Lately, I Have Been So Frustrated By Life.

More of a diary entry than anything else.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

It’s more than just one thing, and by all means, it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be a few years back.

I’m dealing with a sort of existential dread, like a brick wall that refuses to let me fully integrate my lived experiences with my spiritual beliefs.

In this way, I feel I live in a constant paradox.

I love reading and learning, and when I find a new spiritual paradigm to dig into, I dig into it with all that I’ve got, which inevitably leads me into some sort of tower moment that makes it impossible to keep living the way I have been. This, in itself, is a fully self-fueled process, which is to say, I do it to myself.

I seek out new information, I seek out new perspectives, I keep going. Because I love learning. My curiosity is the most wonderful blessing I have ever had.

But I have been walking forward with such a strict narrative of who I am, and as much as I keep learning, I struggle to actualize my life’s story in real-time.

It’s so funny, really.

Instinctively, I understand this process. I know all of this is normal and expected. I have written the advice I’ve needed to hear a million times over, and still, being in the moment, it’s so easy to get caught up in the illusions and refuse to let them go.

You go through life thinking you know your truth, and you open your mind to another perspective, and as soon as you let life in, it’s like you’re backwards free-falling down a cliff, and all you can do is surrender. You know you’ll hit the ground – you don’t know when or what reality you’ll land in, so all you can do is fall.

I Am Falling.

I have no idea where I’m going. I have no idea who I am – at least, I have no idea what functional identity to have. I know I’ll be fine wherever I land, and I know I’ll figure everything out, and I know I’ll never be put into a situation I can’t handle.

I don’t know if it would be more accurate to say I’ve stopped resisting life or if I’ve all at once released all that it is me.

I couldn’t tell you, because I know this is cyclical. As free and unlearned as I feel right now, soon enough, I will convince myself I’ve got it all figured out again, just to free-fall again.

I can’t explain how beautiful I find this all to be. I am so very beyond blessed to be alive. As flawed and crooked as I am, as many mistakes as I have made, and as terrible as I like to try to convince myself I am, oh my god, this life is so wonderful.

Everything is so perfect in all its conniving pathways that seem to lead nowhere, just to always lead you exactly where you need to go. And who's to know if there is some grand design? If everything I feel and believe in is true? What if it is all random and life is not so much about following what is yours but instead finding and making “yours” in the midst of the mess?

Does it matter?

Do these questions need answering?

Suffering As An Identity.

A few weeks ago, a friend broke down crying in front of me. She’s had a hard go of it the past two years, and to her credit, she has yet to meet my emotional side very well. I tried to give her advice, and she said, “How could you ever understand? You’ve never struggled a day in your life.” And you know what? At the moment, that felt like a slap in my face. How could she not give me my credit? Where was my respect?

And so, in the moment, I stuck up for my wounded pride.

I told her what I’d suffered through. And I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

Why did I need to defend my identity as someone who has suffered?

Isn’t her inability to perceive my wounds a compliment? Some proof that I have healed enough to be beyond detection? Wasn’t that always my goal in healing – to be the best person I can, to learn to separate my triggers from my reality, to welcome love and kindness back into my life?

And I did that. And the second I realized my past identity of “one who suffers” was no longer attributed to me, I became defensive.

Obviously, that moment got me thinking.

Why do I have an attachment to that story? Why do I feel the need to prove that I have suffered? Beyond the lessons still available for me to learn from my past, what value does the past have for me?

Do people need to know I’ve suffered and overcome in order to respect and value my person?

No. Absolutely not.

Isn’t it such a beautiful, ironic thing? I have lived and bled and sewn myself back up and got upset no one was able to detect the blood I’d spent so long scrubbing and bleaching? It lives on only in me. Which is to say, it gets put to rest the second I decide to hold a funeral for it.

It doesn’t have to be this blinding light of a memory in front of me. It doesn’t have to be anything other than what I allow it to be.

Which caused an even deeper reflection: my attachment to my story of my past creates emotional unavailability in me.

I insisted on healing alone. Due to the circumstances I was healing from, I believed other people to be judgmental, untrusting, and cruel. This friend didn’t know I had anything to heal from because I never gave her the chance to help me heal. Whenever a trigger arose, I locked myself into my own little bubble, cried alone, dried my tears alone, and re-emerged after the moment passed.

As much as I might understand myself, I have almost never given anyone else the chance to do the same. Sure, I write online, but it’s different, isn’t it? I give you the chance to know me selectively, sharing only what I am no longer ashamed to put words to. As much as any of my readers might understand my inner world better than the people in my life, that’s not the same thing as being seen for all that I am.

This detection of possible emotional unavailability was recently confirmed to me. The universe always reflects to us what we’re putting out there, right?

The Mirror of Emotional Unavailability.

This week, I went on a first date. And I liked him enough, but the red flags were blatant, all of them boiling down to one singular truth: he was not emotionally available. If anything were to happen, it would be surface-level and shallow, and likely, toxic.

That wasn’t the energy I wanted to welcome into my life, so I cut it off. It was a huge bummer, not because I was attached to this new guy, but because it made me reflect on my romantic pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable men.

What does that say about me?

That I, too, am emotionally unavailable.

Which, for the record, is not to say that I am unfeeling, but rather that I experience a great deal of fear whenever anyone gets too close. I have strong limits around what I’m willing to welcome into my inner world, and whenever someone gets too close, I push them away. I badly want to be seen and loved, and also, a part of me is still determined that being seen and loved is a threat of potential death.

Death of what?

Perhaps losing myself and my connection to who I am. That, perhaps, in the process of translating what I know and feel, I will encounter judgments and expectations that I must change who I am, how I see the world, and how I feel in order to keep being seen. I have found that being seen, when done right, is like a drug, but once that second punch, the judgment, begins to hit, it is the scariest experience available.

How can you know if opening yourself up to someone will result in the expectation of change?

You can’t.

It’s a risk you have to take every time you try to open up. Emotional availability isn’t about being perfectly healed but rather about being willing to say, “This is where I am at right now.” What people do with that is up to them.

And whether I like it or not, this is a risk I have to start taking, because I can’t sit here and say I want a better support system while simultaneously refusing to change. Change is always internal, which means my ability to let people in has to start with me – there’s not going to be a knight in shining armor who shows up and does everything right and convinces me that opening myself up is the right move.

No, it’s much messier than that. It’ll be like learning to dance – sharing small parts, seeing how it goes, and deciding whether or not to continue with that specific person. It means paying attention to how people respond to me, forgiving them for whatever depth they refuse to meet me at, and letting go of the expectation of the emotional supply they’ll be able to give me.

So, for the record, that has been a lesson I’ve been working on integrating quickly.

I’ve been trying to learn a simple two-step version of this dance. I’ve said, in the past week, “I’m not enjoying that, please stop,” or, “I am feeling left out right now,” or, “I’d prefer not to be gossiping about people I don’t know.” And you know what? I’ve gotten mixed results.

Some people are emotionally safe, and some connections aren’t meant to have emotional bonds in them. And that’s fine. The friend I joke around with can just be the friend I joke around with, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t emotional connection available to me right now.

The First Graceful Step

So, when a friend did something to annoy me, I said exactly how I was feeling, in all of its ungraceful glory, even though I began to cry, and even though I assumed he wouldn’t be able to understand.

And you know what happened?

He sat down with me. We talked it out. For hours. I cried over and over again. I offered my heart to him, and he handled it delicately and kindly. He didn’t ask me to change, and he didn’t try to judge whether or not my reaction was valid – he just attempted to help me realize that the reaction in itself was understandable.

Now there is someone who knows me just a bit better, and even though I’ve spent the past few days trying to dance and stepping on a ton of toes, I finally landed one graceful step.

Isn’t it beautiful?

It’s not about being perfect from the get-go. It’s about being brave enough to face what I don’t like about myself and being willing to try to do better. I don’t have to force anyone to be anything other than what they are, but I can do what I can to try to find what I need from what is available to me.

Now, I feel like I’m in this frustrating limbo state. I no longer identify with who I was, but I have to figure out what functional identity comes next. I don’t know what I want to want next, and all I can do right now is free-fall.

Writing Into The Void

Why am I sharing all of this with you?

Quite honestly, because I can. And because I hope it’ll help at least one of you.

I’m not perfect. I am also constantly learning and growing, and as much as I try to put my best foot forward here, I don’t want you to see me as someone who knows all the right steps to every single dance. I am just as flawed and complicated as you are. But the biggest difference between the person I was five years ago and the person I am now is the way I think about myself, and the growth journey, which can best be summarized by: everything is fucked and the chance to keep growing and trying is the most sublimely beautiful blessing in this lifetime.

I am not perfect, and I never will be, but there is so much unexpected beauty to be found in the process of slowly becoming 1% better over and over again.

To be frank with you, I have no idea what I’m doing here career-wise. I don’t know what to write about or what to focus on, or how to maintain a balance of vulnerability and utility. Honestly, I have been feeling like I’m writing into a void.

I love writing, but with the loudness of my life, I have felt disconnected from it.

That’s an emotional mess I’m still working on leading with gracefully. It makes sense, since I write so much about the very internal conflicts I’m leading with right now, but I suppose I feel, on some level, that I am failing at some inner goal I’m not even aware I have.

But anyway, all I can do is trust the fall, right?

The answers will come when they’re ready to come.