Working Through Rejection.
I lay in bed a little too long this morning. Work was impending. One thing I had to organize for my daughter felt like a million things. The washing machine is broken, clothing is minimal until tomorrow, so I lay there putting outfits together in my head that would look someway professional. I could hear my son upstairs playing guitar, my husband making coffee in the kitchen. I didn’t want to hear or see any of them. Tears pushed through my eyelids even before I opened them and a familiar deep emptiness in my stomach consumed me. I can’t fucking do this again today.
My past is catching up with me. Usually I can outrun it with keeping myself busy, working, cleaning, parenting, giving, taking care of, offering myself to anyone who will take me. I am desperate to be accepted. The depth of that desperation is so great that my existence is defined by it. Not that you can see that from the outside, but take a peek inside my injured heart and it becomes very apparent.
Feeling Like A Problem
I studied the reactions of my therapist on Friday as I sat there offering her my truth. “There’s so much to digest Nicky,” she replied with a look of disbelief. ” “You have achieved so much and to others you are successful and very capable, but I understand your struggle.” Does she though? I’m not convinced yet. I’m not sure she can understand how this eternal pain I have always known surrounds my lungs so they cannot breathe, my heart so it cannot pump and my brain so it cannot think. I sit in front of her full of shame, feeling pathetic, unworthy, selfish but that glimmer of care I have for myself has led me to her office for help.
I need help, softness and strong arms to hold me up. The yearning to feel safe and valuable and that even one little thing I desire matters, is relentless. I need to not have to ask for permission to be vulnerable. Yet I have learned that nobody is going to do any of that for me. It always has to be me to provide every single thing for myself, from the physical to the mental and emotional. I have isolated my soul and the loneliness of that breaks me everyday, yet I keep reaching out expecting to be provided with something I cannot name.
What is it that’s missing? How can I have survived so much and still find myself here in my bed wishing the world to end? Where is this elusive place that other people find to lay their heads down in peace? God, my poor therapist!
