committed (as in marriage or mental institution)

At this point, love feels like a scam. I’ve spent fifteen years in back-to-back long-term relationships, and before that, short ones stacked like dominoes. The beginning is always a slippery slope. No wonder they call it falling in love. Love is a hole, one that deepens each year, harder to escape. The only way I’ve ever climbed out is by reaching for another ladder—another person, another hole. Perhaps less deep… until I get to work with my shovel.

My best qualities—loyalty, eagerness to please, the drive to improve—always become my undoing. Each need I meet only sets the bar higher, until I’m crushed under the weight of expectation.

A job is kinder than a lover. A job tells you what it wants, reviews you annually, praises you when you succeed. Procedures change, but you’re warned, and you adapt. And if you fail, they have the decency to let you go.

A lover is insidious. The bar creeps upward without warning, without memo, without meeting. I am five-foot-two. I can only reach so far. Eventually, the standard rises beyond my grasp—and I fail. Followed by the assurance: they are committed to me—forever, till the end, as long as I work to get it right next time.

The blow is crueler because I once succeeded. I once believed myself strong, capable, good. Now I sit, speechless, crying, unable to explain why the one thing I want—to please, to love—is always the one thing torn from me.

When do I give up? Admit that I was made for failure, shoveling dirt from the pit day after day? At work, raised standards make me stronger. In love, they break me slowly, invisibly, until one day I look back and cannot tell when I cracked. Why don’t these things come with an escape hatch? Even my office has emergency exits, maps pinned to the wall.

Tonight, I don’t know how to last another day. When it comes to me, don’t give the standard carrot-and-stick. I’ll take a tiny scrap—a baby-cut, small as can be—and a 4x4 beam, big as can be. Like a beaten dog, I take a strip of meat. Like a broken horse, I accept a handful of oats. Forgive the hunger. Forgive the whip. And maybe, someday, mercy will come. Perhaps you’ll see me as the ruined dog that can’t mush one more mile, or the lame horse with a shattered leg, and find the courage to put me down. Old Yeller me.

Until then, alas, I acknowledge: I am still standing. You can see that. You say, "You've improved, but you have a ways to go." I nod. Chomp the tiny morsel. The sliver of carrot is good after hours of hurt.

Tomorrow, I will rise again. I will work and work. I will strain my arms to reach a little higher. I may never know if love will be kind. I may never know if I will fully please another without losing myself. But I can measure my own persistence. I can honor my own courage. I have tenacity. And maybe, in that, I am already succeeding.