Entitled to be... unhappy?

Oh dear.

I've come to a point where I am facing one of the most inconvenient facts of my intrinsic nature.

I can't accept that I am allowed to have happiness!

I chase happiness away. Quite literally.

"It cannot be!" "It's not meant to be!" "It will never work!" "It's not possible!" "It's all going to work out wrong!" "Not possible! Not possible! Not possible".

I say and do those things a LOT! And I'm only just now hearing myself say them.

I SAY I believe that "Anything is possible". I've said it here in this blog a few times past. I say it but my actions and my own speech belies my statement.

I don't believe "Anything is possible" at all! In fact I believe that "Anything *I* WANT is not possible...everything else is entirely possible for others more worthy than me"

seems to me that I am "happiest" when I know I'm not getting what I want...or what I think I want. I seem to harbour a taste for personal misery and I generally get what I want all to often in that regard.

how screwed is that you reckon? How many other people in this world deny, deny, deny their own desires simply because they were consistently told as children "You are not allowed to have that".

"It is WRONG to want things for yourself".

"It's WRONG to have strong desires ...that's just selfishness"

"It's WRONG to be happy because it hurts others who are not".

"It's WRONG to be your SELF".

"It's WRONG to want to be better off than you are".

"It's WRONG to be greedy and want the best in life".

"It's WRONG TO HAVE ALL THAT!"

Those sentences were never actually spoken to me...but somewhere, somehow in my 46.5 years, I came to adopt them as inevitable truths in my deepest psyche.

As a kid growing up isolated on the farm, being bullied at our tiny primary school, having emotionally distant parents - I retreated inside my head. I was a lonely kid despite having younger siblings but I was lonely even so. I developed the most extraordinary fantasy life inside my head. I dreamed big dreams - big epic romantic dreams of everything that could be possible in my life. I was a star in my own dreams. I was feted and fawned upon by beautiful people. I was a heroine of great skill and prowess. I was the goddess of my dreams. I fought for and won the hearts of beautiful young men who fell at my feet in adoration and lust. I found the buried treasure in the bottoms of lost ships. I was the star and the most beautiful and popular girl in the world.

In my reality, I read voraciously all manner of books - most of them romantic epic tomes of dashing young men and spirited young women who could not be without each other no matter how much they avoided the "truth" of it. I absorbed the fantastic possibility of romance into my character as if it were plasma in my blood, then became a romantic hemophiliac straight away - "bloodletting" seemed so much more dramatic and "fun" to do! It was obvious that my real life world as a child and my fantasy world as a child would never measure together equally and I seem to have developed a habit of believing that solitary, bullied, lonely little girl is never going to have her dreams come true at all...even the realistic ones.

Hence this incredibly soul-destroying confusion and heart-wrenching ache I get now, when I believe I will not ever find - or that I am allowed to find - what it is I'm looking for.

Right now, I am very confused about what it is in life I actually want. Apart from finding work, there is this whole life stretching out before me as a newly single woman and I so do not even know who I really am or if I even like what that person is!

See my language above?

"Cannot" "Will not" "Don't" "Not, Not, Not".

These are my words that I tell myself in everything I think.

"Not possible"

"NOT NOT NOT!"

WHY?

Why do I believe so emphatically in what is NOT possible and make it my truth?

Why must I do this to myself? Why is it that I can't seem to believe in what IS? Right here, right now...finding the positive joy in this moment?

Because my "now" has always seemed so ....bloody disappointing! There is no drama in the now of my being...just life as it is. It's boring; it's mundane. There's no colour or sparkle to it? I'm a unemployed newly separated woman with two teenagers living on a shoe-string budget and relying on the good graces of her family and friends to keep her sustained for the duration! That is my current LIFE!

There's no romance, no love, no living. It's just an empty shell of regrets and heart-break.

Alone.

What kind of "alone"? I am sure my friends would say "You are NOT alone Michelle..you have US". Which would be true of course. And I have my kids and I have my birth family still, my siblings and my parents. And I have my church family I guess... but I still feel alone and I don't know why.

I seem to be always alone...even when surrounded by the most extraordinary love one could hope for and I never see it for what it is because I simply ...am not able to ...or perhaps willing...to see it. My habit of 46 years is to be in total denial of my "now" and see exactly what I don't have instead of what I do.

This must change of course.

Somehow, I have to re-shape a life-times worth of thinking into something more coherent and possible...realistic if you will.

My whole brain just rushed with "HOW? IT'S NOT POSSIBLE" immediately I wrote that line. Am I too scared to be positive? To be genuinely content with the Now of my life?

I have no fucking idea!

All I know is that I am slightly screwed in the head and I am letting life pass me by because I believe I deserve so much less than what I already have.

I don't want to fight anymore with my inner child. That little girl inside of me is a very lost soul in need of a great deal of compassion and love. The grown up Michelle must stop ignoring her and nurture her and help her feel her worth. Its time.

God grant me the SERENITY to love and appreciate the things (and people) given me in the here and now;
To allow the things (and people) I want to come to me freely
To let go of my silly fantasies and illusionary fixations
and give me the grace to have gratitude and joy simply because...it's there already.

Souls broom sweeps the cobwebs out

I'm back.

Life has twisted, turned, twisted again and spun me about like I was clothing in a washing machine!

I have been washed, rinsed ...am still being rinsed...tumbled and am being rinsed yet again!

The stains will take much to get out I guess.

On May 2nd 2008, my eighteen year marriage to a decent man ended - at my bidding.

I chose to leave baz and it has not been an easy choice. I still care about him in many ways but.... yeah....the inevitable "but".

I am not really going to go into much detail about it in this forum, suffice to say that I have much I want to explore on the themes of Love, commitment and marriage as well as that old chestnut "What exactly IS a soul mate?", and everything in between.

Thought has followed me and hounded me with ideas a plenty these past few weeks. Many of them I want to exhume and spin about like plates over my head for all the world to observe and wonder about. There are twice as many more I do not wish for the world to observe and comment on.

Still, dirty laundry aside, I admit to missing this forum for my art (if blogging can be called "art"), very much. Too much in fact. I have craved to spin my thinking here in webs of words. I have craved to have "my audience" reading them! It's a weird kind of spotlight this but no less gratifying than the theater.

My soul is still mourning the loss of that which promised so much! Love's tender threads are truly like webs of the finest spider silk, sometimes though you can get so bound up in them they give you the shivers and you must escape for then you suddenly realise it's not "love" after all, but entrapment.

It hurts to break out of silk cases and spread your own wings even so. And I have large wings that must "feel the cold" for a few minutes of this lifetime before I can fly off to be the butterfly I am meant to be.

:) Someday I might explain that last paragraph in more detail :)

So suffice it to say, I am back doing what I love doing most...writing as the thoughts come to me.... online.... where the world may read them if it so chooses.