“It is safe to look within. It is safe to look within.” I find myself scribbling this phrase over and over in a notebook some time after midnight. The thing was I was upset and disillusioned. I grabbed Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life more out of a sense of desperation than anything else. I didn’t want to live my life like this. It just seemed like such a long time since I have felt genuinely happy. I was sad for such a long time and more recently I’ve felt so angry. I just wanted to feel like myself again.
As I scribbled down this mantra a funny thing happened. It seemed to work. I started admitting things to myself that I hadn’t before.
I don’t know how to make my life work. I don’t know how to pursue the kind of career I want to pursue. I don’t know how to make people care about me or the things I do. I don’t know if I have value. I try to assure myself that I do, but I wonder… I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can do it myself. I don’t even know who to ask for help. So mostly I just fantasize over someone saving me from my wretched life. A lover.
Only… on some level I am pretty sure that won’t work. I can’t really compartmentalise my existence and start again. Even with the support of a lover, no matter how spectacularly I imagine them to be. There are things I need to do to sort out my life first, things I need to do to make peace with myself and the world around me. Right now I am in many respects a broken individual. Taking all that stuff into a relationship will only damage the relationship.
But… instead of acknowledging this stuff and start working on it, I look for reasons – excuses – to feel bad and disempowered. I throw myself at people’s feet and if they don’t respond to me in the way I desire I decide that there is no point, that I’ll never be happy, that there’s no point in trying anything at all. [Admittedly I have a chequered relationship history so it's not difficult to find evidence to support a "nobody has ever loved you or ever will" type scenario.] Because… I know how to feel bad and while I do not enjoy it, I can do it. The things I have to do to move on with my life terrify me. It feels familiar, stable, to stay trapped.
But there are ways in which I do feel genuinely victimised. This world is an inhospitable place for many people for many reasons, and for one particular reason that I do not intend to disclose here it seems particularly brutal to me. I don’t see why I should suffer because of the intolerance of those around me. It doesn’t seem fair that I should be so fearful. There’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of things I realise I cannot control. And as much as I would like to operate with cold mechanical detachment, I can’t do that either. The love and support of family and friends is important to me. And the idea that I might lose either seems heartbreaking beyond words. I worry I would not survive such an outcome.
But where I live now emotionally makes me so unhappy. The facade that creates a superficial sense of stability also breeds such inner turmoil.
I just want someone to tell me everything will be alright. Although, if I’m being completely honest, I’m not entirely sure I’d believe them even if they did.
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http://www.liveincanberra.com.au
(I’m hoping for a chuckle.)
But seriously, you could get an entry level job paying $40K quite easily, it’ll only be a temp job, but it would allow you to start to get yourself together. And it wouldn’t be the career you’re after, but you set that goal after you get some of the other stuff in line.
There’s lots of jobs in this city. And, yes, housing is hard to find, and expensive, it’s not that difficult, and I’m sure my couch could probably suffice until you do find somewhere…
Anyway, think about it. I am here and happy to help.
Dr Phil has a saying –
Sometimes you just got to give yourself what you wish someone else would give you.
Yes, I know it seems lame, but it is actually very true.
All these things you don’t know about yourself – do you think any of us had any idea about those things at any time? We may have had an idea about one of them – eg what we wanted to do – quite young, so we knew where to aim. But most of us probably never ended up where we aimed to be. EG do I look like an astronaut to you?
I think maybe what you are missing is to live in the now. To go out and find something that you enjoy doing, *now*.
I can tell you this for certain – you will never find the answer in other people. The person who cares most about you is *you* and you never can hope that anyone else will ever match up to that level of caring – if they do, it will be a happy accident.