I have come to realize that associating my blogs so closely with my real life self, that I have sort of blogged myself into a corner, as it were. I have traded anonymity for the comfort of using my blogs to stay caught up with friends and to make and bond with new ones.

The problem with that, inevitably, is that eventually you want to blog about sensitive topics that affect people that read your blogs, and then you end up starting all kinds of real life and myspacian drama. Who wants that? Perhaps I shall just start a whole new anonymous profile with Happy Bunny for an avatar and blog about personal topics to my heart’s content.

Or maybe I’ll just stick with writing the blogs in the privacy of my own head.

At any rate, what I meant to blog about today, was relationships. Maybe not relationships, per se, but connections. Deep, shallow, transitory, intense, whatever kind of connection.

I realized today that I love meeting new people and making new friendships. But that doesn’t mean I feel the need to deepen all those relationships. I am perfectly happy keeping people at a certain level of depth (or shallowness, if you prefer). Because when I do that, they don’t have to affect my life in a major way. They can continue doing their thing, and I can continue doing my thing, and we don’t have to interfere in each others’ things, we can just kind of motor along in parallel, every once in a while crossing paths to say hello and motoring off again.

The problems, for me, occur when I choose to actually motor along WITH someone in my car. Because, don’t get me wrong, it is ALWAYS my car.

By this I mean, I have decided (or it just kind of fell out) that I would go far enough in a relationship (be it friend, boyfriend, whatever) that now I shall share both my car and my motoring, making decisions based on someone else’s feelings or wants or needs or whatever.

This is difficult for me, mainly because as a Sagittarian, I tend to be rather selfish. That is to say, I have a very deep-seated streak of independence.

That’s not to say I’m not a giving person – I’m generous in a big way, with money or things. It’s my time and my autonomy that I hold close.

I like to do what I want. I don’t like having to plan around other people. I like having my own way and doing my own thing. I exist in a vacuum sometimes.

Shameful, isn’t it?

I love my friends. I love my boyfriend. I would do just about anything for them…other than let them take away my independence. “I feel like doing this thing. I think I shall, in fact, do this thing. What? Oh? You don’t want to? Oh well, I shall go it alone.” or “You want me to do what? And just because you asked me to? But I don’t want to.”

I am not a democracy. I am not even a republic. I am a dictatorship, with exactly one constituent. I am my own sovereign country. When I allow tourists into my country, it is understood (sometimes only by me) that in being in my country, you must follow my laws. Chief of which is, the ruler of the country gets to do whatever she wants. Second rule: always remove your shoes (but not your raincoat) before you enter.

So what ends up happening is that sometimes, the people I decide to motor with decide that they know the lay of the land better than I do, and decide to take a detour whilst I nap in the back seat. I awake to find the scenery all changed, and someone else thinks they are in charge of the motoring vehicle, commonly called, “The Friendship” or “The Relationship”. It is in cases like this that I must make a decision: do I continue to nap?  Or do I wrest back control of this wayward vehicle and get it back to 2NLand?

This is not to say that I make everyone around me do what I want, nor even that I do things that hurt other people regardless of the consequences and completely uncaring if what I want to do hurts someone else. Quite the contrary. I invite all and sundry to motor along with me…just that in the end, if where I’m going is not where you want to go, then I shall ultimately continue on by myself. I won’t make you go my direction. I won’t even beg you to…I’ll just end up doing what I want in the end.

Sometimes I feel like this makes me a bad person. Like completely selfish. Can I even HAVE a meaningful relationship with this kind of mentality? It seems like no matter who the person is, it always comes to a point where I want to go my way, and someone else wants me to go theirs instead, and I just plain don’t want to. Does being in a friendship or being in a relationship mean that you have to give up your autonomy and go the other route? Does it mean an end to the sovereignty? Does it mean I have to sign some sort of relationship congressional act ceding control of my sovereign lands over to someone else if I want to be able to share in a relationship with someone? For the love of pete.

I think what all this means is that I am not a follower. I will follow along as long as where the general crowd is heading is where I want to go, but as soon as the prevailing winds change in a direction I don’t feel like traveling, I will part ways. When I depart the company of the crowd, I don’t generally try to get people to come with me…I just announce my intent, and then execute. So I don’t really consider myself a leader either. Leaders WANT people to follow them, they have a deep seated need for showing others “the way”. I don’t have that need. I just know what way I want to go, and by damn, that’s what I’ll do.

I dunno. In all actuality this blog probably only makes sense to me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay. I’m doing my own thing and blogging for the sake of blogging. Don’t sweat it.