I’ve spent far too much time trying to be someone that I’m not… and it’s cost me more than I could afford to spend.
I’ve been trying to be a stronger, more enlightened version of me. I thought I was doing it with the best intentions… showing up to every relationship, every interaction as the person that I want to be, unconditionally loving, unconditionally supportive, unconditionally understanding. The problem is… that’s not who I truly am.
I don’t always understand and I can’t always be loving and supportive. Sometimes I have needs for support, love and understanding that, without those needs being met I can’t show up as who I want to be.
And the problem is that I either don’t know how to ask for what I need or when I do ask people can’t see the need because I don’t know how to show that I’m in pain except with my words. They say that the words a person speaks makes up only 7% of communication; the rest is made up of voice tonality, body language, etc. I don’t know if that’s actually an accurate statistic but if so it explains a lot about why I don’t feel very supported.
You see, when I express that I’m struggling, the person I’m speaking to only seems to pick up on about 7% of the intensity; and they support me accordingly.
I’m incredibly grateful for every bit of support I receive… and most of the time 7% is sufficient because my personal reserves are high enough that I can show up for myself unconditionally lovingly, supportive and understanding.
But today my reserves are non-existent and I feel a pain that makes me want to crumble, but I never learned enough emotional skills to even know how to break down… so I’m stuck in this limbo of feeling deep anguish inside, lacking the capacity to support myself, while still looking just as strong and impervious to the outside world as I normally do.
Right now I just want to be human. I just want to be able to cry, to feel the pain that is real for me; and, if possible, be held and loved in the process. I feel like I’m setting myself up for failure though because the person I most want to be held and loved by is also running on low reserves and, in the moment, has been the trigger for much of the pain I feel.
She’s not the cause, just the trigger. The cause has been around for as long as I can remember. From the time I was 4 years old I would write poem after poem about unrequited love. At the time there was no specific person attached to the feeling of loss or rejection… but I still felt it. Since that time several people have filled that role for me. Currently there is someone whom I am so deeply in love with, an incredible woman who’s capacity to love exceeds anything I’ve experienced before. A woman who loves many people with deep passion and devotion. But for some reason, that I fail to understand, that deep love that I see her direct towards others, that I once felt her direct towards me seems to have lost its steam. In its place a wavering desire to connect has emerged and I’m left riding a roller coaster I didn’t realize I was getting on, feeling the thrill of the moments when her love is directed at me followed by that pit in my stomach when I fall as her love is replaced with frustration or questioning.
Just like with a roller coaster the climb up was amazing, but I hadn’t expected the fall and now that I’m falling, it’s every bit as scary as any roller coaster I’ve ever seen…
My experience during a pannick attack
Today has been a bad day! It’s been raining all day. I don’t mean the sweet, wet rain that trickles down and leaves the air fresh and beautiful. I mean a rain of emotions flowing rampantly through me taking my psyche in any which direction it wishes. I feel surges of pain, guilt, terror moving through me, ultimately landing in my chest, making my heart feel like it might stop beating.
It feels as though I have no control over this other than the choice to be conscious and watch as I disintegrate or the choice to numb out and hope that, like most other things, this too shall pass.
Intellectually I understand that this is nothing more than a simple case of cause and effect. That I am feeling the effect of spending the last couple years living in a way that required great deals of repression. And that soon enough my emotional state will catch up to the new way I’m living and I will begin to pull out of this phase. But, in the meantime, I am having a bad day!
My first (and hopefully last) experience with having panic attacks
Are you fucking kidding me???
I’ve spent the last 8 years of my life training and developing the capacity to be stable and unaffected by my surroundings. A skill I had become very good at. Little did I know that I’m not excluded from the laws of cause and effect like I would have liked to think.
As soon as I let go of my responsibilities and no longer had to be a rock I cracked like an egg under the foot of god.
I’ve been praised for years for my capacity to sit through very challenging emotional situations, business stresses, etc and come out seemingly unaffected. The truth is that I was always effected but I had just built an above average capacity to stuff that shit way down in there and not let it out.
After 8 years of stability I’ve now spent the last week having almost constant panic attacks. I always thought this was something that could only happen to people that were ungrounded and emotionally weak. That may still be true but that means that I’m not as strong as I thought.
I’ve been going in and out of blacking out, shaking, turning red – then yellow, and feeling scared and anxious about almost everything.
I started off trying to find the physical trigger of this all so I didn’t have to admit that I had cracked but it would seem that I’ve ruled out all physical causes and the only thing that I’m left with is… I’m a bit damaged and in need of repair. So, this journal entry is supposed to be the first of many tune-ups to get my emotional/mental well-being in proper alignment.
I was scared going in this time. Not for any particular reason. I wasn’t thinking of any reason that I should be afraid… but I was. My body was hot and pulsing with little shockwaves of adrenaline rushing through me.
I just had the best, most mind blowing, earth shattering, body trembling “cosmic orgasm” ever…
How far does it go… the rabbit hole that is?