Thursday
10:30am
bowl of honey nut cheerios, 2% milk
strawberry banana yogurt
water
meds
12:00pm
turkey, cheese, pickle, mustard on whole wheat
pretzels
v8
2:00pm
light caramel frappe from starbucks
5:30
handful of chex mix grandma sent me
6:30
half can mixed veggies
couple spoonfuls of chicken casserole grandma froze and sent with me
v8
I need to find a more effective way to keep track of my meds. I should run out tomorrow, but I have several pills left, which means I somehow skipped a few days without realizing it. Maybe it happened over break, when my routine got upset.
It always feels so much lonelier here once I get return from a visit with people, but at the same time, it's a relief to be back.
I sat out on my little porch reading for class this afternoon. It was windy, but it the breeze was welcome as it taunted me, warm and thick. Suddenly, I looked up from my books and it struck me that the place I live in now is beautiful. Wild onions are sprouting up in determined tufts all over the front yard. There are lots of evergreens, most top heavy and naked at the bottom as if they're eagerly waiting for springtime to catch up to their higher limbs. The windchimes and birds tease my ears away from the canter of 17th century poetry and academic journal articles toward the world around me.
The observation brought with it a lovely sadness, the kind of despair where I am awed at the world but I realize that my heart would soar in a thousand happy songs if only I had someone to share it with. As is, the beauty tugs the heart like a weighted line, sinking full and uncomfortably heavy toward darkness as if to say "look how lovely the world is, look how it goes on without you." The water is beautiful as it robs me of breath, but somehow, today, I realized that I am able to break to the surface.
"Look," I think. "You are here, and you are enough." A sigh of relief. The trees sway drunkenly in the breeze, a familiar greeting.
The feeling made me realize that I am changing. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I realize now that a month ago, a half year ago, I would not have been able to appreciate beauty in my front lawn. I've been so trapped inside of a terrible, oppressive loneliness and bleakness for so long that I forgot what it was like to be awed by the world around me. I idealized Ferrum, recalled the beauty of the mountains there, and felt disappointed by the flatter terrain here. I felt as if everyone had abandoned me, and that is was my fault for not being lovable, for never being good enough. "Look at how accomplished you are, Whitney," I'd think. "And it's still not enough to earn affection from those who are supposed to love you. You must be pretty fucked up if after all you've done for them, they still don't care enough to talk to you."
But I've been slowly, slowly, slowly learning that it's not my fault. The people I've loved have failed me. My family should have loved and uplifted me, but they didn't. Not because I didn't deserve it, but because they were incapable. Or even if they were capable, they were careless.
Yes, I've been wronged, but most of all, I've wronged myself. I wedged myself into a role of helper, comforter, counselor, caretaker because that was the only space my family had for me. I thought that was the only place I fit, and I've tried desperately to earn affection and approval from everyone around me by wearing that role like my skin. I never gave myself a chance to be loved for who I am without contingencies. I sought love from people who, like my family, were intensely intimate with me for a while and then painfully distant. And I thought that was how love worked. You had to be intense and bursting, and if you weren't, then it was all forfeit. The patterns of love in my family and other relationships have always gone just so. Too-intense love for a while, then nothing, or worse than nothing.
I am trying to level out my relationships. Intimacy is fine, but the intensity that I've had with my family and others at certain times is unhealthy. I lost myself in those people. I ceased to exist, and I thought that by making everything about them, I'd earn their love. I was desperate for the moment when they'd wake up and see how much I'd sacrificed, how much I loved and then they'd love me back with the same fervor and consistency with which I'd loved them.
But I sold myself short. Love doesn't mean I have to give myself up. I don't have to stay in the helper role. I deserve a truly reciprocal relationship, where I feel validated and appreciated instead of constantly perching on the brink of desertion. I deserve friends, a lover, family, whose love I don't have to earn.
Just so, the people I love don't need someone who disappears; no, they need me to be firm, to maintain boundaries and sometimes say things I they don't want to hear. They need me to be me. Kind, compassionate, quirky, broken. I have something to offer just as those I love will have something to offer me.
There will be ups and downs, but those shifts should not break me the way patterns of love in my life thus far have shattered my confidence and trust. Love doesn't mean I become Sisyphus, eternally hefting the boulder up the steep incline and once things look up, being thrown back to the bottom of the mountain, ready to climb it all over again. That's not love. That's punishment. Others have put me in that position, but I no longer have to let them do so. I no longer have to automatically assume that role.
That being said, it is painfully difficult for me to change my ways. I have always had a terrible time burning bridges, and I still don't have it in me to reduce them to ash. But I do need to cross those bridges. I need to make my way across the gorge of self-loathing so that I can find acceptance. I have it in me to take the first step, my stomach in my throat as I see how far I have to fall. But even that dread is hopeful because as excruciating as the drop would be, it reminds me that I am not at the bottom. I am not wallowing in the trenches anymore. I slip sometimes, but the bridge is there. I can hold on when it sways. I can reach the other side, someday.
I still have dark days. There are moments I don't think I can bear to go on, nights I lie awake wondering why I exist, feeling like the future is something to dread or skirt around instead of work toward. I see no loveliness, feel no connection to the world. I find no beauty as I am swallowed alive by the great whale of loneliness only to be vomited into the sand, a repulsive mass.
But I can appreciate beauty more honestly, more consistently now. I don't have to seek it; it's here. I'm a part of it. I am a part of beauty, and it's a part of me.
I think that's a significant sign of hope.