If I had to use one word to describe my situation in life, it is this: lonely.
Don't get me wrong, I created this loneliness. I'm not asking anyone to shed a tear. At least, that's the lie I tell to myself. I probably want all the attention and affection in the world, but it all ends up making me feel the one in the wrong or the one with problems. So I keep the loneliness going just so I won't be reminded of how shitty I believe that I am. Not that I'm succeeding very well because I have a partner and two children and my inability to bring joy into our lives is enough to make me feel bad about myself. And even when I loved alone, I did a good job of being unhappy.
Everyone wants to be happy. But I resist it in ways that I haven't even fathomed. And believe me, I've done a lot of therapy. The anxieties continue, and I'm in a long horrible period of panic attacks.
I say that if I didn't have anxiety and panic attacks, I would be so much better. Which is a lie. I would still be just as undefined and unhappy as I am now. Or is it a lie? I don't know really.
The panics seems to have a root in traumatic ear operations that I had when I was young. At least there was this one when I was ten living in outback Australia and they took me and a bunch of Aboriginal children in an ambulance to a hospital some 250km away. They operated one after the other. I was the last. I remember my eyes rolling in their sockets before I passed out. I threw up all the way home lying on the floor. I entered into this in my last therapy session because the panics that stem from driving through bad traffic and feeling stuck seem to bring me back to this situation. I never had so much fear flood my body in a therapist's room. But the wave of panic came when I tried one of those therapy tricks - go there and be with your child. I couldn't do it. I was flooded with anxiety. My therapist asked me, who do you want there with you. "No-one". That was the answer. And yes, it brought tears, but it didn't bring relief. If I did something in my early childhood, it was to decide that no-one will be permitted to be here for me. I was so frightened and so lonely in that hospital surrounded by such impersonalism that I understood just how lonely I was in that place. In this place. In this world.
Was that the beginning of all this? Who knows. I remember loneliness even earlier. I remember Broome, another outback down on the Australian west coast. Every lunch I used to walk alone in one corner of the school where no-one congregated. There was a fence I used to tight-rope along it. Every lunch. It was a mostly Aboriginal school. I had one white friend Scott but he left town.
But to go from loneiness to anxiety is a step. I live with the belief that there is no protection in this world, that no-one will ever look after me if I am sick and that dying is absolute sheer suffering and fear. And I live with the knowledge that I am the one lying on the floor, I'm the one that is sick, I'm the one that is not strong, not brave. I don't look at the world, I just assume that it's perfect and that I am the one suffering. I don't think it's arogance or narcisism, I think that its the pure anger that I am the one who is not good enough, not brave enough, not strong enough. I am the one on the floor. Not them, only me. I am stuck on that belief and I am already a deadly 41.
Was it that hospital visit and the ambulance ride that planted the seed of anxiety? Is the reason important? Probably not. All I know is that I suffer from so much panic at the moment that I start to believe that I'll never get out of this and live a "normal" life like everyone else.
I get into the car to drive home from work and I'm already trembling inside with anticipation of being stuck on a freeway with traffic. I already have the belief that I will not make it. I have made it a thousand times, sometimes easily, sometimes with immense suffering sitting in the car in an off-road frightened that death is coming. Even then, I make it home. But the belief continues.
Anger sits there ready to pounce on who ever tries to belittle the beliefs. So I swear, I don't ever want to live in these stupid over-populated parts of the world. But I keep on doing it of course, probably because I don't want to end up in the isolated dumps of my childhood, probably because I'm afraid to be bored and most probably because my job is the only way I can make money to stay alive. That's the belief anyway. I found one thing I'm good at and I hold onto it with all the benefits and all the stress that it brings into my life. I actually like my job - or at least I think I do, even though it doesn't seem to bring joy to my life. But it sits on two conflicting beliefs. One that I won't make it - I'm actually not good enough. And the other that no-one is going to look after me, so I have to make this work no matter what, accept whatever conditions that come with the job. And maybe even one more, that I'm going to do this alone, I'm not going to let anyone help me because I don't want a reminder of just how inadequate I feel.
That's a lot of survival shit sitting there in my life. A lot of stressful beliefs. A lot of miserableness. And a huge amount of anger that the rest of world is able and well and doesn't care.
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