Why Cant you love me?
So much of my life has been spent in the shadows of someone else’s emotional state. Tumbling around in uncertainty and fear. Trying to find a space slow and safe enough to call my own. Where under the mountainy shadow might I set up shop and create a space for me? Where can I breathe? Where can I rise? Where can I find enough oxygen to inhale some of that elusive safety. Where I might be SEEN or at the least… not be rocked by another’s tidal wave of emotions. Where is my Value? Where is my lovability? Where will I not be abandoned or Left? Is there any Dignity around here?
After the ending of my 17+ year relationship I promised myself that I would never ever find myself in a position to be sitting, wishing, waiting, and wanting. I have created that when I am in relationship, someone else’s emotional state takes front and center. I have created my entire life around it. Where I am hypervigilant and overcompensating for it. Where I calibrate for what’s coming… especially when It is explosive…. I spend a great deal of my life energy waiting.
Waiting to be seen. Waiting to be acknowledged. Waiting to be valued. Waiting to be hugged, kissed and held. But perhaps the WORST…waiting to feel like I matter. Waiting to see/ feel if another sees my value to deem me “valuable”.
I can conjure up the feelings inside of me right now as I type. The small and scared little one inside of me who just wanted to NOT feel disposable or inconsequential. She would sit at the feet of the “other” raging or going silent and wait. Wait and hope that she would be accepted. Seen. Heard. Known.
This strategy has always left me more and more injured. More and more shameful. More and more hurt. More and More desperate. More and more anxious. More and More….Less and Less.
I can think of many many times in my life where I sat in a closet, in the bathroom or on the floor , curled up sobbing. Scared. Gutted. Lost. Alone. Hurt. Sad. Not understanding what was happening. I wish I could say my memories of these moments were when I was a child, but the ones that I remember the most were as an adult. An adult with a partner. An adult with responsibilities. An adult with a job or going to college. Gutted. Alone. Curled up and in feverish pain of wanting to be LOVED or HELD.
I was trapped in these moments. Frozen inside of a trauma response too large to name and too unclear to change. I didn’t know about my breath back then. I didn’t know I was an adult. I was very much a little girl. Scared and afraid and Unsafe. It is a funny thing to be sooo small in a big body and still be paralyzed. I spent many hours of my life in this fawn response.
These are not moments I have ever heard referenced… spoken or shared out loud. They are the deep, sticky, shadowy depths of our lowest moments. In public, or in friendship, we may say something like, “I am feeling sad today or full of grief or it was a hard day” …But we don’t talk about being overwhelmed by the fear and terror of history. Being held hostage to stories.
I am eternally grateful for having met a gaggle of incredible women on a journey to own their own lives. Take back the terrain of the body and SOUL… I was held in circle…. Witnessed. Loved. Listened to deeply. And accepted. As a birthright. I was encouraged to breathe and soften. Wow! Soften? Are you kidding me?!!! That was the most dangerous thing that my body could think of…. If I soften…. I will fall apart. Let go of form. Die? Never stop crying?
Phew… and I did. I allowed every day, week, month and year a grand softening. Allowing space for what bubbled to the surface to be felt and to be MINE. Not spewing it or throwing it at another. No Blame or shame. Just took it back. My tender heart. My tender self. Regardless of her age in body.
Profound work that the women who I know continue to do. Express. Feel. Re Write. Let go of. And do it all again.
It does change the world. Small acts of kindness. Willingness to see/feel/hear and not resist. Willing to me messy. Not have it figured out and “roll” with what presents.
I owe a HUGE gratitude of debt to these women. They were the grandest mirror for me. The most exquisite examples of what is possible. They always reflected the BEST of me back. They allowed and encouraged my deepest loving and tender self to rise. Feel Safe. And Be. Not because they gave me advice. Or weighed in on the content of my life, but because they didn’t. They sat, softened, bore witness, and breathed with me. They knew themselves in what I shared. They trusted that what moved inside of me was mine and not up for debate or that they needed to pick it up and do something with it.
That is FREEDOM. That is a different kind of LOVE, respect and a generosity of spirit of the new world.
