These days I waver between contentment and desperate loneliness. It's disorienting how happy I can be with what I do -- my job, the upkeep on my apartment, gaining better expertise in budget management -- and how unhappy I can be with how I am -- holding everyone at arm's length, wrapping myself in a tight shell of isolation and shutting off every emotional valve to avoid thinking about the awful emptiness that I feel as a result of not loving people.
My favorite child at work won't be coming back. His mother has left the Center and likely I'll never see him again. When I learned this yesterday I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. Some overriding discipline rose up and slapped down the inclination toward tears. I thought to myself, That's what happens; that's the nature of my job; that's why you don't get too attached or take things too personally.
Probably when Meg comes back from vacation we'll be sad together. I can only be emotional communally, for the past couple of months. When I'm by myself I'm not emotional at all. Which is completely unlike me.
A large part of me doesn't even care that I'm lonely. I'm better off that way, right? It's much less effort to live with and for myself only. I can love the kids at work because that's my job, and it's a wonderful part of my life...but loving peers involves being vulnerable, and I can't do that with anyone except Leigh Ann, Laura, and the hilarious MP.
My creativity is dead. My faculties for higher thought are dead. I'm reading fiction again (yay!) but only as a means to occupy my mind with Story so that I don't have time to dwell on myself. All the things I want to do I can do alone (cooking, gardening, plant-rearing, reading), but I must, I must, I must learn to surround myself fearlessly with people, because if all my efforts are turned back on myself there's a flatness, a lack of love. And I do believe that love is all.
So I need at some point in the next month to check my insurance to see how it covers therapy. Because however disinterested I am in my own well being, I can't let myself live like this and still be a responsible human being. It's time to move on.
1 comment:
Oh, lovely Sarah B. I hear you 100 percent loud and clear. I'm reading this book "Happiness is a Choice" and it's enlightening me on how unnatural it is for me to naturally be intimate with anyone. (Ha ha, big surprise there.) I thought of you in that in-no-way-implementing-you-in-dealing-with-the-same-thing-as-me-but-wink, wink-we-all-know-the-truth type way. :)
Post a Comment