I’m Mad

What happens when you do all the work to heal and still do not feel like satisfied

I’m mad. Very, very mad. The amount of anger I have has surprised me. I thought I had done the work, processed enough. Healed to the best of my abiliities and yet here I am on a perfectly lovely Thursday morning feeling rage course through me. Thr question I keep asking myself is, “why hasn’t this been enough?” Enough to feel content, satisfied and tethered to this life of mine.

If you’ve been following Lost Girl for a while you’ve been around for my journey through chronic illness and reinvention. You’ve watched as I’ve cried on the internet about feeling lost. You’ve seen the way I’ve picked myself up metaphorically off the floor more times than I ever thought I could do. You have beared witness to me building resilience in real time. If you’ve seen all of that and I’ve lived all of that, why do I still feel like I haven’t done enough to live the life I’m striving for? Why do I feel like I haven’t done enough to be rewarded with deep, unconditional love?

I keep reviewing the things I’ve done. Externally and internally I have given myself the task of healing as much as I possibly could. With each challenge I thought, I can get through this. Things will be better on the other side and in many ways, they are. I’m healthier now than four years ago. I’m proud of the woman I’ve become. But I’m unsatisfied with the status of my life and if I’m being honest, I’m fed up that I did all this work and the universe still hasn’t come down and granted me the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’m not seeking financial stability. I’m notl ooking for riches or wealth or notoriety. My pot at the end of the rainbow is a sense of feeling seen and understood and loved unconditionally. And I know, someone is going to say “you need to love yourself first before you can receive love.” And to that I would say, trust me, I do.

I love myself. I love every single thing about me, good and bad, scarred or perfect. I’ve gone so deep into my own soul that I uncovered things I could have happily lived my entire life not knowing. I’ve attuned, aligned, curated, cured, healed, uncovered, cleared and reshaped many many layers of self. I have broken patterns of behavior. I’ve held myself accountable. I have tried to be a better version of a person for myself and for others. I have given one-hundred and ten percent to raising the standard by which I exist in and live my life. And yet, last night, I found myself blinking up at the ceiling asking the universe why it is taking its sweet time giving me the one thing I seek.

The Anger That Comes After Survival

I’ve tried not wanting it too much. I’ve practiced detachment and not thinking about it. I’ve tried the opposite direction and given my all to attaining it. I’ve tried letting it flow naturally. I’ve tried interfering. I have tried to just let it be. But still, nothing has happened and I am mad that I feel like the woman people look at and think, huh, wonder what happened there?

That narrative isn’t all in my head by the way. It’s in the pity glances I get. Or the well-intended compliments that read as sympathy. It’s in the way people pat my on the shoulder with a “there, there” motion when they realize that me, someone who is accomplished, talented, funny, charismatic, driven, and intentional, still doesn’t feel like there is somewhere I belong. And that kills me. It makes me feel like I’ve failed. It makes me think that all those times I cried in somatic therapy, or on the acupuncture table, all those times I bashed pillows in with my hands trying to get all the anger and inflammation and trauma out of my body, all those times I regulated my breathing to not become reactive. All those times I was so goddamn understanding about what was done to me and around me and about me was for nothing.

Someone once told me there’s no gold star for healing and they’re right. I don’t want a gold star. I just want to feel like I belong to myself and to a person and in a place and the only thing that feels true in that statement is my possession of myself. I feel like I have worked so hard to find myself again that I refuse to let myself get lost. But I cannot keep functioning in this high space of wanting to pour myself out to the universe without seeing some sort of return on my investment.

And yes yes, I know. We invest in ourselves not to get something back or at least we should anyway. But the thought that keeps me up at night is “what is this all for?” What was all the pain and sufferring through illness and heartbreak and grief for? What was all of that pain of losing myself and fighting like hell to get her back for? What was all that pain from rebuilding a life for if I still don’t feel like the deep kind of love I have longed for my entire life?