January is full of such promise and yet I cannot find my way out of this undertow I’m stuck in. I cannot seem to catch my breath. When I manage sleep all I see are moments of the last 6 months and how my life has spiraled so far out of control. Every right thing decision that I made seemed to play its part and I knew it as it was happening. I actually lived a moment where I knew that my life would never be the same and that it was the beginning of the end. For awhile I convinced myself that it was an irrational fear nagging me, but I knew it wasn’t.

The amount of things I have had to attempt to process through over the past 6 months is more than my 30+ years before it. I have no idea how to be anymore, how to be today, how to be in this moment. I am beyond overwhelmed and truly do not know how to go on. A well-meaning friend says “this is when you rely on your family.” Another chimes in “Don’t be afraid to ask for help, love, support, hugs, whatever.” It’s amazing how simple things seem from the outside looking in. The translation of both of those things is “surely you have family like I do.” I don’t. and “just not from me, I’m busy with my husband and children right now.” Ouch. And call me crazy, but should someone (especially when they are already broken) really have to ask for those things? Since when did love stop being a verb?

Just when my eyes have all but swollen shut and it feels my heart is drained dry of tears, more flood to the surface.

I was called out, about a month ago, for being kind of a crappy person. It was said that I do things for others and create a place in their lives where people will need me so that I have people. It makes sense to me, though I’d never realized I did that before that conversation. I love in the way I want to be loved so I have tried to make myself valuable to the people who have had immense value to me. Apparently I’ve gone about it all wrong… It’s true though. Over the weeks since, I’ve thought a lot about the most important relationships in my life and in them I tend to make the majority of the effort. It’s a pattern I guess I created. This sums up my marriage, family and many close friendships. I can’t blame others for what I created, so instead I’ve stopped really making an effort and it’s not at all strange what has transpired… Nothing. If people need me, they rise up. If they don’t, I pretty much don’t exist. While this isn’t true for EVERY ONE, it’s the majority and again I can only blame myself.

I don’t know how to do today.

I have been going along forever really, handling everything on my own to ensure that I had a marriage, a family and a life to grow old in. Now I see that most of them were delusions… But still I wonder, which hurt less? The sitting in a Christmas Eve service with a husband a million miles away in his mind and a daughter who hates you, or sitting in a Christmas Eve service completely alone? The first hurts less, the latter is hell. I wish I had known that before hand. I feel like I’m feeling that a lot lately. There is comfort in the delusion.

I was called out by another friend, just the other day, about how she is alone too, and it sucks and basically welcome to her world. I totally deserved it. I wasn’t intending to minimize her situation as much as attempting clumsily to process mine. But it really is as simply as the first friend pointed out, I needed people to need me so that I felt value and worth because otherwise no one found me that way. People are great with the lip service and reassurances to the contrary but I’ve always valued the actions of others above their words and seldom do they align. I did it to myself.

When your life’s biggest fear- which is that if you stop pouring into the people you love, you will be disposable- comes true, then what?

I don’t know how to do today, but I don’t really have a choice.