Divorcing Expectation

This Monday finds me where most Mondays find me...exhausted, worn out, spent, sick, overwhelmed and all together disgruntled. Fortunately, I've hit my max. I'm so sick of being in this state of perpetual victim-hood. It's like life is just something that continues to happen to me, turning me into nothing more than a ping-pong ball bouncing from reaction to reaction. All the mental coaching in the world isn't flipping the switch this time. Purpose, positivity, resolution, all very lost concepts my sick soul can't seem to grasp. And then I realized that is precisely why. My soul is sick. This goes so far beyond my physical ailments. This is me at my essence, at my core. I'm lost.

Somewhere along the way I started seeking approval again. In my world, that's the quickest slide down the rabbit hole. For I don't know one single person, save for my husband who has been by my side watching the entire thing unfold, who approves of my life. After exposing myself, during one of my weakest lows in recent history, to the endless expectations, opinions, judgments and criticisms of how I should be living differently, I'm a woman about ready to pull her hair out. Yank out my fingernails with pliers. Anything to distract myself from the bevy of disapproval I've opened myself up to, and for some sick reason, taken as truth.

I'm an island into myself. My happiness and success is my responsibility. Nobody else is going to fix my life, tell me it's okay, guide me down the path of least resistance. It's all on me, which can be a very overwhelming and isolating feeling, if that's how one decides to perceive it. The anger over such a harsh reality put me in one hell of a tailspin for a long, long time. But in the midst of all this tumultuous living I forgot I wasn't alone. I forgot my faith in God offers me the unconditional love and support of a mother, father, best friend and supreme confidant, all in one. I forgot I don't have to bear the burden of my trials alone. It's still my job, to find a way to live successfully given all my limitations, but I have not been abandoned. I am never alone. 

I must reframe my own expectations, while at the same time releasing the need for approval from others. I will never live up to what the world collectively wants from me. Many people spend their entire lives trying, running against time, racing to satiate the opposing interests in their life. It's certainly how I lived before I got sick, and still after all these years the default behavior I revert to when times are toughest. But I just can't do it anymore. Simply trying makes me a very sick woman. It's just the way it is. So with a lightness in my spirit I didn't have when I sat down to pen this revelation, I'm divorcing the controlling, passive-aggressive, harsh and unrelenting presumption others place on me. If everyone else wants to spend their life in that cesspool of disappointment, go for it. But as for me, I'm done. It's a beautiful day out, and I've got a life to try and figure out how to live. 

Thanks for joining,
Leah      

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back In The Saddle

Image
Well I got back on the horse. What else am I going to do? Take a long walk off a short pier or go play in traffic? So here I sit ready to try again. Raw, insecure and uncertain, but here I am. As I sort through the disillusionment in my mind I realize many of the sanity-saving tools I employed along the way got dropped in the dust a while back. I fell into my old behavior patterns. I allowed negativity and demands to infiltrate my sense of responsibility to myself. It's a big job, to regain my lost ground. I can do it, though. Not all at once, perfectly or on the first try, but it can be done. Of course this requires a significant amount of isolation and reflection. Accepting some will grumble over the selfish action of me taking care of me. Realizing that is not my problem. In fact, expecting myself to get a handle on my issues and then resume a level of interdependent living is exactly why I wound up back here in the first place.  I have finally accepted I cannot go back....
Read more

Waiting On the World to Care

Image
This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months. As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I...
Read more

Incurable Fog

Image
One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...
Read more