Confessions of a lost soul

I haven't written in weeks but something compelled me to write some of my confessions. It doesn't even scratch the surface but here is where I begin.

There is so much history here. The beginning of a level of acceptance that only began with the meeting of two people. One riddled with cancer the other just looking to be accepted. When you marry into a family the hope is that your “in laws” will accept you. That they will welcome you into their family with open arms. The hope is that they will be happy. It isn’t always the outcome because they never were and now even less. However, Kelli welcomed me into her world and with that world came Chippy and Uncle John. Chippy didn’t know what to make of me. My mother-in-law had been so vocal in her seeming disapproval for her daughter making a life with me that Chippy didn’t know what to do but Kelli took the time to get to know me and with that began a beautiful love. Kelli was such a force. She didn’t take any shit from anyone, and when she loved you, she loved you for life. She was able to see the fundamental beauty in people. She had every right to be angry, to hate the cards that had been dealt to her but instead she took life by the balls and lived each moment as it was her last because for her at any moment could be her last. I wonder what she would say if she knew that I had not kept to my commitments that she had fought so hard to foster.

In so much of life we don’t know what will be the last of something. We wake up every day and we go about our lives without a care in the world and we just live. We go to work, school, spend time with friends and everything else in between and we take full advantage of this life that we have been given and we don’t think of the possibility that it could be the last moment we have of something. I have not valued life the way that I used too. I have taken advantage of the people around me, the resources provided to me, and I am ashamed.

I have not been a good person recently. I have been selfish, insensitive, self-centered, selfish, arrogant, and so many words that I can’t even begin to use to describe myself. None of that matters because there is no room for self- deprecation but what I have realized is that no matter how much you pretend, life has a way of smacking you in the face and making you realize that life has no room for frauds. Life always finds a way of leveling shit up for you. Life leveled shit up for me this last week. Even in such times of scarcity I have been blessed with abundance. I have placed so much pressure on myself to be “somebody” that I began feeling even more and more like a failure. And while I am all about a healthy level of dissatisfaction as a means to motivate, feeling like a complete failure is a lot different than simply trying and failing. I am not a failure; I am not a loser, but I am feeling really lost and I need to find my way back. Back to what is the question. What I had once created to be my home base no longer exists and what I had hoped to create now, no longer exists. The last of so much and all because I made horrible choices.

I have some horrible confessions to make. Ones that I don’t know if I can take them back. I know the damage is done and that I have exhausted all possibility of anything good coming of all the damage I have left in my wake. I have not taken full responsibility for my actions. I have chosen gaslighting and manipulation rather than taking the time to acknowledge the experience of others and letting them have their feelings for as long as they needed since I was the one that did the hurting. I chose defensiveness and self-loathing rather than owning it in a loving way, that would have allowed trust to be rebuilt.

I broke trust and I didn’t choose radical transparency. The level of transparency that was required would have helped to repair what I had broken but instead I continued to create situations that I couldn’t get myself out of that continued to create mistrust until there was nothing there. Until the only choice left was to leave. I have no one to blame but myself.

I have dysfunctional behaviors that are destructive to myself and others. I choose defensiveness, poor communication, and ultimately lacking at times emotional intelligence. I have a ton of room for growth and while I have come a long way, I don’t think that I have come far enough. I am an adult and I have been acting like a complete child. I have chosen reliance on others rather than self-reliance. I have played the victim rather than reach out to my community of friends for support. I have not done what’s in anyone’s best interest regardless of what story I may have told. What I should have done is create a truly open channel of communication and what I did instead was choose silence. I chose dishonesty and silence to avoid conflict and all I did was create what at this time seems like irreparable permanent damage.

In my pursuit for comfort, I lived the last of something and that should never be how one experiences the last of anything based on a slew of choices that are labeled as self-serving and end up hurting those you care about most because you choose yourself rather than choosing the best interest of others. I feel like the sky is falling around me. I feel like I have lost everything that matters to me and rather than distracting myself or numbing myself I am sitting in the absolute misery that I have only myself to blame for. I keep being told that I need to choose happiness. That I need to make choices outside of the ones that I have been making because until I do that there is no way for me to actually be happy. I have literally been insane, doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result. I wonder if I will find the answers, I have been seeking in all my heroes, in myself so that I can finally feel relief from this self-inflicted anguish that I have chosen to live in.