They say you get better as you get older. Wiser, kinder… Really, you just get er-er, though. You become more of what your heart desires. It’s like that song that becomes stuck in your head. Even though they say you can get it out by singing it or listening to it, most times, it just gets more stuck.

I’ve always had trouble being myself. It can take on so many forms. I can be a jerk because I don’t want you to know how much I care. I can be arrogant because I know how small I am in the scope of things. It gets really bad when I’m convinced I’m going to screw something up. I’m torn between doing anything to get out of a scenario in which I’m terrified to fail, and doing everything I can to keep what I have because of how much value I place on those things. This fear can keep me stuck in a kind of limbo—I don’t quite act like myself, yet I don’t quite hide myself.

The question I always come back to is simple: which is worse—being myself and living with my failures that naturally come with that, or sacrificing everything that makes me marginally unique for the sake of not making things worse? And regardless of which option my mind chooses, will my heart let me get by with that? Here’s an example. I have people in my life who expect me to do brainy things with my career. “You should be a mathematician or design computer applications.” Yeah, that’s nice. I’m a nerdy guy. I could probably do it. The thing is, I have no desire to do so, nor am I convinced that I’d be utilizing my full potential. I’d be missing something. However, I’m pursuing a career in music. Why? Because that’s where my passion lies, and that’s where I believe I can be the most effective and do the most good. I have my reasons for that.

What if, however, I didn’t pursue a career in music? What If I chose computers or math? Well, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that besides a few things: 1) I’d be defying my conscience, 2) I’d be defying God’s calling for me, 3) I’m not the same person when I’m pursuing the head over the heart, caught more in perfectionism than love.

It’s never just isolated to one thing, though. This mental limbo is like gravity: it affects everything within that system, only to smaller and smaller degrees as you travel away from it. While I no longer suffer greatly from career choice limbo, I find myself very often in social limbo. I know there are some people who I can be 100% myself around without consequence (or I’ve just become gradually more apathetic to those consequences); but then there are others whose relationships I value so much that it terrifies me to think that I could say or do something to disintegrate us. While moving on and going separate ways seems to be the modus operandi eventually with most relationships, there are always a few that we shudder to lose. The reason for that is simply that relationships like that are rare, like diamonds in the sand: how does one manage to lose a diamond back into the sand?

So it’s worth thinking about to me. Do I build walls and keep people who could come close—keep them at arm’s length for fear of losing them to time, or do I bite the bullet and love knowing that inevitably I’m probably going to lose them? I think I lose more by creating distance, not calming down and simply taking them in like a breath of fresh air. Still, I find myself caught in the cycle of asking myself these same questions every single time I meet someone who I know could break me, wouldn’t, but life might force that breaking upon us. I’m that song, stuck in my own head, looping, repeating, and it’s always the typically-brokenhearted second verse that hits me. Why can’t it be the bridge? Why not listen to the turnaround?

We’re all sinners. We’re all liars. We’re all afraid of something. Even when we finally choose to follow Jesus in His perfect love, we run into some cycle we’ve been stuck in since we emerged in this life. Just like open doors are meant to close, though, cycles begin to end. For me, it always comes back to a choice: live alone and lose everything, or love and learn to live fully. Option two is the beginning of the end of my cycle. What’s yours?