March 12 2016 – Loneliness

Each year around my birthday I find myself looking at my life as a whole. How far I’ve come, what I’ve accomplished, and what remains the same. This entry took place 6 days after my 29th birthday. Just about a year after my 8 year relationship ended. Loneliness laid heavy on my shoulders that rainy day.

Sometimes I feel so alone.
Trying to connect with people through social media as if that’s the cure to my loneliness.
As if there’s a medicine for my lonely dis-ease.
As if some external source can solve all my problems.

The hard part is knowing that the answers to all my problems are all on the inside, if I could only look inside. Yet here I am doing anything and everything to distract myself, as if I’m afraid to know the truth.

Truth.
Funny that I pride myself in being so honest and true, yet I seem to be afraid of it. Of knowing. Why?
Afraid of silence: I always play music. I spend hours making play lists to suit every mood. As if the music will solve my problems. Help distract me from my ever over-analyzing mind. If I find myself in a mood I don’t like then I can simply find a play list to escape it, and invoke the mood I want to be in. This is great for a while. Until I break.

There’s that one feeling: Loneliness. I can’t seem to escape it. I can avoid it. Do anything to distract myself. Yet it remains. Building on itself until it becomes too heavy to hold and I drop it. Shattering everything at my feet as the tears fall endlessly from my eyes. I try so desperately to hold back the sound; of my failure to hold myself together. Sobbing like a child who just lost her cat. Feeling so pathetic for crying over nothing.

Nothing.
as I spiral into every reason to cry, because I can’t allow myself to cry over what feels like nothing. My over-analytical mind searching frantically for all the reasons in the world to justify these endless tears. Every mistake. Every bad experience. Every person who ever hurt me. Every time I misread a person. Then I lose control, trying desperately not to get louder. The tears become a waterfall. It becomes harder to breathe as I begin to have an anxiety attack because I can’t hold in my sobs any longer. I blow my nose, trying desperately to breathe.

Sometimes it lasts for minutes, sometimes hours. At some point I realize it’s been hours and my mind flashes back to losing my cat when I was 10. Crying into my pillow harder than I have ever cried in my entire life. Feeling so many emotions that I had no idea how to navigate at the time. Only to lift my head 3 hours later to find my nose had bled all over my pillow from the intensity of my grief, and rage. I try to pull my shit together, dig myself out of that dark spiral. Yet that feeling resonates, reminding me of the damage that shattered my heart that day. How he will never apologize for taking my delinquent cat away from me. How I learned that day that love is conditional.

A brutal reminder of the resentment that remains stagnant in my heart. The very thing that so frequently contributes to my loneliness. How badly I want to let go of the resentment. Let go of the past. Yet it never seems to stop. How can I let go of the past when things from the past continue to repeat in the present. Proving yet again that love is conditional.

I suddenly realize just how damaged I am. How can anyone love someone so damaged? That’s the whole point though, isn’t it? I can’t expect to be loved if I can’t love myself. If I’m not good enough for myself then how can I expect to be good enough for anyone else? I need to fix myself. Stop trying to distract myself. The answers I’m looking for are always within my reach. I just need to sit with myself. Stop avoiding myself. Show myself the love I long to feel. Connect with myself instead of trying to connect with anyone else.

The answers are on the Inside. Not on the outside. Outside is just a distraction to further myself from the truth. Find the truth within. All the answers are there. Once you have the answers then anything is possible. Once you love yourself then you will never feel lonely. For wherever you go, there you will be. You’ll always have you.

While I feel I learned a lot from this experience of intense grief . I also see how much that feeling of “love is conditional” never got addressed. It was my truth. Even in navigating around it I thought that I had to fix myself in order to be loved. The concept of unconditional love was something so foreign to me. “How could anyone love someone so damaged?” because I wasn’t damaged. Nobody is damaged. We are all humans. Those moments that make us feel damaged help to shape who we are in a way, but there are so many other life experiences that also help to shape us into these beautiful people that we are now. We deserve love as we are now. Everyone is worthy of love. Yes, I strive to become the best version of myself. Constantly learning and growing, but I also have to acknowledge that I am awesome as I am right now. I don’t Need to change. I simply Want to change. This entry was one of the first times I fully cried over the loss of my relationship and how lonely I felt as a result. I also felt the true depth of emotion that I couldn’t navigate when I was 10. It was a painful, yet very healing moment.