My husband asked me this summer: “What did it feel like in the past when you were really hurting and emotional support wasn’t there for you?”
I would feel isolated. I would feel despair.
I would even at times feel like I wanted to die, like I didn’t want to live with the pain of this burden of experience.
If life had to be this way I just didn’t want to play the game.
When a wave like this would hit there were so many feelings that would come all at once. I would feel overwhelmed and I would feel lost.
“I don’t belong. Something is really, really wrong with me.” That kind of deep, deep, shame that says I am unlovable and no one will ever truly know me, love me or understand me. Sometimes it would also feel like I would be trapped in this experience and it would never pass, although gratefully, it always did. And afterwards I would regularly feel confused as to how I came to experience such pain.
I know now that I am not alone in these moments of intense waves of feeling.
A lot of people just don’t talk about it.
When the experience above was happening to me I just didn’t know how to be there for myself and the people around me didn’t know how to be there for me either.
Those around me were trying to love and support me.
I was trying to love and support me.
But no one had ever taught me how to truly be with pain.
And I believe no one had ever taught those around me how to be with pain either.
There are so many connections to make around this conversation but for today I will say: When I was hurting deeply it often made the people around me uncomfortable, very uncomfortable and so I would regularly feel simply rejected because of their discomfort. This fed into the story that something was wrong with me and I would move even further into isolation. I couldn’t see that others were hurting too. Everyone else seemed to be fine and I was the one with the problem.