“You can give without loving but you can’t love without giving,” Amy Carmichael. In the context of last year in particular, I understand where I need to change my relationship habits.  I am a perfectionist, yes, but when it comes to relationships I’m not as much a perfectionist as people think.  Do I like things a certain way, yes.  But I also allow for people to have things the way they like them and I do not interfere with that.  Their homes, their interests, their quirks are all theirs.  That isn’t something I ever use against them and I never ask them to change that.  When their habits and patterns start hurting other people, that’s a different story.  It took me this long to understand that most people don’t have that level of understanding about others.  That’s part of why we tease each other or outright despise each other.  But I had to start asking if this belief of mine was actually conditional to have a relationship with me.  I started to expect people to have the same open acceptance of me.  I expected them to have the same understanding of my habits and beliefs that I had for them.  Like if a friend kept a messy house I literally said nothing but if they came into my house and started putting things away I’d bristle and get angry.

Because of the ups and downs in my relationships this year, I really had to start looking at that habit and that belief. I still don’t feel like accepting people as they are in their own environment is a bad thing—it is their space and we all have the right to have our space.  But we can’t make people adapt to us if they don’t understand that concept of acceptance.  I had to learn again this lesson about compromise in relationships and I had to learn about perception.  People will misunderstand even the most well-intentioned things if it triggers something in them—especially if it triggers their insecurity.  My ability to be open and allow people to be who they are triggers a lot of people.  They see how I live my life and because I struggle with ADD and anxiety, I need to keep things a certain way or my brain goes to chaos.  They assume it’s perfectionism or that I’m trying to be better than them—I’m trying to keep my mind sane.  My love for others is complete no matter what I give.  The relationship needs to be reciprocal.

There has been a lot of growing over the last few months—time apart, loss, limbo with work/home/health.  All of it has led to the realization that sometimes things don’t work out because they aren’t meant to.  We can try to hold it all together but that doesn’t mean it’s meant to be together.  I said it the other day—sometimes we are trying to hold smoke together.  We are trained to have this certain vision, this belief about the way things should be and we often forget what we want it to feel like, what feels right.  We operate based on acceptance from others rather than learning to accept ourselves.  Once we accept who we are, the rest can fall into place.  We aren’t here to meet other’s expectations, we need to live up to our own expectations and that is how we develop that acceptance.  The more we accept ourselves the more we have tolerance and acceptance for others.  We can learn to love and give of ourselves without wasting our energy because we are giving from the core of who we are.  We know how to replenish ourselves and we operate from there.  Our gift is infinite and the more we give, the more we love.