Mar 20
I’ll live… maybe…
This week has been the worst week that i have been able to think of since the week I left theEx and lived in fear of what was going to happen to me and my children, which was blissfully topped off by being fired without cause from the job I loved (and where I had a support network of other people who had gone through the same kind of thing)…
Yeah. I feel like I am in hell this week.
It doesn’t help that I am entirely and utterly ALONE right now. I could use a hug in the worst way, to be touched and held so that I don’t feel like I am completely unlovable.
Right now I feel completely and entirely unlovable and undeserving of ever being loved.
I feel the scars on my soul from my past:
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I feel the pain of disappointing my family by not being what they dreamed their little girl would be
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I feel the pain of the rape I survived
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I feel the bruises of the relationship violence I endured
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I sting from the emotional abuse from past relationships
I know I’m stronger now than I was then. I know that I won’t put up with the words or the deeds of violence anymore, that I will speak out and stand up and defend myself…
But right now I feel very very small and insignificant inside myself. I feel all the nasty words that have been slung at me, all the hurts that have been directed at me for being “inadequate” and right now I feel a bit like I’ve been locked in a dark room with all of this and I don’t have any one who I can reach for to make it all bearable.
And when I feel like this I feel like obviously things work this way because I don’t DESERVE to be loved, and I don’t reach out to anyone because I’m too scared to be rejected when I need love the most.
And so I spiral into the darkness of my soul, alone.
The things going on that are hurting me make me feel unlovable, and when I feel unlovable I do what I did as a small child and I retreat from the people I have disappointed. Hell, if I could I would have stayed home in bed, under my overly warm covers, with the cats who love me (if only because I am the person who can open the catfood container) and just cried and cried this week.
I feel like I have once more failed to live up to some sort of ideal that I didn’t really hold to be true, but that I know was expected of me.
Its what I call the “Post-Christian Guilt”. My grandmother held an ideal of what a “good (christian) girl” was. My mother reinforced it. I lived my life unable to believe the tenets of Christianity, but still wanting to be a “good girl” enough to earn the respect of my family. I married a man who’s father had an even stricter image of a “good woman” which he had passed on down to his sons.
I still feel the guilt when I don’t live up to that ideal, even though that ideal does not fit my image of a “good Pagan girl/woman”…
When I went out and pierced my nose, I felt a HUGE sense of not only relief at having taken back control over my own body. Yes, it was just a TINY green gem, but formerly that would have been a HUGE deal as theEx would have freaked about what XFIL and XMIL would think about me (and by association HIM for “allowing” me to do such a thing) and even more, how that would reflect on him with XFIL’s CHURCH. But even though I felt the relief at having the ability to make these decisions for MYSELF and my body, I also shook with anxiety that I had marked myself as somone who was no longer “good”…
Its the same when I started online dating. I wanted to break out of the image that other people had of me, I wanted to be “fun” instead of “good”… and I was conflicted. I enjoyed meeting a variety of men, but I wasn’t comfortable with the NUMBER I was meeting for coffees or going on dates with. I tried to be light and free and easy. I tried to just experience what came along.
And I am still feeling residual guilt at going outside of the image that everyone else had for me. I am haunted by the berating that I got from the Stalker because I had started dating before he was ready for me to do so and because I dated someone for a few weeks that he did not really think I should be dating. I failed to live up to the ideal that he held of me, and it affected how I looked at myself and my own situation.
I’m not a classical “good girl”… I’m a woman… I’m a human being. I made mistakes, things I have to live with, but I don’t think that I always need to adopt the ideals of what other people think of me as my internal view of myself.
Pam’s Life lessons:
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Guilt is not always productive, but it lets you know when soemthing is wrong.
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Its best to live up to your OWN idea of who you are and what your values and goals are, not what someone else feels you should hold as goals or values.
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Sometimes you don’t see the mistakes until you are further down the road. And then its too late.
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I can live my life alone, with my kids and my cats, if my mistakes have caused me to lose the respect of RGG — I will never again put up with the verbal stings and assaults of a man who feels that I need to be “corrected” and “put in my place” and that he is to decide what that place is. I’d rather be alone the rest of my life than be constantly crapped on for a mistake that I have done my best to learn from
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