Untamed

Connection.

What is that word?

Why do we crave it so much, and why do we distance ourselves from it?

This post might be a bit rambly today. No notes written, no inspiration… I had nothing prepared. That’s not me.

However, I attended a meeting this morning.. A group of men and women coming together for one purpose. To connect with each other.

I realised I had forgotten how to do that. Yes, I have my main friends and my family, but am I still connected in a way I want to be?  I don’t know?

I know I push myself away from my husband, especially when I feel things are going well. I’ve realised I don’t know how to accept love and to feel like I’m special to someone, so I push them away. I don’t believe them when they tell me they love me and that I’m amazing.

Reflecting on today, and other women’s groups that I have attended, I know I shut myself off from that sort of environment because I feel inadequate. Other ‘enlightened’ women intimidate me. Women who know who they are, can express themselves in the spoken word, know what they want… I find them frightening. So I pull away.

I can share myself easier in the written word. Getting out my feelings on paper means I can show people how I’m feeling but don’t need that awkwardness of being present. They can read it when they are ready and I don’t have to respond.

I guess over the years, I have lost myself. Having kids and I’m pretty sure suffering from postnatal depression but not wanting to admit it (again, fear of failure and being weak), I’ve become someone with no purpose. I often question what the hell I’m doing?  why am I here? what is my role?  

I dislike my job. I crave a job that feels worthwhile.  I want to connect with nature, water, forest, animals and people. I want to bring people into nature and help them find their way if they have been lost.

In the last few weeks, I’ve lost confidence in my writing.  I am doing a poetry course and take constructive criticism too personally and it has made me feel like I want to give up. That I’m not good enough.  I know it’s never going to be a full time career, I’m ok with that. But I want it to mean something to people. I want to encourage them to pick up pen and paper and get creative.

I’ve always thought I wasn’t creative and was jealous of people that could make something out of nothing be it drawing, painting, pottery, music; whatever the creative form.. I was jealous.

The lack of self confidence has made me question who I am and what I stand for. I’m not liking myself at the moment and am now not afraid to admit I have a problem with eating. Disordered eating they call it.  I feel strong when I don’t eat for a few days, like I have power because I can run on nothing.  I feel unattractive, fat, ugly, old.  Turning 40 was a pivotal point in this and I went downhill from there. I’m not ‘young’ anymore and seeing all the beautiful, tanned women with flat stomachs around town has made me feel less of a person, because I am not that. Never was actually. I was always bullied at school for being fat. Always the fat friend on the side and called names. Couldn’t wear what my friends did because I wasn’t the same size as them. And to top it off, my mum was a single parent so money was tight, so I also didn’t have the designer labels that all my friends had. Now I couldn’t care less, but when growing up, that was hard. I was the ‘fat poor one’.

So after a little ramble, what I’m trying to say is we need connection. I know after today, I need to connect with women, whatever state that may be. I crave it. I want that village and I want to belong. I am the same as them, we all have bloody issues. We are no better than one or the other. We need to lift each other up, men and women. Live together in a world where we praise people instead of shutting them down, making them feel unworthy. Men and women can do this together, we don’t have to be separate

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I will embrace those women, I will not feel inadequate.I will stand in my strength next to them and know that we are all here for a reason, whatever that may be.

I need a connection.  I am going to own my feelings and know that whatever I am feeling, it’s right in that moment.