Meaning we will always improve our lover with every relationship we move to, as long as we are confident and are patient to wait for someone better than the last. Eventually, we are content and settle with a lover because we are ready to nest. Love is just a category and the idea our species has created to define the feeling all those words create within us. The lust and butterflies, they come and go, and are not consistent or love. Every relationship is case sensitive because we each love differently and in different cycles. It's truly chemical, the feelings we define as "in love." Hard work and settling are what is truly everlasting and what I would consider love."

I want to fall out of sadness and into "love."