When the disease tugs, it tugs hard. It’s cunning and it’s baffling and it’s subtle. It whispers and then it works its way into the crevices and the cracks you didn’t notice were still open and available to being worked.
Then slowly it chokes. It seems like overnight, but it isn’t if you look back and take honest stock. False evidence appearing real is no joke. Fear disguises itself as truth and has a way of convincing you there is no other way. It has a way of working you to a place that you turn to it for resolution instead of your center that enabled you to learn it was false in the first place.
It’s haunting. And it’s been happening to me without me realizing. It has pulled me away from people close to me and it has told me things that I haven’t believed in a long time. It has told me that it is you, and not me. It has told me that you don’t think I’m special, that you don’t think I’m sexy, that you don’t love (want) me or find me worthy. It has been so busy pointing fingers that I hadn’t even realized that there were still three pointing back at me.
It has told me that I don’t deserve the good that I have attracted. It has told me that I am not worth the health that I hold. It has told me that I can’t move beyond the old stories that have bound me for much of my life and that I’ll be void without them. It has told me that I am alone and that I should be afraid.
It has narrowed my experience and solicited trivial bullshit. It has picked on and isolated variables that don’t have anything to do with joy, freedom, peace or sustenance. It has warped my mind into believing that what it was seeing was true, real and fact.
It has stolen from me. Thankfully, I have people in my life that are closer to me and unattached to the false evidence appearing real and can easily hold up the mirror to the falsities screaming when I shine the light one them. I have remained honest and true to my experience and not taken any hostages too violently along the way. I have shared my heart as it was beating while trying to untangle the web that was closing in and because of that am starting to find my way out.
Your inner dialogue is hard. It is enchanting and seductive even when it’s not trying to be. It’ll pitch to your mood at any given moment, seeping into those crevices exposed. The hope is that the inner dialogue can change, and it does when you let it. Even more hopeful is that we don’t have to attach to the things it says or believe them to be true. I have found that I am more likely to attach and believe when I am not close to my tribe, connected to my God or rested in my core. I am more likely to attach when I am in a new place in life and trying to find security in the unknown, which is apparently the place I have been navigating.
I have never been in a long-term relationship without drama. I have never felt unconditionally loved and supported, and I am in that phase of my own journey: learning to unconditionally love and support myself without outsourcing that responsibility to anybody else. It’s hard. Not every day, but on the days that I don’t want to be responsible for my own love and support. It’s hard on the days that I want you to make me feel good, on the days that I want you to make me happy, on the days that I want you to fill me up. And unfortunately for me, that shit is never your responsibility.
It is never your job to make me feel loved. It is never your job to make me feel wanted and sexy. It is never your job to make me whole. That is God’s job, and my own. Sure, I can make that easier or harder by choosing better or worse for myself, but in the end: it’s not yours.
And I hate that. Because right now, I really want it to be yours.