Finding my Sadness

First rains of the Southern Hemisphere spring arrived yesterday. It's cold and miserable outside and I've spent the morning in my pj's reading articles online. I eventually drifted onto my blog and started taking myself through some of my pieces from a year ago.

Wow. I was a very sore girl then. Struggling with the cognitive dissonace of emerging from that horrible ground zero moment of just losing everything, including myself. I'm still sore, but the pain has shifted. I guess I understand the loss more now. I have learned that the loss was not John-the-narc. Or the life I had before him. The loss is actually the illusion I had of my life.

I have lost the picture I created for myself about the perfect world. The life I painted for myself in my own head that denied so much of my reality. I know that I spent many years running ahead of my deep sadness and loneliness. And masked it for myself in all sorts of ways. I believed loneliness was for losers. And they have only themselves to blame. So I created noise noise noise to eliminate the voices in my soul that wanted to draw my attention to that pain. Running. Doing. Marrying. Building. Mothering. Performing. Worrying. Learning. Growing. Shagging new men. Loving. Being unloved in return. Getting sick. Healing. Years and years of busyiness. More and more work and loads to carry.

All masking this deep sad lonely girl sitting at the core of me. Mute. Alone. Lost.

And so now the sadness I feel is her's. The sad, lonely girl at my core. I have put down enough things to be able to let her grief come through. There is less noise at my centre. And I feel her pain. Of course, I want to keep on running from it. It's horrible, this lonely sadness. And my lifetime-honed skill at escaping this pain keeps begging me to run again. And I do, often. In little fits and starts. Until I remember again that running won't really help me. That this pain at the core of me needs feeling. Moving through. Holding, until it's felt it's fill.

I still have not cried. I know there are a lifetime of tears sitting inside me still. Unshed. Waiting. I don't know what for.  I think of that Disney movie again when I think of those tears. Inside Outside. Where Joy draws a circle on the floor and instructs Sadness to stay in that circle. I think I have done that to my sadness. She can stay, so long as she stays in the circle. Joy is terrified of what may transpire if Sadness oversteps her circle. The chaos! The devastation. Joy can't abide that. She would prefer to keep things light and 'together' forever. Of course that doesn't happen, because life isn't like that, is it? Sadness must out.

And life gets richer when Sadness is part of the range of healthy emotions we allow ourselves to experience. If we allow it. I think I know this intellectually, but I'm having a really hard time letting Sadness be. Still, I try to contain and hold her, and not allow her to spill out and contaminate my world. And I have also become wise enough over time to know that I can't force this thing. That this barrel of unshed tears that is still travelling between my heart and my throat will unleash itself in it's own time. And I need to just be patient with myself and trust that I will find my way there when it's time.

A dear friend of mine had her sadness overcome her last week. She booked herself into a psychaitric hospital. I'm standing close to her and loving her well as best I can. She's on anti depressants and giving herself the time and the space she needs to recover and heal this space. I can't help feeling a bit envious of her: she seems to be able to access this stuff inside her a lot more readily than me. She has such great instincts about it all. She is getting well, slowly. I take so much longer to learn these lessons. And I have no anti depressants.

Feels like going through major surgery. Without an anaesthetic.