I’m feeling super super emotional lately. I’m getting my period, and that is a factor in things, but I also feel frustrated with life. Maybe it’s the loads of therapy I’m doing. I’m caught in the middle of what seems to be a never ending excavation process, trying to heal what has been buried for so long.
Rejection. What an interesting life experience. I think you can divide life into 2 buckets, one is acceptance and the other is rejection. Your life experiences with the 2 buckets can greatly impact outlook. Let me explain. Let’s say you grew up in a safe and loving home environment where your needs were met and the opportunity to self actualize was present. Your acceptance bucket is likely to be full. You felt valued, which in turn spurns feelings of abundance. This inspires growth and expansion. You can be anything you want, you can do anything you want, because the world is your oyster.
The rejection bucket is the other side of the coin. Let’s say your upbringing was rough, with absent and neglectful parents. This neglect, especially as a child, amplifies feelings of low self worth and of being an irrelevant person. As you grow and the tides of life bring in experiences, some negative, your sense of value can continue to decline. Rejection has embedded itself as a core identity, and every negative experience lands a little harder, mirroring a warped truth back to you. There’s a permanent ceiling on how far you can go, how much you can have.
I’m aware my life existed in two distinct phases, one was the acceptance phase, and the other was the rejection phase. My rejection phase was aggressive and dismantled me as quickly as possible. It was like the scene in Cinderella when she is dressed up to go to the ball and the stepsisters get jealous and rip her dress to shreds. I feel like young adulthood unraveled that way for me. Someone excited to live life, and then ungodly hands tore it down in every way possible.
There’s been something strangely dogged in me through all that, like a creature with a missing leg, I’ve kept limping through life waiting to become whole again. I still keep getting hit with rejection, with things not working out, and my confidence quickly falters. I feel like I am not meant to have. The thought is thick and heavy in my mind. I can lay in bed at night and linger in a never ending sensation of loss until I snap my brain out of it and send my thoughts on another track.
Life carries on, we grow and evolve. But it’s always uncanny to look back and mourn what the child in us is still holding onto.
a soft death 