Blah…

Today has been a day full of self-loathing, doubting, depression, feeling so stuck and so bad about everything I don’t know if I will ever get myself back. I appreciate the little bits of support I find and I am trying to gather evidence that the universe is a place I can trust again but my heart… hurts… soooo much… I feel like I was born to love but something went wrong and now I am surviving to be broken. I feel so needy but when I feel needy I don’t reach out to anybody. Not that I normally do anyway and it is a process, I can’t just reach out to anyone right now and feel safe and comforted, but my goal is to start creating that safety.

I might need a cuddle and maybe that is the best therapy right now but I am terrified of how it might go, what further depths of feeling despair I might come to if I let myself have that oxytocin and to just therapeutically share whatever might be going on inside my messed up self. I feel scared and I just want to run and hide. I don’t know what is wrong with me; I don’t want to believe anything is wrong with me. I feel guilty for wanting to hide, for never measuring up, for feeling like such terrible things must be wrong with me. I don’t want to be scared anymore. I long for an opening.

I just read the beginning of Charlotte Kasl’s If the Buddha Got Stuck:

“The purpose of life is to be alive. Not to gather objects, achieve, accumulate successes, or forge your body to fit a mold. It’s simply to be alive. To touch, feel, sense, hear, see, and live in a dynamic flow of whatever arises in the moment; to accept the wild and crazy thoughts that go through your mind, your animal nature, your wisdom, the fears that arise and grip your chest, the laughter that brings tears, and the joy that takes you beyond yourself. To be alive is to meet and accept every part of yourself—the scuzzy, sweet, passionate, talented, or slow. From this place of self-acceptance you can be a good friend to yourself and others. This does not preclude achieving, learning, or taking good care of yourself, but you do so because your body, mind, and energy converge to do whatever feels in harmony with the aliveness that you are.”

I am so hyper-aware of how hard the world seems to make it, to just be, experience life, accept and love ourselves, and scared of all the barriers that could get in the way of simply surviving, especially when I am really vulnerable and in certain ways way too open about how I am feeling. I want something to make a big innocent smile come onto my face, like something really good or exciting or hopeful happening, but right now I don’t even know what that would look like for me, and I think since I am so weird the sort of affirmation and love that would make me smile big like that is so different than it would be for anybody else. I don’t know what I would want or need from anybody right now that might make me happier even if there were a loving community there who wanted to make me happier.

I am so ashamed about being depressed and feeling like I have to hide it, or to pretend to be feeling better than I am, and the truth is I feel awful. I don’t like feeling jusged and criticised for lying in bed all day ir not getting up in the morning. It makes me fear getting up even more like it is an obligation or something and I do not want to feel that way; it is exhausting so I hide more and get scared that my host will check on me and be frustrated that I am not being more productive. But I think if I had friends and loved ones that really just wanted to see me happier and cared about that, just knowing there is someone out there who wishes that for me, helps a whole lot.

I am so torn between wanting to connect with others intimately and feeling like I am way too messed up for that. Sometimes somebody gives you a chance and cares and listens and you’re not expecting it but they care about you and something opens up and you know they care about you being happier and don’t judge what you’re going through so you relax into that and knowing that caring is their intention you get happier. I wish I could spend a weekend with someone that felt romantic; that is just me being honest… I don’t know what would have to happen for me to feel like I am connecting with someone like that. And would it be what I really need or, like a cuddle, would it just bring up all my brokenness and all my yearnings and unmet needs even more? It is hard to trust that others care about me meeting my unmet needs, I don’t even know how to have a conversation about all that, with anyone, maybe even myself; and when I can’t figure out what my unmet needs are, I despair because it feels like I don’t know who I am, and if I did I should be able to find some way to meet some need that would satisfy me… get me a little closer to satisfying this seeming plethora of unmet needs in my broken heart.

It is really helpful today to read that doing, taking action, which feels absolutely impossible today, can come from a place of self-acceptance where your body, mind, and energy “converge to do whatever feels in harmony with the aliveness that you are.” That feels really hard right now, hard to find any enjoyment at all in the ‘dynamic flow of whatever arises in the moment’, hard to experience it as dynamic or anything other than terrifying.

I am overflowing with unmet needs, and I do not know how to begin to meet them, to start with, because I don’t know how to simply feel safe. I need the right kinds of connections with others and I need to trust myself. The idea of chatting with kind friends and receiving loving messages of affirmation both relaxes me and terrifies me right now. I am just lying in bed all day hoping my heart will just break open instead of remaini g half-broken in excruciating torment while my brain asks me again and again what life is for and if any of this is worth it and who I am and what does any of it matter and… I am someone who hates lacking purpose, having thoughts about doubting purpose and meaning in life. I like encouraging people and affirming in one way or another that life is worth living and I feel like such a failure.

I dreamed last night of an old love and I do not remember much but I missed her and almost wanted to ask her to date me again. I think we cuddled in the dream, I’m not sure; but anyway, I did not feel worthy of the connection and I could feel her holding back like she did not totally trust me and it was like we were waiting to see if evidence might arise that I had done something horrible… and since we were in my mother’s house, it was like everyone was gathering evidence to convict me; and she was waiting to find out what the result might be, or else I just didn’t trust myself and assumed she would go along with this hurtful process that was happening, where my family in collaboration with the police were trying once and for all to come up with conclusive evidence that I had done some unspecified horrible thing that they could get me locked up for and… really it was just everyone out to frame me and my having to cover up my tracks anyway, and trying to defend myself to my old love probably would have just made me look more guilty.

And right now, I just don’t know, something is missing but I don’t know how to begin to get unstuck; I have resistance to everything that used to make me happier, everything that used to be fun or pleasurable. I have thoughts of peacefully watching the seasons change but they are just thoughts; I guess it rained today but I have hardly looked out the window. I want to feel more like myself and have some sense of what my identity even is; and maybe when I know myself less than ever, I’m sort of thinking, why not just get a tattoo? Nothing satisfying quite comes to mind though, just an image of a girl holding a birdcage and releasing it so it can fly… I don’t want to just up and get a tattoo, actually, especially without some kind of affirming connection with someone else that kind if solidifies me on the idea. It is just a thought that is going through my mind today; like changing my clothes, or something about my body, to just feel somehow more settled in my own skin or like someone else or…