Living a Story

"All the darkness in the world cannot drown out the light of a single match."

I am Grieving

Feeling sad this morning.  I am in the process of grieving.  In the process of reconnecting to my childhood.  Beginning to see the needs I had that were not met.  I needed to be loved.  Seen.  Understood.  Accepted.  I needed to feel like I belonged.  I did not feel like I belonged.  Up until about a year ago, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.  I felt different.  Out of place.  Misunderstood.  I felt tainted.  Like there was something wrong with me that kept people from being able to love me.  I had a lot of people around me while I was growing up.  I had my family, my father’s church, my school, but I felt like I didn’t belong in any of those places.  I wondered what was wrong with me that made me so different.  It made me hate myself.  It made me wish I wasn’t alive.  It made me feel empty.  I was filled with the deepest sense of loneliness.  Feeling like I was completely alone and misunderstood on this planet and like I would be completely alone and misunderstood wherever I went after death also.  It filled me with fear because I thought that even in death there would not be an escape from this isolation and loneliness.

I think these feelings of being different, misunderstood, and like I didn’t belong are the roots of some of my suicidal thoughts.  I think feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere on this planet made me not want to be on this planet.  It made me feel like a mistake.  Like god or whoever created me messed up and I shouldn’t be here.  It made me want to correct his mistake and remove myself from this place.

I am adult now.  I have friends now.  I have a place where I belong.  But I cannot shake the thoughts and feelings I had as a child.  I cannot shake my beliefs about myself and the world that were created during my most formative years.  Do I belong here?  Am I loveable?  Am I worth it?  I’m feeling sad this morning.  Because I am remembering how I felt as a child.  I am remembering the isolation.  The loneliness.  The feelings of rejection.  I am not alone now.  But I am grieving the years that I was.  I am reconnecting with that child.  Learning that it was not her fault.  But as I reconnect with her my sadness grows.  Because no child deserves to grow up feeling that way.  No child deserves to feel like there is nowhere they belong.  So today, I am grieving.  Grieving for the child who grew up believing she was all alone.

I’ve Been Sad but I’ve Been Brave

This blank page in front of me is my respite.  My escape from the world.  The one safe place I can express myself.  I long to express myself.  It has been too long since I have put pen to paper.  Now that I am sitting down looking at this blank page I am not sure where to begin.  Is this something I am going to post?  Make visible to the eyes of others?  Or am I going to keep it safe?  Hidden where no one can see it?  My dream is to make it visible to the eyes of others.  Allow them to see me.  Allow them to know how I feel.  To provide a place for them to be seen and known as well.  But I am afraid.

I’ve been weighed down with sadness today.  Deep, deep sadness.  It’s part grieving, part distorted thoughts, and part fear.  The grieving comes from things in my childhood.  Deep wounds that I am just now beginning to address.  I am going through a season of mourning the things that I lost.  Mourning the things that I never had.  This weekend was a weekend of authentic connection for me.  I have a special group of friends and together we sat down and took the time to get to know and listen to each other.  It was refreshing.  It was healing.  It made me sad.  It’s one thing to never know what you have been missing.  One thing to never know what was lacking your entire childhood.  I didn’t know what I was missing.  Now I do.  Connection.  I was missing connection.  Vulnerability.  Authenticity.  I am finding those things now and though they are so healing, they are also causing me to feel so sad.  When I was younger I didn’t know that these types of things existed.  I didn’t know that life could be so much deeper and richer.  But now I do and this awareness is causing me to grieve the deep emptiness I felt as a child.

I have also been feeling afraid.  I am afraid that I am going to lose this connection to others that I have just begun to find.  I am afraid that my friends are going to leave me.  That they are going to change their minds about wanting to know me.  That they will be just like others in my past.  It’s one thing to never know what you were missing.  It’s another thing entirely to become aware of it, to begin to taste it, and then to have it ripped away from you.  This is what I am afraid of.  The amount of pain that would cause.  I’m not sure I would survive that pain.  And so I find myself wanting to pull away.  Wanting to put my guard up.  To protect myself.  The thing I long for I also fear.  Connecting with others is one of the most healing things.  Being seen and then rejected is one of the most painful things.

This is what I am grappling with today.  This is what I have been grappling with the last few weeks.  Trying not to get lost in the sadness.  Trying to be brave enough to risk being vulnerable.  Allowing myself to feel what has been coming up.  I’ve been sad today.  But I’ve also been brave.