Loneliness
I am feeling lonely today.
Going to try and break this down and expand it...
I am feeling isolated and judged for the boundaries that I hold. Our society is toxic and breeds toxicity, and therefore by going against the grain I feel disconnected.
Isolated, lonely, disconnected.
I am not these clouds, I am the sky.
It still hurts though. Like a stormy sky... Covered and I cannot see the benefits.
I see the strength. I hold my strength as if it were my child.
I feel that people don't see it as strength though, and we hear this in relation to small children- she isn't strong, she's stubborn. Unhelpful. Unyeilding.
I am a giant oak for my own well being.
I have felt like I am coming back slowly from a depression swing that I knew was coming the second I found out my client had passed away.
So this week I am able to wake up on time, I am able to do my work in the slots I allot for it each day/week.
But I feel worn. I feel exhausted.
Then pile on this isolation feeling. I decline to help people at work and I feel that because I am drawing a hard line for my own boundaries I am seen as unhelpful.
I decline to friend the mother that just lost her child on facebook and I feel I am cruel, heartless... but I am breaking inside over it.
I feel the loss of her on some level everyday.
I feel it in the judgments I put forth about my current work with my current clients. Am I seeing everything? Am I able to do everything? Can I make up for all the shitty ABA in the world?
Isolated, disconnected, lonely, invisible.
Is invisible an emotion?
I am going to try some more tonglen practice today... to try and see my pain in others and feel it expanding to fill the universe that is so vast.
There is no need for judgment or feeling insufficient in the grand scheme of the universe. We are all and everything moving at the speed of time unknown.
Being part of this greater whole also does not diminish my experience, it just diminishes the impact of the hooks I'm throwing into these bad feelings.
I think my work has been to push into the feelings, to sit with them and embrace them.
Through this, at the age of 32, I continue to see even more of the effects of my trauma on me.
Never the worst trauma, never the thing that I need everyone to know about, but those feelings of isolation hit such a harder note. They hit nights crying alone in my room, they hit days and weeks without basic human interaction outside of school. They hit a childhood of emptiness that then collides with an adulthood of the same.
Except my life is full- but material and emotional joy does not cover up the past. It's healing slowly as I love myself.
To circle back to the start, I am proud that I love myself. That I am feeling my emotions, checking in with my limitations, and growing with them.
I just hate the added weight of my trauma, and then the added weight of feeling the judgment from others, unintentional or intentional.