Trying to Keep My Feet in the Water

I've decided that my daily activities are to a large extent ways of dealing with grief. I make gardens or organize lectures as if inspired to do something for someone, but I seldom really do what I want openly for a person because I am sensitive to being rejected - or maybe I am afraid of seeing that I'm not as skilled or advanced or good at what I am doing than I fantasized.

Every once in a while, I am reminded of what I am avoiding. It is usually a memory of emotions, perhaps in a dream, where the feeling comes back of being or getting close to being in love with someone or getting to know someone and being gung ho Martian about the whole thing but not being completely honest to myself and the other person as to all of what I am feeling, what is going on with me. Often promises are casually made or ideas discussed which then fall apart or are forgotten. Maybe they were never meant to be taken seriously, but I tend to. They touch on some deeper longings and hurts perhaps or some values that I try to guard so well I might forget they are there. They become battle cries and dry, empty ideas instead of warm, emotion-filled currency. I'll set myself up by thinking, as an example, that I'll have a nice birthday dinner with someone, maybe I've even celebrated their birthday with them. By the time my birthday rolls around, we've gone separate ways - or worse, and I'm trying not to feel loneliness and rejection or let inappropriate anger sneak out when I feel like I am settling for letting one of my family members get me a dinner, and I can't appreciate it in the same way as would be nice to able to do. Did I allow it to happen this way? Maybe it's a pattern bigger than my present self and can't be taken on all alone.

I don't need to say that these are challenging emotions to navigate for a teenager, or a Venus retrograde, or a person approaching middle age, either, and there is a fear that I'm sharing in a way that will leave me vulnerable to others who might be less likely to value emotions they consider sentimental or casual. I am trying to learn how to at least treat them with a little care, and not react with anger or resignation when something awkward, or worse, does happen, because there is something of value in them - a softness, a realness, something restful, anchored in feeling rather than in ideas or goals. Obviously, that is what I struggle with too - treating them with care, and the struggle really comes out in relationships, romantic endeavors, especially. Of course, but still. Sometimes, it helps to spend a few days with family or by myself and write privately in my journal instead of trying to shape it into some public form that might awkwardly try to get others' to pay attention or recognize something in me that I am kind of hiding by sharing too much too anxiously, anyway. If I write everything out as it is coming to me, in early morning hours perhaps, and do this when things finally get too chaotic to hold together any more, those things tend to get sorted out and calmed down and I let go of some of the bitter angry thoughts for a while and the obsessive racking of my brain to figure out what is going on. For that time at least, I feel that I have what I need and feel that my mind and emotions are in control, at rest in a healthy, balanced, reasonable-sounding kind of way.