Dalloway´s Recovery Journal

[SenseOrgan]

Congratulations Dalloway! The spell of unworthiness is broken. I'm popping the Champaign my friend. Here's to the point of no return. 🥂 

[Dalloway]

My whole experience is telling me that something´s wrong with me. This has been the narrative all my life. It´s not something that I consciously keep telling to myself. It´s deeper than that. It´s the internalized, inherited, deeply embedded belief that my way of reacting to things, talking about my experience, living in this world is not acceptable. I don´t even know why. I never got an answer or an explanation of what am I doing wrong or not quite right. Nothing. I was never told how to do things right and yet from very early on I knew that I was not doing the right things. It´s so deeply rooted that it took me decades to realize that it might not be true and even now I act most of the time as if it WAS the one universal truth that can´t be questioned. It´s so painful to live like this. To see myself constantly, in every sense and context as a failure. But I can´t help it. I look around and there are too many things that remind me of something I failed doing, achieving, pursuing. So many things I could have done, so much wasted time I can´t get back. It´s hard not to be overwhelmed by the pain of it all. It´s almost impossible to keep hanging in there. You can´t help but drown when there´s nothing you could grab and hold on to.

All my life I´ve been missing compassionate witnesses to my pain and suffering.  This is why I keep isolating myself more and more. Every time I try to reach out, I meet with ignorance, misunderstanding or people trying to fix me, at very best. There´s this repeating narrative of my not being okay or being something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. People are trying to give me advice that doesn´t resonate or try to talk me out of feeling this way. It never lands, just reinforces the notion that a) there´s indeed something wrong with me and b) people will never ever understand or see me. Pathologizing my lived experience is denying my very sense of self, everything I am, my core being, my whole life. I am not nature´s mistake and neither is my life. I was being hurt, physically and emotionally, and in a sense I continue to be by the burden I´m carrying. My existence is not a mishap and my reactions are not pathological. They are the reason I´m still here, surviving.

I´m tired of having to explain myself to the world and of having to feel different. I´m not the odd one out. I´m not ill. Whoever the * is trying to convince us that we are, is so wrong. I am perfectly healthy. Show me one trait of mine or reaction that wasn´t perfectly valid and understandable in the context of what I was going through and I will declare my illness proudly. What if I was perfectly normal all along? What would happen if the world stopped looking at us as if we weren´t? I´m tired of carrying the burden of literally everything in the world.

From the very beginning of my life I received a clear message: I am not good/acceptable/tolerable the way I am. How I feel, what I think, what I do, how I do it, how I don´t, is just simply wrong. I don´t know what´s going on but I don´t like this story I´ve been told. My reactions are not disproportionate. They are aligned with what I´m going through and experiencing at the moment. There´s nothing untrue about it.

No one ever told me that what I was experiencing and how I was reacting, was perfectly normal and understandable. Instead I´ve been told that I´m different, not meeting the criteria and the norms or I was just simply made to feel that way. This behavior was further shaming and invalidating me. I don´t want to believe that anymore. I don´t want to believe that my experience is not real or that it´s abnormal.

[Marcine]

Dalloway, my friend.

You wrote,

"I don´t like this story I´ve been told. My reactions are not disproportionate. They are aligned with what I´m going through and experiencing at the moment. There´s nothing untrue about it."

This powerful awareness belongs to you.
No one can take away your truth.
Your voice is beautiful, sister.

[HannahOne]

Being misunderstood is so painful. You deserve to be seen and heard. Your feelings and reactions are valid and make sense in the context of your life. You know the reality of your experience, and you can trust it.

[TheBigBlue]

- and so much more - to both of you, Dalloway and Marcine.

OMG, I cried reading your words, cried in a good way. I felt your words in my body;
YOU spoke MY truth - and probably the truth of many here on the forum!
Thank You, just Thank You!!!