Closure

I am torn right now between writing one final email to the community that kept scheduling these meetings with me and writing a diary entry. In the end ahhh thankfully I chose the diary entry but I think I may take a break from writing for a while as this also keeps me in old patterns I don’t want to be in and I think what I need right now is what I would write if I were writing just for myself, no judgments from anybody, no fears sbout being misunderstood, just the plain truth.

They ultimately rejected me today, easing me over a half hour into the idea that maybe I was not a good fit, but kind of telling me that not going back there was in my best interest, and I was frustrated because I am well aware what is in my best interest and I can find that out for myself. But so many huge wire crossings or it felt like it to me. I went off trying and failing to explain my frustration with not getting to decide what is in my own best interest which must have looked bad because the whole point of the meeting was about, are they going to let me back, and it is their choice. That must have looked terribly arrogant but I was making a side point because being told what I need frustrates me and I prefer the directness of hearing it is not a good fit from them but they are unable or unwilling to explain in a more satisfying way way. I really didn’t mean it to be an argument with them, pleading for them to let me stay, and that is what it looked like. The final analysis is they just don’t understand me and they’re not going to. very qualities that are red flags for them can be seen as adorable by others but it is like a relationship that has started going bad and all of your quirks and insecurities and mess ups are going to be seen in light of how they saw you before. I have tried to express to them that I am sorry for my past actions but someone there suggested that I have lied or stretched the truth but didn’t tell me how. I already know that, and given time I could explain, but I don’t think there is time to resolve the issues rhey have with me and that’s that. I have my mistakes and regrets, but I will never really know why things went this way. I know that whatever the reason, I am responsible for myself. I would have been happier, with or without them, if I had made better choices with respect to them.

Dang, processing this is going to take all my time today. I kind of feel like they have maybe meant to exclude me for some reason for a long time and they just wanted to put the formal finishing touches on it. It feels very strange and very liberating and very scary and very omg I will never understand anything that is going on: they tell me like they know what my needs are that they are looking out for me when they say maybe look into other communities and maybe this isn’t the right fit. Any community that would exclude me is not the right fit so I am just fine with the outcome but it was one of those situations where everything you were in the meeting was not you, like I felt trapped in a box created by things like saying clearly that I *have* been looking into other communities or am just more okay with however community unfolds in my life and I am more okay with being alone.

A community that in a way felt so promising and maybe like home as that one did, I started thinking while we were talking todsy, might be hard to find, and all my processing got in the way of anything that would give them reason to give me a chance. I was feeling like why am I holding on, what am I holding on for, why did part of me still wanted to go there despite becoming so sad about it all now. Was it not the right fit from the beginning? Could I have changed the outcome today? Would I want to, five years from now, check in with them to see if they’d take me, or would I hope I am way over that by then? They *were* right: if I went back there now in any case it wouldn’t be good for me. I concur with that but for some reason i don’t understand I wanted to leave the door open for me to return. I am glad it is closed now. So can I make sense of my life now with that in the past? What did all that mean, what did I go through, what about it still matters to me and how can I totally clear that energy from my life and start… new, in a way, even with all these regrets? There was something about that place so important to me that this closure feels like starting new.

How do I make sense of the meaning of alllll of that part of my life connected with them so I can bracket it and put it behind me and be here now without all that baggage and see if the day can offer some grace. How will I ever find out what is going on at the core of it if I go back to that place where I feel like all my signals cross wires and then get stuck there instead of around others where there is more effortlessness in understanding? I do not think they give me any credit, trying to *tell* me they think this is what I need and not letting me figure it out myself. But in telling me they are a no as far as me coming back to that place, I guess it is a gift because now I have all the space in

the world to process everything that all this represents in my life.

My guess is that it was something that happened a long time ago and though I could not find words it is like, I felt on the hotseat though at the very beginning I felt very welcomed by everyone. Towards the end I felt like the one who greeted me into the meeting was rolling his eyes and smiling bafflingly like I can’t believe this is still foing on. He called me tenacious and dressed it as a compliment.

They seem to think I am too much work, like, my old retreat leader was there and actually said, well, brought up something personal and asked the group if they could share it openly without giving me a clue what it was going to be and then basically saying something that was really personal and tender to me and something that only someone I let into my soul has the right to talk to me about let alone share with everyone like that and I don’t know if they meant that as a jab or it was innocent but,they should have known better.

Why can’t they just say, you are not welcome here, you have made people uncomfortable? Or, we just didn’t like you from the beginning and we do not want you in our circle? Then they finally get to, actually we are making the decision but we’re doing it out of love, they say. And I know they can’t help me but who even knows how long that has been the case? Who even knows at what point and

through what rationale I became excluded from

their thing. I guess I am grateful as it helps me do some processing that would have been really hard to do with them still part of my life.

Their choice was made up all along, maybe, but still it was like blowing an interview and I think that is the final point on the matter. A place where it is so easy to blow an interview is not a good fit and for sure the way they see you is based on the past but you can’t address any of it and jt keepsmgetting brought up even though you’re sorry. You will just have to apply the lessons you learned somewhere else and it’s kind of sad because I wanted to show them I learned from everything, but oh well. Everything Insay or do just makes me look worse to them.

Did I have an expectation of this community being there for me to support me around wounds I experienced within it. Yes. I wanted to feel a sense of resolution with them and I guess this is one but it is so strange because it calls into question what even happened and though I seek answers who there will ever be able to provide them? It is self-understanding and awareness I really seek. I have things to resolve about well pretty much everything and I have questions and there is so much I don’t know. I know that can’t be the place for me now, it is clear, but whyyyyy and what the heck does everything that happened to me since I found them even mean? Obviously that is not the place to process it.

That was never going to be a place to go to really figure it out and maybe they were right, even before they closed the door on me, that it might be best for me to look at it from the perspective that they had already closed the door. Only from that angle are doors going to open to places I really belong, but I didn’t realise I was attached. I hope I am not frustrated forever about what the thing is that did it with this community. Why forever chase after how others see you, why not let that go? I think they distrust my intentions for wanting to return and totally misunderstand what I am going through but it’s fine. I think they think I still have hopes for something or other from someone there and honestly for their sake at this point these people would be reasons never to return. If I saw them again there is nothing I want but to give them space and have space. It is freeing to be free of all these misunderstandings of my intentions and motivations. I don’t need that.

The time I spent in that community though and what it means and how it is connected to a huuuuge period of my life… and whether my struggles and messed upness that I expressed sorrow about led to their decision or it was something else, I don’t know. It feels like the right decision of course though I sort of wish it didn’t. It really was like a trial maybe and maybe it was my old retreat leader who outed me with my consent about something that was not relevant to anything and made me look like a weirdo to everyone. And when I said, “it’s my truth,” a bit defensively, it felt so unfair because I have come so far as far as that goes and I think they saw me as aggressive. It didn’t look good to anyone, I am sure, and it put me in a bind, because my truth has changed for sure and it is no longer my truth but if my truth had made everyone uncomfortable then you’d think that would have been brought up then instead of now. It came out like I am tenacious about *that*’and I am really not. It was a moment of defensiveness but the way itmlooks in a frame lets just say paints me as a fool and I am sure that as a result of these words they formed entirely inaccurate perceptions of me. I am pretty sure everyone seeing that is why they made the decision… but saying what is real I guess is more important to me than being immediately understood, and a single phrase there made me feel like a total fool. I know what they’re looking for, I know what they are seeinf, but their assessment of me especially based on that is all wrong. That’s not to say they weren’t right that it isn’t a good fit…

I have done plenty of processing on that and there is more nuance than that and it might not be my truth any longer and I have changed and realised things but maybe like a breakup it is too late to show this community who I am because they keep seeing what they expect to see and I see exactly why they would see it but they’re not right. Maybe it doesn’t matter because it opens me to what is open to me, but something is kind of strange about how it all went down. It was like heaps of misunderstandings piled up with everything I said and I got stuck in a pattern that did not make me look good… to them, anyway, but there was never going to be a way to look good with them. In fact it made me look very bizarre and foolish and I feel very uncomfortable with how it happened that way…

Well, I asked sillily because I found myself in the call having a struggle with letting go if I could check back in five years and they said, ‘We’ll get back to you,” but I really hope I don’t want to at that point? Not that I do now, having it made clear that they do not believe I would be an asset to their community. If the rejection is about today I did and displayed all the things that people always get wrong about me and I know in my heart that today I was just really misunderstood. I feel like they expected me to fit a mold I am never going to fit and being a neurodivergent INFP seems to explain so much.

Writing like this is how I process and I think maybe it is time to do my journaling in a more private, sacred space. I may grow more that way, be more ready sooner to start again with whatever life brings from here. Whatever my issues are, are for me to be responsible with in the future, and not the business of a group of people that wouldn’t want me anymore because of the fool I made of myself today.

I feel kind of good in a way, aware of what it is I would want a friend to get about me, so much clearer in all sorts of ways about the things I do to make myself misunderstood. Trauma came up a bit during the meeting and I guess it was a matter of whether they were a group of people that would interpret my intentions and motivations gently and on a very subtle but intuitively obvious level I do not think I got that today. I wanted to be authentic. I let my trauma and my inner knots show too much, I played out old scenes and ways of being I don’t want to be anymore. I chose being authentic over doing what I needed to do to ‘get the job’  and over another chance at coming back to that place. In the middle of it I empathised with the person I was then who was sad that no one got back to me at a time of needing support. I am a different person now and not in the same situation with the same needs. I was expressing and feeling empathy for how I felt then and I am sure they mistook that as my current statement about where I am at but it was not that at all.

I chose to reveal the real issues I have had, at the risk of overstating them, and yeah, from a perspective of having healed so much and learned my lesson so if I had to do it over again I would make totally different decisions rather than make a total fool of myself and maybe that would  have meant stepping away myself or it might have meant expressing myself and dealing with my needs and expectations of others in a more mature way which I totally failed to do. If I had to relive it all at what earliest would I go back to to change the way it all turned out that leaves me very disappointed but finding the silver lining of what I guess was inevitable. The community meant something to me and I was so awkward and it was made clear nobody has time to listen to me express themselves in the ways I like to express myself (like the writing I read at the beginning of the meeting). I don’t think they see who I am and it makes me so clear on all the ways I let myself be misunderstood and settle for less than I am worth. Like who has time to read the stuff I write, I agree. But I think they mistook me.

Sorry I went off on an INFP tangent into introspection and empathy for my own feelings when I was supposed to… I don’t even know what, they did not tell me what their concerns about me were, just that somehow over the course of the half an hour they decided it was a no to letting me come back, whereas earlier they were like, let’s sit on it and come back to it. I don’t think it was fair but I am not complaining because I guess it’s what needed to happen.

I know, sort of, what they are evaluating about me, I know sort of how they are seeing me, and there would be little I could do to change that at this point amyway. Private concerns of mine getting brought up publicly and unfairly certainly contributed to that, but everything I said today, that feels so horrible knowing how they must already see me.

Why do I keep journaling things and sharing it with them like I want them always to know my deeper process at all times? They seemed to take that as me having needs that they couldn’t satisfy but honestly I do not feel the need to go to a retreat and share my long journal entries with people. They are concerned about themselves, as my old retreat leader said, they don’t have time to give me what I need. I think one of the biggest misunderstandings that can come out of me trying to express myself arises around people thinking they know what my needs are. I don’t need anyone to read my writing but I keep sharing it instead of maintaining a cordial distance. The truth is if they accepted me and it felt right I would just have been happy and grateful to be given a chance despite not deserving it. I might have gone to another retreat. If I had a good time at that one I might go to another. I would have no agenda or expectations of what that would be like, I just wanted to tie up loose ends and make peace with everything and their rejection kind of allows me finally to do that. I totally get in so many ways how I made people uncomfortable and I would be uncomfortable with me too. I don’t think there is any way to convey to them how much I get all this.

What I wanted was space to make sense of it all and I’ve got that now in a way. I don’t know if I will make sense of any of that but it is an opportunity to make better sense of myself and… to integrate what I now know I could have never integrated there. But why? When did that awareness actually start for me and how could I have responded to life differently? Would I have been happier now? What are alternative ways things could have turned out if I had made different choices and if I had full access to my wisdom and intuition and made better choices? I would have had to set boundaries either way and I would have had to walk away from a lot of things. I might have just walked away sooner or I might have found some real understanding there. What is the use of reflecting on that now?