I know that I grew up believing that I needed an intermediary to assist with my emotional internal storms. A friend, my mom, and knew that a therapist would one day no longer be a want but a need. I think I always thought the emotions that roiled and raged beneath my surface were just too much for me to handle on my own.
So I set about a process of drawing others into my emotional pain. Trying to explain it to them when I had no really understanding of it myself. And so began a pattern where I allowed others to define things for me. And that became a habit.
I did not learn to sit with myself. I learned to leave myself. And other people were my vehicle.
Disappearing into the lives of others, attempting to seek out solace and comfort in any way and with any person I could. People became my most favorite escape mechanism. The best way to avoid me, was to disappear into you. Or allow you to disappear into me...although the later was less fun for me.
I can see now what started out as unintentional, something I did with impunity because of a hard wired pattern would long prevent me from being able to handle, or at least believe I could handle myself. I somehow created this great dependence on you to help me live with me.
Admittedly, I got pretty lost along the way. When one person didn’t work out, I just went and found another. A friend, sexual partner, date, romantic partner. But I was always looking for this other person to help me understand me. It never occurred to me that you might not be interested in assisting in this manner. I know, I know, how fucking arrogant can one person be?
I wish it had come from arrogance instead of this misplaced idea that EVERYONE else knew things I didn’t. This fundamental belief that others had more of a line directly connecting them to spirit or God or life’s answers is perhaps one of the biggest and life lasting errors in judgment I have ever had. Most people I have encountered along the way, were not even interested in figuring this out for themselves, let alone helping me with my confusion and anxiety.
Add on top of that my inability to select people who would not take advantage of this innate vulnerability, and what I have found is a life time installment plan of a set up of epic proportions.
I didn’t even identify this as an issue of mine until 2022. Well, perhaps that isn’t true. I think I knew it was an issue before that but it was not the kind of knowledge over which I could actually do something about for another couple decades.
But in 2022 the relational wheels feel off my chaotic bus. And I had to really examine my relationships and how they were impacting my life. And when this process was done, there were not very many relations left standing. Just me standing there in my rubbled debris. Alone. No one to really disappear into anymore. All of my closest outlets still smoking from the relational fire I started with tiny bombs that shouldn’t have really been able to create such wreckage. But I think when you build your life foundation on top of land mines that go undiscovered and undisturbed for years, when they finally go off, there is nothing else that can really happen other than to see that any disruption on foundational levels of your life are going to cause the whole fucking thing to collapse.
And collapse it did.
But as is usually the case, it needed to. I needed to rebuild. And I needed to do that differently than I had ever attempted it before. And I only learned that after making a pretty egregious judgment of the next intimacy to develop. Which is why I am here two years later sorting through relational rubble of a different kind, and infinitely more painful which seemed impossible two years ago. Yet, here I am. Again, still.
But I think I have probably learned this time for reals. And so I am sitting with myself in this new way for the first time ever. I am not doing all the things I used to do to draw people in. Propagating and continuing the idea that someone other than me, or God, is going to help me control this internal fire storm that rages constantly within me. I know better now. This isn’t a me and other job. This is a me, me and God job. And I finally feel like I have the stamina and the fortitude to sit with myself and just allow the rolling waves of fire to burn me down, hollow me out and destroy those parts of me that have long survived but have not been functional.
I have to say, so far, it has been a few weeks which honestly feel like lifetimes, and if you were paying attention, you have seen the smoking embers from this self created firestorm of change in my life.
But I think, and I say this very humbly and with a great amount of trepidation, I think I have been able to calm the storm within and now am sitting comfortably by a camp fire with myself. The conflagration has burned itself out and I no longer have the energy or fuel to ignite the kind of firestorm of my past. Instead, I am sitting solo, refusing to allow others too close because I am really trying very hard to break the pattern where I draw you in and then expect you to help me sort through myself. Turns out that was a misguided and fairly fruitless exercise always.
Time appears to be better spent sitting with myself and of course God. Trusting that which is meant for me will always find me. I need no longer seek out others, and instead, sit beside my own fire, allowing it to warm me and provide the light I so desperately sought in others. Turns out, I have had the light within all the time...I was just so stubborn in my refusal to acknowledge and accept it.
I can see now I was only making something hard more difficult by refusing to sit with myself and to await further instruction. Allowing myself to be people led, instead of anything close to Divinely led. Seems fitting as I round my way towards 30 years of sobriety to finally find myself in this place of spiritual growth, moving closer to God always seems to require me to move away from people. Most especially men.
I didn’t select this path. It was clearly selected for me and I resisted it with all that I am. For decades. But one of the payoffs of spiritual growth and emotional pain is that you gain access to things, ideas, feelings and thoughts that have bene previously locked away from you. And as I am finding out, one of the priceless gifts one receives from sitting with yourself is a new path forward that feels foreign and a little daunting because of all its newness.
It is hard to allow something new to develop when the price of the new is the old. My experience is that I cannot live differently with all the old habits and patterns and apparently, people. A great and fiery clearing has had to happen, a dearth of people clamoring for me to be this older version of myself. This was what had to happen in order for me to grow beyond my edges. Finally.
And I have learned that sitting with yourself can happen while you are walking, or yogaing, or meditating, or lying in bed reading. Access to the deeper recesses of you are available in the places in your life where stillness reigns. Which is usually the last place most of us ever look...
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