LONELY HEART

Have you ever felt lonely? Loneliness is defined as a distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one's social needs are not being met. Loneliness is more than just being alone, it is a complex state of mind that impact your health. Although it is often defined as solitude or being alone, loneliness is truly a state of mind. It can lead to feelings of being unwanted or emptiness. Many people that are lonely yearns for some type of connection. They are badly looking for someone to talk to. They feel that they are the only person that exists in this heartless and careless world.

Loneliness is not just a word, it is an EMOTION. We as humans was made to be able to touch and communicate with other humans. We were wired to be in a relationship and when we have been deprived of that, loneliness becomes deprivation. Living a life as a human comes with a sense of craving closeness, sharing, joy, touching and intimate nonverbal connections. Some people are awaiting their superhero to come and save them from their misery of being lonely.

When some people say that they are lonely, what they really mean is that they need someone to appreciate them, to live life with them, to enjoy the happy moments that they share. Even to share their sorrowful moments.

Let me be perfectly honest with you, have you ever heard of a "lonely heart?" MMM, I think this is what I am suffering from. Some people would call it the "broken heart syndrome."

Whatever I am going through, it is my reality. If you could just enter into my mind, you would find that my mind has been spinning and spinning, over and over again. My life is the opposite of quietness and unhurried calmness. There you will see that my life has been through a hurricane and yet I am thinking that I had made it to still waters. You know still waters run deep.

You see, with some people, what you see on the surface, isn't what meets the eye. Usually there is more going on than you could ever know or understand. Sometimes, things that appear normal aren't actually the way you envision it, rather, something more deeper and darker is being hidden. For simplicity, that person is hiding something, maybe for protection or naiveness. This is me. I am trying to act like my normal self, but inwardly, I cannot describe the pain that I am feeling.

I am experiencing a crushing loneliness. It is real and I experience it every day. I am trying to fix it. Being alone hurts. I think it hurts because it lays me bare. There is me, and there is nothing to buffer me from all the things that hurts, that is lodged somewhere inside of me.

Do you know what being alone feels like? It feels like a black hole is opening up beneath me and I am about to fall right through it. This is what the world does for me. It distracts me from that falling through sensation. It distracts me from myself.

Let me talk to you, soul to soul, about the one thing that has been quietly destroying my peace. I cannot rewrite my pass and I have my way of trying to heal. I realized my pain is deeper than I thought and rawer than that. I have been brave enough to try to get through it, but this pain has absolutely been transforming inside me. I am beginning to realized that I cannot solve all of the levels of my problems with the same level of consciousness that created them, because tactics are temporary but an expansion of consciousness is permanent.

My loneliness has allowed me to try to unravel me. Slowly, it tries to pull the rug from under me. I feel a thought, and this thought begins as neutral, almost like a visitor knocking at my door. I know that I cannot allow that thought, which is a visitor, to move in, because if I do, it will redecorate my life and will start running my life. A thought on its own, is okay, but once you give it free reign, it will begin to start overthinking, and have me judging myself, and this will cause me to start spiraling into the worst-case scenarios.

My loneliness has me just going through the the motions of life, and I am not living it. There is a quiet realization that sits at my heart, that my old life with Claude is over. My life with Claude, was my first life. Now I must start living my second life. I am simply exhausted by a life that no longer feels like mine. I have become trapped in routines, obligations, and expectations that is so gradual, that I barely remember choosing them.

I know that I need to kicked loneliness out of my head and my heart. I shouldn't allow it to take up permanent residence. To evict loneliness should be simple, but perhaps the simplicity is part of the problem. Sometimes we tend to imagine that changing our lives requires something enormous. I have thought about moving to a new city. I have already changed careers. Maybe a dramatic decision will divide everything into my life as before and after.

Sometimes loneliness begins much more quietly. Then you start noticing that something is draining you. I sometimes asks myself, "when was the last time you did something simply because it made you feel alive?" I have realized that I postpone those things that I desire to do. Why? I don’t know why. But I realized, when I say later, when I really mean, is never. When I say someday, when I really mean, I'm afraid. I think that I must wait for the perfect moment, the right circumstances, the right season, but I never give myself permission to do what I need to do for myself. Meanwhile, life just keeps moving on.

I am learning to be alone, one day at a time. At first, loneliness felt like something was gnawing at me, like I needed peace. Then there are times I feel like I need to call someone, anyone. Somebody, please save me! Some people just doesn't understand about my pain, and my feelings are not fake. This pain that I am carrying is almost, always the second arrow, the one I fired at myself after life already threw the first one at me. Life shot the first arrow, which resulted in pain, loss, and misery, but mentally, the second arrow, I have inflicted on myself, and this was optional. That word, optional, restructured something in me. This suffering I have been carrying feels like a very heavy piece of luggage. Some of the stuff in this luggage was mine to carry, but a lot of it, I picked up voluntarily along the way. When I am going to learn to put this luggage down?

My feelings have made me feel like that l am living in my house and I have just discovered there are rooms that I never knew existed. I have come to realize that I am not the voice in my head. I am the awareness behind it, the one watching, the one who can observe the chaos without being consumed by it. The moment when loneliness makes me notice that I am thinking about it, even before I question those thoughts, I must allow myself to be aware, to not get caught up with those negative thoughts, because those thoughts will make me cry and feel sad.

Sometimes with the sadness comes a pity party, because so many of us have spent many years of believing we are the anxiety, we are the self-doubt, we are the worst thought we ever had about ourselves. But we are none of those things, but we somehow feel the blame. What we call our reality, is almost, always a filter, that is a heavily edited version of actual events, processed through layers of past wounds, assumptions, and fear.

Loneliness will have you self-doubting yourself. Your thoughts will turned into your enemy, and you have to understand how suffering can come from believing the wrong story about yourself. When you allow loneliness to sit at your table, you start creating self imposing limitations, by telling yourself that you are not disciplined enough, you are not smart enough, you are not lovable enough. These labels are self-created, and most importantly, absolutely untrue.

Beneath all the encouragements I received from myself and others, there is a serious reminder that there is no guarantee that the person I keep promising myself that I want to become, is waiting somewhere in my future. In reality, I know that there is only one person, and that person is who I am today.

I kind of realized that I have placed myself in a prison. This prison that I am in, I have been trying to escape, but it never had a lock on it from the outside. The door was always opened. I just believed the story that said that the door was sealed shut. But the door was always opened. The one that who has sat in that same prison, can truly find they way out, and that person is me.

There is a lesson in this for me. I am here asking myself, "When was the last time I felt the most alive, the most joy, the most loved?" The answer is, when I didn't allow loneliness to conquer me. Realization has opened my eyes to see that loneliness is robbing me of the presence and my happiness.

I need to stop loneliness from hindering me from moving forward with my life. I need to make my choices with the time that I have left. My second life may not require me to abandon my old self. Perhaps it will begin the moment when I can look at my ordinary life and finally ask myself, with complete honesty: "Is this the life I am choosing, or simply the life that I have become accustomed to living?"

Sometimes one honest question is enough to open a door that I had forgotten was there.