Settling Scares Me More Than Being Alone

In therapy, discussing my disappointment and once again, I’m not able to get past it. Not anger. Not frustration. Just disappointment which is a deadening blow sometimes. My therapist made me sit through this one, not letting up. She prodded and asked me to get to what the root of the emotion is. We walked through it. The initial answer didn’t feel right. I discarded it. We circled around to another reason. That didn’t stick. We moved on. Then it hit me.

“I’m disappointed because they weren’t willing to wait. They settled.”

Something I can never turn off is seeing potential in anything. People, situations, businesses. I find myself hearing a pitch and asking if I can help someone with their business development plan. I see the highs and potential lows of a situation within seconds. The intake and outtake of my brain is constant, but instead of just discarding a thought, my brain thinks about where it could be in five years. This is one of my greatest strengths, coupled with the greatest weakness. The result of always seeing high-potential is that you are rooting for someone or something to go the distance, disappointment.

I want to be clear, it’s not that nothing is ever good enough for me. It’s that I will always want to try to raise the bar. Or widen the bar. However I can influence the barometer of the bar is what I want. So desperately. I’m not one to fight for a legacy of many things, but I want the legacy to be, “You know, most couldn’t, but Alissa did” when it comes to setting the standard or going the extra mile.

Typically I stand alone. Not only literally because I’m single, but because I relentlessly want to pursue what could be. And guess what? I want that in a partner too. Someone who doesn’t give up their drive because the gas has eased on them as they build their career. Instead, they create their own gas pedal that pushes them for more. They go to the place that most people get too tired to go to. Life has a way of badgering you and beating you, taking your energy and drive along with it.

I’ve been in therapy for years asking how do I remain energetic and driven because I see those around me start to drop out of the race as we enter new decades, relationships, etc. Independent of our priorities changing as we mature, I observe a sort of throwing up of our hands and going on auto-pilot in our lives. I want nothing to do with anything that looks like that.

In my 20’s we all sort of started out the same. College, relationships, etc. Then some got married. Some divorced. Some had kids. You get the idea. I guess I thought during one of those moments I’d want to find myself joining that same life moment. I didn’t want to be engaged because I didn’t want to be married. My friends started having kids and I thought I’d feel like I was behind. I never felt like it was for me. The feeling that it should be for me haunted me instead.

I watched people who knew they were marrying the wrong person, marry them. Their parents, at their own wedding wondered if they were going to make it. I watched them have children they know they didn’t want to have, but felt like it was the ‘next step.’ And then I learned from them.

People say I have an impossible standard, without asking what my standards are. Whether they simply just think they will never meet them and write me off or something else, I don’t know. For so much of my life the narrative is that I’m asking for too much, without even being given the opportunity to ask.

The idea that I’m high maintenance is mistaking confidence.

High maintenance is needing someone else to help fulfill ones needs.

Confidence is knowing exactly how to do it yourself.

Honestly, I’m working on this in therapy. Exploring WHY I have to be the one that willing to do hard things and refusing to settle. Why can’t I just settle? Everyone else does, or rather, they get to. They get their family, relationships, house, etc.

And before you try and tell me I’m all wrong. Every relationship I’ve encountered, every man, has proven this to be true. Some I can’t even tell my friends about. I carry alone. But every single encounter has unfortunately affirmed that I don’t get to have the life everyone else does. And do you know how incredibly hard that is to give yourself your own energy, harvest it, feed it back to me and then repeat the cycle.

I’m burned before the match is even has oxygen to ignite.

I am the only person I feel safe with.

It’s very few that don’t settle.

Perhaps it’s ego that makes me think I can.

Whatever it is, that in spite of any overwhelming self-doubt, isolation or any other overwhelming feeling, I think that I can go the distance. Because I know what it’s like to settle. I tasted it and sat it in it until I exploded out. I would rather spend the rest of my life wondering what else is out there than taste what settling tastes like again.

Maybe I’ll read these words in 10 years and regret them, but I don’t think I will. It’s not that I’m not willing to accept anything under the guise of ‘not settling.’ I know myself well enough to know when something feels like settling and when something feels like it’s really meant for me. I have a lot to explore and I have a lot to try out to find out what does and does not feel right.

Never setting to me means being so true to who I am, that I have lived in a way that is fully on my own terms.