I have felt quite crabby this last week. I was even depressed one day. When I am in a bad mood I tend to worry. It's hard for me keep a level head that it may just be a bad day, because I have that worry that it could be an oncoming depression, but thankfully, the last two days I have been feeling better.
One obvious reason of why my mood has been down just occured to me, one of my favorite "companions" has not been in my life. It feels rediculously nerdy to say "in my life" since the means of our friendship is over the computer, but I mean it, he is important to me and I have missed (nerdy again) his company. (as have many, many others)
One of biggest gifts my friend has brought to me is an alternative way of looking at men. I am sad to say I hold some deep seeded sexist opinions about men. My mentally ill dad was a drain on my mom, and in my sudden & early-blossoming in adolecence I witnessed the extreme lenghts males would go to to get close to a beautiful female's body, while at the same time having little to no regard for the person inside of it. These experiences have created in me a self-fulfilling dislike for men, and my absent friend, as well as some other friends I have met recently, have really helped me see that this dislike can only be accurately applied to a few, and a way to stop hating all men is to stop dating the bad ones (what a concept!)
The thing that is most freeing about working towards ending my sexism is the fact that, try as I may to change it, I am mostly heterosexual, and will probably find the most long-term satisfaction with a man. So if I am to find true love, I will have to begin seeing men as worthy of love. (some of them of course) Up until recently, when I began having platonic relationships with men, I felt like I needed to learn to "tolerate" men, even though they are selfish, needy, id-driven and unintelligent. This kind of mindset would make me a very unappealing partner to men who arent these things (would you want to date someone who thinks this of you?) and this mindset allowed me to accept this sort of behavior from people I dated, which only validated my incorrect assumptions.
Without my favorite "distraction" around I have reverted a bit to my old thoughts and patterns. I have felt that I ought to develop myself so I can "catch one" instead of reality- focus on developing myself FOR MYSELF and then hope that at one point I will run into a good match. Another bad pattern I have reverted to, again because I didn't have my distraction close at hand, was worrying about the future in regards to a partner. When I focus on the future (or the past for that matter) I don't even experience the present. I have spent a lot of my life mourning the past and fearing the future, and so when I have experiences put in front of me in the present I don't accept or acknowledge them, perhaps until the future when I mourn missing them in the past ;)
All in all I am pleased to know 2 things. One, that I have friends in my life who inspire me to grow and think correctly. And two, that I can continue to grow and think correctly, even when they are gone.
mood: back to calm :)
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