Follow Your Truth

Amazingly--amazing to me at least--my plan for self-care seems to actually be working. The last few days I've started to feel much better. More specifically, I feel lighter. Less suffering, less heartache, a whole lot more lightness of spirit. :)

I went with a friend Wednesday night to a meditation and dharma talk at a local, free meditation center. I have virtually no experience with meditation, but am excited to perhaps start exploring. The talk was about desire. I took several interesting points from it:
1) Desire is a natural part of the human condition, so there is no point in feeling guilty simply for having them. On a very basic level, desire is what keeps life going--we desire food, sleep, love, family.
2) Desire takes you out of the moment. Instead of being present, your mind has taken you to an imaginary future place.
3) Sometimes, desire can cause a lot of pain. Desire says, "I am here, but I want to be there," and if there is unattainable, this can be very painful. No point, again, beating yourself up for *having* the desire; instead notice and have compassion for the pain the desire is causing you.
4) When you have strong desires, sit with them and notice them and see what they can tell you.

While this whole talk was going on, I was noticing how I was feeling a lot of pain myself, caused in large part by unfulfilled desires. So after the talk I took some time and, instead of feeling guilty as usual, decided to have compassion for my pain and to try to learn what my desires could tell me.

What I figured out was that behind my immediate desires was a deeper yearning for emotional closeness. But here's the thing: I already have emotional closeness. I have so many wonderful relationships in my life, people I can count on to hear me, support me, love me, who I can be deeply open with. So why is it that I yearn so painfully for something I already have?

I realized that I feel lonely. I hadn't been able to put words to this before that moment because whenever my heart started to cry out, it would be cut short with a reminder, Kate, you have so many good, loving people in your life; you are less alone than you've ever been before. My mind said, it doesn't make sense that you would feel lonely, and I never gave my heart to voice its objection to this logic.

But now I realize that I do, in fact, feel lonely. This raises a very interesting question: why do I feel lonely even though I am not alone? I think that this is the answer: I feel lonely independently of whether or not I have lots of friends and love in my life. My loneliness, at least right now, is not a reflection of the actual circumstances of my life, but rather it is a reflection of something internal, something within me.

No amount of love from others can fill this gap. I'm getting so much love right now from the outside, and I feel only marginally, if at all, better. Something in my brain refuses to translate the intellectual knowledge of others' love for me into a deeper, intuitive knowledge that I am loved.

Some part of me, and not a small part, believes that I am unloveable. I have a fear that at any moment, those who love me will finally realize the truth about me, about how "bad" I am (lazy, selfish, incompetent, insufficient, etc. etc.), and they will stop loving me. Because on some level I do not believe that anyone who truly knew me could love me.

In other words, I struggle to accept love from others because I do not know how to love myself. So yes, I am lonely, because there is a deep, gaping, impossible need for love, and no matter how much keeps getting poured in, too much falls right back out. I do need to say: I am so deeply grateful for all the love I am given. I would not have made it this far without all the support I have received from others, and that support continues to play a critical role in my recovery.

Ultimately, though, the solution must be for me to learn to love myself. To somehow come to believe, solidly, confidently, dependably, that I am actually okay.

I do not know how to do this. I know only that I need to do this. This may not be the only thing I need to do, but without it, all my other gains will be ultimately fragile. Because what life can be built upon the treacherous foundation, the wretched pain, of the constant knowledge of one's own inadequacy, unworthiness? I deserve more than this from life.

A good friend suggested that I begin by keeping this thought in my head: "What would my life look like at this very moment if I loved myself?" I like this approach, because to be honest, I do not even know what it looks like to love oneself, to accept oneself, and perhaps it would be helpful to begin creating a vision of what it is I want to achieve.

The other words this friend left me with were this: Follow your truth.

So what does this moment look like in a universe where Kate loves herself? I think that what I am doing here, writing, figuring things out, trying to give myself permission to be kind to myself, I think that is an act of love. And I am feeling...satisfied in a way. The truth that I am following is that I want to think and write and share and learn, and I feel good that I just did this for myself. It's a good first step. :)