My personal stare-down with Life

Something in me got broken when I was very young.  Something that can never be repaired.  I keep learning about this over and over.  Well, I'm not sure if I'm learning, actually.  What it is, is that I keep being exposed to this truth repeatedly.  Only thing is, I don't seem to be learning from it.

I'm not the only one going through this.  There are others of you out there who stumble over this or fall into it as the case may be.  It trips you up in relationships with friends or other loved ones.  It torpedoes your best intentions in school or at the office.  That one last thing that happens that just sort of pushes you up to the brink and bulldozers you helplessly over the edge.  Like an ice skater who makes a brilliant leap except that she lands on rotten ice that then disintegrates beneath her.  Nobody notices the leap of faith she took.  They only remark upon her crashing finish.

So, let's say there's a friend you might have that you love like you imagine sisters and best friends love each other.  You have to imagine it because you've never been sure it was real or even existed anywhere outside of your imagination.  And she let's you down, or uses you, and you find yourself stuck with a bunch of emotional baggage that you suddenly recognize she doesn't share in.  And the mistake that you made was in thinking that she cared enough for it to matter in the first place.  And so -- once more -- you kick yourself for loving.  You berate yourself for caring. You put your soul through an emotional shredder and vow it'll never happen again.  Until next time ...

Or, let's say you are friends with two people who are also friends with you, being friends with a couple comes to mind.  One of them starts to talk to you about his troubles with the other person.  Then, stupidly, you stride -- righteously confident about all your good intentions -- into the path of a speeding tractor-trailer truck of everybody else's messed up emotions. Then, smashed to pieces, you scrape yourself up off the asphalt and declare "never again" only to find yourself tied to the railroad tracks with a train bearing down on you.  Different story, but emotionally it's the same result all over again.

Once more you've made what seemed a good investment only to find out you're an emotional fool in the end.  That somehow you keep being taught this lesson and you keep failing to learn it, so the only place you can go is to do it all over again once more.  

Wake me up if anybody learns something.