Escaping

According to Google, escaping means to break free from confinement or control. All I know is it's the only word I can find to explain how I have been living. 

Do you ever feel like for every one step forward you take, you  end up taking two steps backward? That's how I feel right now. It's like everything is within my reach and I have the tools available to succeed... but I am choosing to escape. Opposed to rationalization, escaping for me is just blocking out EVERYTHING. I get caught up in a series on Netflix, a game on my phone, working late, really whatever task that demands my attention, allowing me to get away from thinking about anything going on in my life. 

What am I working so hard to block out? Emotions are the obvious answer; but what ones? I have this reoccurinig feeling of loneliness. Not just a constant feeling of loneliness, a fear of eternal loneliness. 

What if I never find a partner to share my life with? It's gotten to the point where I lay in bed at night, wondering if I'll ever be held again... loved again. 

But where does it stem from? Logic (aka kryptonite) tells me someone is out there for me. I can safely say that I know that, but I still fear feeling this loneliness for the rest of my life. I can't really be scared of this... but I am. That's what I know. 

So I am challenged with this question... when else in my life have I felt lonely? 

My first thought, every day of my life? Haha...but no, seriously. I felt lonely when I was a small child, no bigger than two feet tall when I wondered where my "father" was. Later in life, I learned to refer to this individual a sperm donor, but as a five-year-old child, I just wondered why all the other kids had dads, and I didn't. 

I thought I was over the daddy issues. I don't have any desire to meet the man that I refer to as a sperm donor. I have a dad who adopted me at the age of 7. Unlike most "fathers," he made the choice to be my dad and that means more to me. Without him and his family, I wouldn't be where I am at now. I can safely say, that memory doesn't haunt me anymore. 

Maybe it's not the memory though, maybe it's the theme of loneliness throughout my childhood that haunts me. 

I was always alone. My mom worked and I was in daycare by myself or she wanted to go visit her boyfriend (the man who later adopted me) and I was entertaining myself away from everything I knew. I moved from Colorado to Michigan when I was 7 and left the world I knew behind. Acted out in second grade, when the first person noticed I was not handling my life well. So my parents put me in counseling. The thing is though, no one ever told me it was OK or that it was going to be ok. I was just told to get it together and be positive. I honestly don't know if anyone ever asked if I was ok? 

I don't think I learned what it is was to not be ok, until I was a senior in high school. Not being ok, wasn't an option. The goal was to be positive and grateful. The theme was to ignore my feelings, not embrace them. Not acknowledge them. I needed to control, I was supposed to be able to control them. That's when I first started escaping. I would get lost in books until I couldn't differentiate between the stories and real life. I felt my emotions through the characters and just dealt with the rest of my life. 

I am not sure this posting will be helpful to anyone...or if it even makes sense. I could sit here and say the lesson I learned in life was to make the best and give the "when life gives you lemons" speech. But that's not always what is best. Sometimes you just have to feel, whatever that feeling is. We often avoid the "bad" feelings, but you can't pick and choose what to avoid. We feel everything or nothing. For me, it's been nothing for far too long. 

Whether it's through logic or escaping, I find a way to avoid feeling. This is how I have hurt myself most in life. I hope I can forgive myself.

It's Easy to Hide When You Use Logic...

Considering my last post was December of 2011...yes, I would say it's easy to hide. But who was I hiding from?  The world? No.   Myself?     YES.

I could recap the past two years for you in basically 2 sentences; Got back together with the guy who broke my heart and he broke my heart again. Spent the past year and a half, or more realistically the better part of my life, convincing myself how to feel.... Maybe as I continue to post (yes, more frequent than every two years) I will go into depth about the past two years. For now though, I am going to start with where I am at currently.

Disconnected. Well I have been, still am... working on it. Something like that. Basically I just thought I needed to reconnect like a plug into a outlet. A light switch flipping on. I was hoping "feeling" would be a quick fix. Turns out that was a fallacy disguised as wishful thinking. Isn't that the story of my life...

Then it was pointed out to me; by thinking I need to be fixed, I am insinuating I'm broken. Hard to argue with that logic. 

That's the thing about logic though, it always provides us an answer. It's the rationalization to why and how. It's the explanation we always wanted but never got. It's the answer behind, "everything happens for a reason." So we yearn for it. We search for it. We tell ourselves we need it. But logic and emotion are like water and oil; they will never mix when coupled together. The quest for an answer is merely the lit match thrown into combination. The blazing flames that would come about in this analogy, are whispers of self-doubt in your ear.

We rationalize, explain and justify how when we don't trust what we are being told. When we apply logic to our feelings, we insinuate that we don't trust what our body is telling us... because if we did trust ourselves we would be empathizing with how we feel instead of searching for a reason why we feel this way. Think about it. If a friend tells you they feel alone and miserable, you don't question why they feel this way. Your response is empathizing and consoling, to remind your friend they aren't alone. So why is it that when we feel alone and miserable, we concentrate on finding the 'reason' why instead of empathizing and consoling ourselves, to remind the being within us that we aren't alone. 

It took me a while to understand the saying, "treat yourself like a friend." I'd say, I get it now.

The worst part is, while we are on this quest to find the logic behind why are feeling a certain way, the whispers of self-doubt build a wall of mistrust. Every time you choose the path of logic instead of empathy when your body tells you how it's feeling, you are essentially saying to yourself 'I don't trust what you're telling me. Prove it.' This repetitive environment, leads you to where I am at currently. The point where your body doesn't tell you what it's feeling at all because you won't believe it anyway, so why try. Without feelings, personally, I feel disconnected. Going back to my earlier point, which essentially leaves me believing that I am broken.

In Tara Brach's book, Radical Acceptance, she describes this feeling of being broken or thought process that something is wrong with you as a "trance of unworthiness." She describes that while within this trance no matter what we do or how hard we try, we believe that we'll never be good enough. This often leaves us feeling that we are alone, separated from the rest of world. She writes,

"If we are defective, how can we possible belong? ...The more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel. Underneath our fear of being flawed is a more primal fear that something is wrong with life, that something bad is going to happen. Our reaction to this fear is to feel blame, even hatred, toward whatever we consider the source of the problem: ourselves, other, life itself."

When I stop to think about all of this though... I can't help but think that if I had a friend that constantly told me I was wrong, I would stop responding to them to. So how can I blame myself for building a wall to protect my feelings from myself? Brach sums up this thought by writing, "I mistrusted myself for the ways I would pretend to be positive when underneath I felt lonely or afraid." 

So here I sit with my glass of day old, pink champagne, enjoying the still bubbling sensation in my mouth as I slowly sip it down. It's a lot to take in. The ways I have tried to protect myself in the past have essentially just outlawed me from accessing my inner-self, the good and the bad. Which is sad. I have hid from myself so well, that I know this journey of rediscovering and learning to trust myself is going to be difficult.

Well this is where I am at.. so this is where I'll end this post. if you are there now or you have been before, this post attests to the fact we aren't alone, even in our darkest moments. As I continue to post, this will be a traumatic and dramatic journey of reconnecting. I am sure there will be happy, funny and tear jerking stories... so stand-by. Please leave comments or question anything...maybe at the end of this journey, I'll reveal who I really am to the world.


(Side note: For anyone who can rent or purchase Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, I highly recommend it. iBook will give you a preview of the first 50 pages)