Self-Inflicted Solitaire

Self-Inflicted Solitaire

Emptiness lingers on inside,

A constant, unyielding pain,

Competing with despair that thrives

While the blues pour down a drenching rain.

A hollow wind storms in my conscious,

Acutely aware of what never will be,

As troops of sadness methodically marches

Chanting songs of pain and misery.

Loneliness strangles attempts at laughter.

Alienation has given birth to an ache.

Time has been wasted constantly chasing after

Part of a world that threw me away.

Isolation becomes an obligatory guard

When fumbles at acceptance fall short of the need

So that all my tries leave me unwanted and scarred,

And I'm stranded in wounds that endlessly bleed.

Then lessons are learned from trying to belong

To a world so different from my own.

The wounds of rejection keep my cold and withdrawn,

But I'm too hurt to feel anything less than alone.

Metaphor

I am a proofread, amended manuscript.

An altered copy of the undesirable original

where history was unnecessarily edited:

Delete this. Add that.

I was broken down into parts,

each line, each word, each letter

declared this blue-eyed literary initiative all wrong.

The authors claimed I was filled with mistakes:

disconnected, superfluous, unstructured,

fragmented.

Each page was rewritten

until I was nothing but

a collection of multiple revisions,

decidedly unfit for publication.

But authors don't write stories.

Stories write stories.

I am my own story,

my own unfinished truth,

my own work in progress,

my own creative effort.

And in the beauty of our revisions is where our story will be told.

Accepting my Unacceptance

I feel moody.

I feel like nobody likes me.

I feel fat.

I feel ugly.

I feel disgusting.

I feel like saying, ”Physician heal thyself” because I tweet all kinds of positive and inspirational sayings and expressions on Twitter, and I believe them at the time, but later I feel so distant from what I expressed just an hour earlier.

I am having a hard time on this Tuesday, what other people are calling Christmas. It is always hard on Christmas. I would love to give to the littles what we never had. Loving parents. A cozy, safe, decorated house. A house full of gifts and good cheer. A feeling of acceptance. A sense of belonging. 

Acceptance is something I am really struggling with right now. Maybe it stems from a lifetime of trying to be perfect and never feeling like I belong, always wanting others to accept me as some proof that I am normal. Can't I just be normal by my own definitions? Why do I have to rely on others to delineate normalcy for me?

But still I do. If I see others receive attention or friendship without me, I wonder what is wrong with me that I am not included. I feel I am normal for someone with my frame of reference. For what I have been thorough, my actions can be expected. But I long for more, and I quit whatever I am doing when I feel I am not perceived as part of normal.

For example, at work I quit trying to be friends with my colleagues because I sense they feel I am different. So I'm keeping my distance. But in keeping my distance I'm not giving others the chance to find out that my “normal” might be quite good. What I am doing instead is leaving others before they can leave me.

And while I know that is what I'm doing, I don't know if it will change. I've been judged too much in my life to hang around and be tolerant of others continuing to tell me I'm different. And, also, while different can be good, people don't want to stick around long enough to find out.

But then I think on what Theodore Roosevelt said: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”

I am a fighter. I do not lay down for anyone. If I have to keep failing at friendship and acceptance, then so be it. But . . . just maybe . . . there is one person who can accept us for who we are and what we can offer. I hope it's worth all the pain to finding out.

I'm over this.

(This post was written in partial protest by members with differing opinions.) That's normal? Right? :-)