It's for the birds

The other day I was complemented on my ability to use insight and the obvious signs of some personal growth, as good as that felt hearing that I still feel sort of downbeat. I just assumed the afterglow of personal growth would be unbridled joy, but I feel more wistful about the path I have taken in life. I can now draw two conclusions about myself; I’m incredibly naive in matters of a more personal nature and I have surrounded myself with people who might not be the best fit for me. Most of my ideas of love seem to have been inspired by the great poet whose name I bare and from Victorian poets, a simpler way to put it is that emotionally stunted men are the inspiration to my ideas of what love is.
I want things to mater, mostly because I feel diametrically opposed to the idea of solipsism; legitimately I want to believe in the commonality of our shared experiences. I like the idea of universal truth and I want the idea of love and its philosophical children to be more than just offshoots of my imagination. That particular want is one part of the conclusion I have drawn, the second part is that I am chasing an Idea. One could argue that these poets and the flowery talk of love was less about something real and more about chasing the unobtainable. There is a certain amount of willful naiveté when a person is chasing the dream because that act allows a person to feel sheltered an unexposed. No one, I think ever wants to feel exposed and relationships for the most part force a person at some point to come to terms with their frailty and vulnerabilities. It’s fairly harrowing stuff when you make the rationalization that there are parts of a personality that might be incompatible with another; and that thought makes immature or magical thinking that much more attractive. If you can focus all your feelings towards this ideal, this immaculate non threatening entity then why ever attempt to come to terms with adult relations.
I’m frustrated at the people I have chosen to surround myself with; after all it’s only relatively recently that I have cobbled together a working sense of self worth and confidence. I’ve been familiar most of my life it seems with the idea of feeling overlooked and undervalued; and while not all of my friends and relations would fit that paradigm there are some that clearly do. The scary part of all this insight is that I am starting to reassert my value as a person and faced with the reality that I can do better and must do better, and it’s frightening because it feels like I have to start over. There is familiarity with having people undervalue my thoughts and feelings, and I am not sure if I want to throw all that familiarity away. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t feel like someone who was out in the cold hungrily looking in. It also seems crazy that I have subconsciously been reenacting whatever emotional traumas that were inflicted on me in childhood. Causality, is a wonderful thing and it seems that I have been trying to get the love and attention of someone who could never quite articulate their feelings, and that one which should have been so easy to reciprocate has lead me to some weird choices.
I can now say at least to myself that I do have a value and I should just settle for someone. I can say that that is abnormal and wrong for a person to ignore me for weeks at a time, and despite my vocal proclamations that it doesn’t affect me it in fact does and makes me quite fucking mad. I have the insight that emotionally crippled/frosty women aren’t ever going to see my worth and that it is a fool’s errand to chase after those sorts of people. The most important insight I have gained is that I can at least start to think of reasons why I should love myself. All these things should make me happier but it feels like I have won the battle but lost the war. I don’t want to give up, but part of me wonders why the hell I was so keen on this idea of personal growth and emotional healing in the first place.