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I Stress Myself Out By Not Taking People for Granted

·383 words·2 mins
Relationships
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You are wonderful. This is wonderful. I’m so lucky. I never stop thinking how lucky I am.

Even when things get rough, when we’re having some kind of conflict, I find myself stopping and reminding myself you are so lucky you met this person.

You could have gone your entire life without experiencing a deep connection with another person. The kind that lots of other people swear doesn’t exist. (And who could blame them? Until it happened to me, I had a hard time believing in it, too.)

I’m very lucky. I never forget that. But I also find it extremely difficult to relax and just enjoy it sometimes.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’ve had failures in the past. Relationships that didn’t go so well. There are a few that I tried like hell to make work, but they just didn’t want to. They weren’t meant to be.

This has always felt different. This has felt like something inevitable. Something that naturally worked.

And that’s why if it ever ends, it’s going to hurt like hell. More than the others did. (And they were hard enough.)

I don’t want that to happen. I really don’t. And I know that if it ever did, I’d blame myself. (Because I’m like that.)

So I do my best. But sometimes I’m not sure what the right path is.

It’s easy to mess up in either direction. I don’t ever want to take you — or this — for granted. But at the same time, it’s possible to be so vigilant, even hypervigilant, that you imagine problems that aren’t there. Guard yourself from threats that will never come.

And not only does this waste an enormous amount of energy — sometimes in anticipating problems that aren’t there, you end up creating a few problems that didn’t have to happen.

Anyway, I’ve identified the issue. But I’m not sure what to do. I don’t think it’s easy at all.

No one ever warned me about this problem. And I don’t see a lot of people talking about it. But making sure not to take people for granted but NOT stressing out about things going badly so much that you ruin your joy is a lot more delicate of a balance than most ever admit it is.

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