One healthy decision in front of another. I was tired and depleted last night and I wanted some usual less than healthy comforts. Instead I commanded my body to take me on a walk. It starts out creaking and groaning. Protesting why after a long day of work we must do more, it feels like having to do more. However once a rhythm sets in, the walk gives more than it takes. Isn’t that always the answer? Making choices that give more to us than they take. If it takes our self-esteem, confidence, and worthiness. Is it worth it?
The walk felt amazing and I got so many good pictures of things I appreciate about my life living in Milford. Downtown Milford is beautiful. Lavender sky painted backdrops over harbors of boats. The smells of many local restaurants making me glad I didn’t have my credit card on me. I wanted to disappear into one and indulge. I always want to indulge. The walk gave more than it took, and after the craving passes, I feel alive and attractive. Buzzing with vitality.
So last night a line in my book Wild Game stopped me in my tracks… I’m a little over half way in the book and Adrienne (the memoirist, has a new friend, and is now in college. Her new friend says to her that her mom is lonely. And Adrienne scoffs and says she has dinner parties every night, and has been juggling two men for years. That her mother is not lonely. And the friend says “you’re wrong, loneliness is not about how many people you have around, it’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.” Adrienne: “I was at a loss for words.”
“The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.”
This is the thing we all want, to be known. To show our true selves, our soft underbellies.
Feeling lonely and unknown can lead to a series of not so good things. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and actions that cannot be undone. Only healed and moved forward from.
The promise of being known in a way that seems unique in all the world can lead to breeches of sanity that are almost unimaginable. A promise without a follow through is potentially one of the cruelest things to live through. Karma is real. It’s not in fact a bitch, contrary to popular slogan. It’s the thing that it used correctly, that keeps us on path to integrity.
The biggest route to change is fully feeling, an embodiment of experience to the point that discipline outweighs desire, and compassion and understanding lead, rather than impulsivity and greed.
I am learning you can’t simply know the lessons cognitively. To become real, it must be the journey that brings them to life inside of you….
It is painful to have realized how disconnected from myself and others I was. How my desperate mind was buzzing from threat to attachment, threat to attachment. how unsafe I felt in my own body and home, because in my mind it was still a haunted house.
I cannot speak enough about how presence is a gift and a privilege and how many people are not able to be in it, for a variety of reasons. I think of how it must have felt for my children to see my eyes so blank. Wild with terror….beyond any loneliness. Shattered, scattered, and lost. In ways that no one understood or put together. The logical conclusion was selfishness. When one doesn’t have any presence with themselves they cannot access executive function and the higher ordered thinking, regardless if they have empathy or not.
They were never blank like my mothers, my eyes were never those of the uncaring, the permanently disconnected….
I was however lost inside myself….
And now I’m coming home….