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This all began rather suddenly, you know. We met, were colleagues, became friends, then lovers, and you moved in pretty much as soon as I told you that I loved you.

You've never given yourself any time, you know. Went straight from HS to college, living with your mom, off campus, working, filling every hour you had with school or work, always driven. To be the best. You've been competing with your older sister and brother your whole life. Everyone does this to some extent, of course.

But you never took the time to develop your own life. This is the first time you've ever been on your own, really. On your own. Your own.

Maybe what should have happened was that you should have kept your options open. Kept your life open. Not poured 110% of your energy and focus into the one or two or three things that, at the time, you prioritized as being important -- to the exclusion pretty much of everything else. Definitely to the exclusion of finding yourself, which I realize sounds like pop-psychology. There is a qualitative difference between focusing and prioritizing, you know. In its broader sense, prioritizing isn't about cutting things out of your life, though it sometimes is. Sometimes has to be. But, most of the time, it's about choosing. Choosing what is important. Sorting the most important from the least important without shortening Life's "To-do List." Everything doesn't exist, can't exist, on the same plane. Shouldn't, either. Well, to be honest, maybe it just doesn't for me, and I'm cool with that.

Ask yourself, do you have a center? Of course you do, but you haven't been there. If you have, I haven't seen it. You've never talked about it. And, feeling that, I feel that I haven't been there, either. If you haven't found it, you can't share it. You've spent your time charging forward, trying to make things happen, always wrestling with the balance between maintaining the familiar, the tried and true, the situations that and people who you are comfortable with. Maybe I was a bridge, a means out of your childhood and into the adult world of work and responsibility. I certainly am safe, and would never let anything happen to you. Protective. Nurturing. Supporting. I'm the fucking poster boy. But that's my shit.

You have to remember that everything I try to tell you, when it relates to your interactions with the world, is coming from love. I see how much you suffer, how you run yourself ragged, how you struggle to be good enough, to impress people who impress you, to lead people to believe that you're the shit. The expert. The master. Fuck that shit, girl. In some areas, you are, but in some you aren't. And it's ok. It's normal. It's why people are different, if there's a why.

The only person you need to impress is yourself. Once you get there, you're almost done with the struggle. Or, maybe, once you get there, you can at least choose the battles. You won't ever impress yourself, knowing you, as long as you continue to feel that you're not the total shit. I've said it to you before, when I've felt that you've gotten hung up on some superficial thing, something easy, that you can label as "well done" and "wear" as a reflection of who you are. Some work accomplishment, or how your hair looks, or how clean the bathroom is. Yes, you're the best. Yes you're beautiful. I love you, and I love what you do, and how hard you try. Now get over yourself. All of that stuff -- the hair, the work, the bathroom -- it's pretty, it's cool, it's nice -- but it isn't you. You need to learn to separate the superficial from the real. And yourself from the world of external events. The soul from the mortal coil.

Try to stop filling your time with stuff. Try to get to know yourself. I've told you before, how I learned from Clarissa Pinkola-Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves (can't remember the chapter) -- you gotta locate your demons inside you, where they live, have to find the very monsters that you fear the most and, when you find them, you have to face your fear and stand up to them and say, "Hi. This is me. Without me, you don't exist. So, c'mere and lemme give you a big fat hug."

You do this, and they lose all their power over you. All their potential to frighten you. I only tell you because I've been there, and it worked for me. And it works, I think, because you realize that it all comes from inside of you. Nothing is happening that isn't of your own creation. Except the weather. And other people. As far as feelings go, they live and die inside your psyche.

You need to find faith, girl. I mean faith as in a feeling of belief. A belief system. Of your own. Might be the one thing that I did take away from my whole Catholic upbringing -- the ability to believe in certain things without proof. Those things being: Love. Energy. Nature. Truth.

I don't believe in anything else. Anything else really big, I should say. Because I do believe in myself, in the energy force that is me. I believe that I am real, and that I am worthy. But I'm not a big deal. I'm certainly not the center of the universe. And that's a true relief, because I don't want the job, man. Parts of the universe are totally fucked up, right now. If I had the job, it'd be hell. The first thing I'd do is send a memo to whatever Higher Power(s) there might be (I assume I'd know if I were the Center of the Universe), the gist of which would be that we really need to revisit the whole structure.

And some long-time personnel would have to go.