Monilophyte

Okay, okay. I admit that was probably not a helpful image, the one I invoked in my last post. I can see how evoking that situation when I'm trying to unravel my feelings probably isn't going to help me.  Here's a nicer one - a fresh green fern. This could be me - small, hard and tightly wound, about to uncurl gently into a fan of soft fronds. Why not?

However the whole "feelings" business is still making me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I tried to come out of my shell, be more authentically Me, say what I thought, behave in a way that allowed me to be myself rather than someone who other people thought I ought to be. I wanted to get my life back to a place where I did not feel so alienated and detached from it. And now look what's happened. 

I was looking back over this blog and it made me cry. I started writing it five years ago, when I had so much hope that I could make things better for myself, even perhaps by the very act of writing.  It builds early to some touching optimism, then plummets fast to the greyness of depression, interspersed with some desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to talk myself up.  It feels like a catalogue of failure: resolutions not acted upon, plans not delivered, aims not achieved, dreams that turned into a nightmare. 

Are things getting better? 

Well I guess they must be, relatively speaking. This time last year I was approaching a desperate rock-bottom. Now I longer feel that I want to disappear into oblivion. I think I am slowly rediscovering a direction, and formulated a medium-term plan. 

So how do I feel? How do I feel? How do I feel? I'm trying, really I am.  I feel sad that I got married for practical reasons, because my head told me to, even though my heart (and my friends) were screaming that it was a mistake, that I was selling myself short. And I feel angry with myself that I missed my cue to walk out of this particular doll's house when I had an open door three years ago. I feel ashamed that I am not showing my girls by example how to insist that a partner will treat you with consideration, kindness and respect. 

I am not The Very Thing. For anyone. That makes me feel like Nothing.  I want to be loved, and to make someone smile when I walk in the room.  I feel that I'm the inverse of this, that I'm on the flip-side of life. Spreading my misery like a disease to the people I get close to, and being too hard to love.