Decrying Gravity

Today in one of my classes, our professor asked us to highlight our "lows and highs" from the past week. Other people listed difficulties finding time for partners, being homesick, difficulty acquiring partners for their lows. I said I do not feel like the person I want to be, and I am struggling to figure out why this is true and how I can change.

I'm twenty five today. And I can read last year's entry and think "I was so much closer then." I have gotten into the field I wanted at the level I wanted it. I transitioned genders. I acquired all kinds of new experiences, some quite good others fundamentally challenging essential parts of my self. And yet I feel further now that where I was.

I feel angry, distant. I feel *alien*. I feel so far away from everyone. At least in the past, I could listen to them, care about them, give them something of myself. But now, I feel as I have given all of myself away. And I have next to nothing left. My empathy is exhausted, my patience is shattered, my hope is modest at best. I used to be able to talk to people and find their pain, find their goodness and love them. Now I am just hard.

The hardness, alone, is stultifying. But there is always the fear that "This Is How It Always Shall Be." That fear that I will never find another S. That she was an opportunity that I failed both for myself and herself. That everything else will be "What Could Have Been" and "What Will Not Be."

But even as I write this, I feel resistance. I know that people change (I perhaps moreso than many). I know that I have much to feel positive about, much more than I've had before (aside from S). I can feel a voice inside me fighting, relentlessly, and it is a welcome change to find that it is not only the negative voice which dominates the conversation of my self any more. I am hurt. I will always be hurt. But, with enough work and time, I hope (if not believe) that I can get perpetually closer to who I need to be. Perfecting, not perfection.

Perhaps I have gone backwards. Or perhaps it's just one more detour that will make the rest of the journey all the richer. Let me know how that works out, future self.

I am angry. I am so angry. At nothing at everything. I really think I was better, once. I know I was better. I empathized more, cared more. I held others in positive regard. But now? Now I'm just bitter. I look around me and find a sea of incomprehension. And the one person who "got it," who got *me* cut me out of her life for reasons as nebulous as they are unassailable. It is not so much that I lost a love, oh no. It is that I lost a kindred spirit.

Yes, I have someone else who does a great job with what she has. But we have gulfs that cannot be crossed. And I just feel so alone. So alienated from everyone. I want to immerse myself in someone else's suffering so I don't feel so very alone, because I feel so hurt and I just don't feel it from those around me. I need this poison to be siphoned from my psyche, and all I see are blank faces, each another grain of salt. It hurts too much. It hurts too much. I didn't realize how much it hurt, but the more I realize that no, everyone is not suicidal, no, everyone is not terribly depressed, no, the feelings I feel are *different,* the more terrified I am that I am alone and that finding another like me is so far away. So very far away.

Known triggering mechanisms immediately:
1. 5 hours of fretful, stressed sleep (as opposed to my normal 8)
2. New people/social situation
3. Talking about suicide all day with few breaks, thinking of S killing herself unavoidably S killing herself losing losing losing
4. Realizing that everyone else in the training only knows of suicidality incidentally, tangentially. They've not tried, they've not experienced. Where is their suffering? Where is their pain? Why do I feel like the only one in the room feeling?
5. A bit over three weeks since breakup

God. It shouldn't hurt this much. I know it shouldn't.

There's a book I'm reading now which switches POV between characters each chapter. And one of the POVs is that of someone who's been tortured. Not just tortured for a few days, but tortured over many months if not longer, who has had every impulse and sense of identity retrained to be "less than human." He is terrified of everyone who would help him, mistrusting always, compelled to do absolutely anything requested of him because he knows, knows so agonizingly well, what horrors could truly happen to him. He knows pain. Pain which, by its nature, those who have no experienced it can barely even grasp intellectually, much less emotionally. And the worst part of all is that it all just feels so S.

She told me, that last night, that "pain is greater than all." And I didn't dare protest. Because as much as I, as we who have not been so hurt may want to believe we would be different, when hurt enough we will break. And once broken, all we can do is strive to make our miserable existences slightly less so.

She wrote, in her last email, "I have kept asking you to wait while I have yielded to weakness, weakness, weakness." And it broke my heart not just to know that she felt that way, but moreso to learn that I would not get the chance to try to convince her otherwise. That I had waited months, with silence, with doubt, with omnipresent fear, with unquenched need, with utter longing, with broken love, with fickle self-hatred, with with with to finally be able to wrap her in my arms and hold her and let her feel some ounce of safety, some bit of reprieve that surely she deserved that I knew I could give her if only given half the chance, that I had waited so long and come so close only to have, with a few words, us both be dashed.

I am angry, often. Angry at the intangibles, certainly. But angry with her. If I was convinced she was better off without me, I could heal my new hurt with some solace. But instead it all just seems so pointless. I am angry. Because I wanted to love her so very much. Because I knew I was uniquely positioned to do so. And because it all became too much *so close* to realization.

But pain is a marvelous teacher, and I have learned not to want answers. I have learned that sometimes people are hurt and stay hurt for no reason. Nothing preventable, nothing avoidable, it just... happens. And although we perhaps have control over our responses, since we can never be right where another is, judgment is the province of the self alone. Was she right or wrong? That's really for her to decide. And, knowing her, I can pretty well imagine her decision.

It still hurts, of course. I read these chapters in this book and I'm just profoundly struck by a desire to love. Not to save or protect, for I am illfitted for either role (if even any person could fill them). But I so dearly want to love that hurt. To let my faith in the goodness of the wretched permeate through the cracks that are in their armor (despite their beliefs to the contrary), to love and let them finally need and to have that need be answered. I want to love that character. I want to love all who have been hurt so very badly. I want to love S.

And I need to remember that. Because I feel so rough and raw that it is difficult to focus externally. I am almost appalled when I speak to others who don't know what it's like to live in constant fear, with no safety and no saviors, with "need" being so clearly a luxury they cannot afford. And I *know* the other side of this coin, that *I* don't know pain, that *I* am so so fortunate, that *I* am not one to raise my suffering upon any podium and say "the line of legitimacy starts here."

But it's so difficult to do. Because I, in truth, feel as if I love no one. I feel that I cannot need anyone and have them be who I need them to be. I feel so alienated. And even as I like being around people, it is only Sisyphus being excited about reaching the top of the hill, only for inevitability to follow.

I want to need someone. I want someone to love me. Love *me* and *know* precisely the wretchedness they're loving. And I feel that with that foundation, like a spring of cold clear water beneath my craggy surface, I would be overflowing with what I could offer others. And I so do want to love.

Essentially, what this comes down to is "I need to be loved to love." And sans some Galatea, the common sentiment is that I must turn towards Narcissus instead. "Love one's self to love others."

I wonder, after I'm able to woo my heart and win my trust, how long it will take before I too break up with me? Empiricism indeed.