Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.
(Robert C. Gallagher)

I was thinking last night about how much I have changed over the last year-to-year-and-a-half. And I was thinking about how subconscious and undetected that change was, for the most part. I suppose that's the way personal change is -- rarely something obvious and instantaneous. Which is a scary, scary thought. Because if change isn't easy to notice as it's happening, it means all you have to work with is hindsight. That really doesn't make me feel better.

One thing that really hit me was to do with my relationships with my friends. I feel very ... far away. It's my own fault. I think that within the last year or so, I've tried to keep my friends at arms length. I know why I did it, but I'm not sure I was really aware I was doing it, until recently.

I've always wanted my life to be transparent. I wanted people around me to know that what they saw was what they got, that I wasn't hiding anything. But that requires vulnerability. And I don't think I've had the self-confidence or whathaveyou to be able to live like that and not crumple under the criticism and judgment that people inevitably dish out (I say inevitably because I know people do it sometimes unaware that they are doing it -- I know I do). So what happened? I got hurt. I let other people's thoughts and opinions affect who I was, and then things just got unbearable. It's almost sick how textbook a case I am sometimes -- I get hurt, I throw up my defenses. As a reaction to that hurt, I retreated back into my castle. It's safe there; nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Simple.

But it's not so simple. Because life isn't life without people. I've come to realize that nothing I do in life will matter an iota if it isn't others-focused. What a funny paradox. My whole life is this fight against selfishness as a natural reflex, but life itself is meaningless unless it is lived in self-lessness.

I feel lost at times, though, almost overwhelmed by this hole I've dug for myself. How do I get out?! My relationship with God has suffered a lot for the same reasons -- keeping anything that could require intimacy at a distance just shy of outright rejection. It creates this vicious cycle. I struggle with an overwhelming sense of guilt, but I don't know how to accept that God forgives me anymore. I don't know how to accept Grace as a gift, not in my heart anyway. And all of this only perpetuates my feelings of being distant from God.

The problem is the same between me and my friends. I don't deserve them. And I don't know how to start over. I don't know how to turn around, to stop going down this empty, lonely road, this lifestyle of being me-focused, and show them that I care and that I want their friendship. There are a couple of friends that if I didn't have right now, I'd have probably lost my mind. I gotta say, they're pretty tough people, to put up with a dink like me. And believe you me, I am very glad they have.

All I know is that I need to start trying to show people again that I do care, and to stop only thinking of myself and instead live my life with the others-focus that I know God desires from me. I only hope that a year and a half from now I can look back and see the gradual, maybe even undetected, change for the better.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
(Ellen Glasgow)