In Between Loneliness and Love is Missing

What happens after you are no longer telling a major lie to yourself? Is it over? Of course not. We have lived an entire life of denial and repression as our go to, as well as when we feel stripped in any way of choices, or forced into definitive decisions, we react in addictive or needy ways. Tara Branch called in it in a talk recently “feeding the hungry ghosts.” Life now is a more indepth study of how to not push away the good that comes into your life, but also at the same time say “no thank you” to the people who are not healthy, quicker and without shame, but also thank you for them showing you that you have choices, backbone, and well, kahoonas. There are less and less mysteries of why and how you operate like you do. You can make definitive statements like “I don’t like the sound of his voice on the phone, so I won’t go on a date.” Or “That cookie is full of sugar and I won’t feel good if I eat it.” Sometimes we falter and go on the date or eat the cookie… and we learn our lesson fast. 45 minutes tops. No more of this four decade walking in a fog. By the time my head hits a pillow these days, I am like, yeah not that again. And I don’t.

You also start to love on a deeper level when you have opened your mouth about your sexual abuse, you being the key person loved first. Scary. Painful. What that involves for me is missing people. I had always dealt with the back and forth custody of my kids, not seeing them for five day stretches. It was a missing, but with an element of clinging to the notion they are gone, and some elements of victimization. Sure they missed me, but they are fine. I was carrying around with me this deeper longing that I had to start to explore. When my daughter got involved in the track team, I got spoiled for several months because every weekend I would come to the track, or entertain my pre teen when she didn’t want to go to the track. So every weekend, even if it wasn’t my weekend, I got these tastes of my kids, their lives, in a very non-custody delineated way. My ex husband was at the track meets as well on his weekends and non-weekends and he and I learned how to hang out, but not too much (boundaries boundaries), and be individuals in this co-joining event with our kid. Of course some teenage angst made its way into the scenario. I was still growing up as an adult after being stinted and falsified for so long by the abuse lie. So I made sure every other parental participant on the track team knew he was NOT my husband. Just to get that clear. Me, individual. Him, done.

I fell this particular track season in love with someone who I had met suddenly, went for aggressively without misgivings, and for the first time in my life had no desire to push away. I wanted to be around him. I missed him, and that really threw me because while I had been in a prior relationship that he expressed his dislike for not seeing me for stretches (and pushed on me his unmet wounds of childhood loneliness), I didn’t really care. I was like, deal with it. With this new guy, I could see myself spending the rest of my life with this person and that was really fucking new. Scary. Painful. (Sense a theme here?) Suddenly, an event occurred at the track meet which was not an accident. God’s timing is immense in my life. Our track team was suspended from a meet because someone had gotten in a fight. I was plunged into my first five day stretch in ages without seeing my kids at all. I was spending time with my new boyfriend and really getting to know him more, but Monday came and I faced I was still not going to see my kids until Wednesday and that when I saw them, it meant I wouldn’t see him until five more days when they went back to their dad. I crumbled into a pile of goo. I was going to always be missing someone. It would never be straight. I prayed to God. When would the missing ever end? Why was I some kind of disciple of missing? How was this my path to walk and understand and why was it so consistently painful? I explored wanting everyone together and how good that felt. My priorities had shifted. I went from wanting isolation to wanting love. I went from loneliness to missing, and I bet you there is another stage here to explore. It isn’t a straight shot from loneliness to love. It is loneliness to missing to love. Ouch.

It struck me hanging out with my new boyfriend how much I no longer needed the big fun, or the amazing nights out, or the hotel rooms (although I do love a good staycation). I loved negotiating a turkey sandwich getting too hot in a car while we were on the beach, and how to leave it on the blanket when we walked away from the seagulls. I loved going and getting STD tested together. I loved the idea of walking and holding hands all the time. Connected together and not missing someone, but knowing them in the gentlest way. I was suddenly not looking for something, instead I was in the experience and when you are there, you feel so much and it is hard to accept and then be in the missing when they go.

Then he left permanently, quickly, only six weeks in and I profoundly understood at the end of the day we still only have ourselves and I had to keep my heart open.

I was always lonely as a child. Around my family, Christmas around the tree. I was lonely in my twenties on movie sets with 150 people, sounds, roll camera (back when film went through the gate). I was lonely as a teen and I was lonely as an adult. Then there were all these times I was forced to be alone because my kids were gone and no man was in my life. I grew to be a student of loneliness. I created a Meet Up for a short bit that was based on writing through loneliness. I called it the Loneliness Project and in less than two weeks, over two hundred people joined. Yet no one wanted to come to the Meet Up. Well, there were a handful that came, and yet, it astounded me how many people admitted they struggled with the definition of their loneliness but didn’t want to know more about it or transcend it.

When I have asked the people who did come to my Meet Up to define loneliness I was told they were unable to connect mentally, spiritually, or verbally with anyone. Or anything. They had a feeling of isolation. A forgetting of our connectedness. A disconnected sense of self. Isn’t that what we are seeking ultimately is that big exhale that comes with finally understanding and believing no matter what we are enough just as us for us. We can make a million mistakes, but at the end of the day, we don’t have to punish ourselves and separate us from the herd so we can be held so punitively accountable for our faults.

I was so incredibly lonely as a teen ager. I realize now, so lonely, I could talk about it for weeks and still not be done talking about it. When I lived with my dad, despite my mom being just up the street in a small town, she never visited, and he was often out of town. I would eat alone, and on a Saturday, with no hobbies or sports, I would watch Saturday afternoon TV. As it was the time of only three channels, I would watch Dialing for Dollars on the black and white TV. In the middle of a classic movie, typically Abbott and Costello, they would pick numbers cut up from the phone book (who the heck did that job I think now in retrospect?) out of a bin and call the number. I would hold my breath and pray as the host said, “It’s connecting” and someone’s phone would ring. It wasn’t ever my dad’s land line. I would fantasize that one day they would call me and I would be heard all across the network! It was comforting to even hear other people pick up somewhere in the state, and I would be with them and the host for that short winning conversation. I didn’t even know or care what I would win. Then the Saturday afternoon movie would start again. Abbot and Costello made lots of noise. They were loud and funny.

Later that night, I would have friends over to make noise in the space, and the goal would be to get out of my head as much as humanly possible. It would start by opening the seal of my dad’s Blue Nun wine, cold and bitter and white, that took the edge off the silence. I was too young to get liquor at the package store, but sometimes a friend’s older brother or cousin would do it for us. Then we would take double barrel purple mescalin that brought an unstoppable roar of laughter and lunacy to her life. A tilted perspective that made my world level again. At least for the twelve hours it all lasted. I’d leave my body so I didn’t need to be boiling hot dogs alone again. And in the morning, I would wake very late, my young shaping brain a scramble, and I would peek out at the sun in the sky. I would realize I was hungry again. It was unavoidable. I was still growing. I would think about the hot dogs and the white bread and the ketchup and I would roll over and put a pillow over my head and go back into the silence.

I thought about walking to the local Dunkin Donuts down the street. I still had ten dollars but I was inert. I was suddenly paralyzed by fear of the silent apartment that lay beyond my bedroom door. I closed her eyes, and thankful inside my young soul, sank back into sleep.

Time passed. Children born. I got divorced. I got sober. I faced sexual abuse. I discovered the joy in a very busy jam packed life with my business, kids, love, and I started to see how many synchronicities would play out in my life. How empathic I was with other’s despair and moments of their being completely unknown and lonely whether it was being homeless or injured.

I realized while most of my life I had known far more about loneliness than I did about love, living this way was the only path to be able to speak about that acute knowing that now is the time to spread the message that we can all be okay with others and without others because being alone is not scary, especially when you are not isolating, depressed, drunk or high. When you are completely aligned with your higher being and calling on this earth, you are driven to beautify all that is around you and to make choices to be surrounded by love because you see the true value in time with your self.

#middleage #babyboomers #faith #love #healing #childhood #innerchild #kickingabuseintheass #bookcoach #trauma #

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