September 6th 2016 -The downward spiral

Still the loneliness lingers. The connections I had with men were merely satisfying my physical urges. Not hitting me on a soul level. Though I wanted to dive deeper into an intimate connection with one, I knew our paths were not aligned.

Life is like an endless ocean. There’s a constant ebb and flow. The waves come in, and they go out. How foolish am I to believe I could stay in a constant state of happiness? That’s simply not how the world works. One can only stay up for so long before they fall.

Everything was going so well, and nothing much has changed. Nothing else has fallen apart—just me. I can feel it. Here I stand on the edge again, looking down that deep and all-too-familiar hole. I can feel the spiral vortex begging me to give in. To allow myself to fall, to spiral all the way down to the bottom.

I tell it: “No, I’m stronger than that!”
Yet I have a hard time believing myself this time. I’ve been fighting it for so long. I feel drained. I feel weak. I don’t know how much longer I can fight it. I am so tired. It would be so easy to give in. It’s so familiar. I could let it embrace me like the warm blanket I find myself curled up in right now. There’s no one else here to embrace me—why not give in to the darkness?

I know it’s a choice.

But how can I choose happiness right now when I feel so lost and so alone?

Sure, I have plenty of things to be happy about, to be grateful for. Yet my heart aches. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to put the pieces back together again. It’s been broken for so long, and every time I try to put the pieces back together, it just falls apart again. Maybe I should stop trying. Maybe I don’t deserve love. Maybe I’m just not supposed to experience love in this lifetime.

I should just focus my energy on other things. Just give up on love entirely. I’m so sick of getting hurt. If I just give up on it, then it can’t hurt me. Love is just one aspect of this reality. I don’t need it. I’m sure I can survive without it. Just let me bathe in the darkness one last time. To remember why I left it all behind. I won’t go far down the spiral—just a little bit. Just visiting an old friend one last time before I return to the light of happiness.

               Learning to love myself has been one of the hardest lessons in my life. I longed to be loved because I didn’t know how to love myself. So I would pine after another, longing for them to love me, without stopping to ask myself if I really loved them. Or worse: I knew I couldn’t build a life with them and I just wanted them to love me. Yet when they did show me any form of love I wanted to run, because how could they love me when I couldn’t love me? This kind of push and pull is something many people experience when navigating anxious or avoidant attachment patterns. For me, it played out for over two years with someone I still care about deeply— I cherish the connection we have now.
There are so many different levels of love. The more I learn to love myself the less I feel the need to be loved. The more I can love others without expectations, the more I can feel secure in building connections that aren’t based on needing love as proof of my worth. The more I love myself the more I can allow another to love me without questioning that love. Without running away.  Allowing myself to curl up in that blanket of depression allowed me to feel all the sadness I had been avoiding. I was able to realize that heart break was not going to kill me. That I could move through the pain. That I could survive it, and eventually, I could move forward again.