When You Don’t Know How You Feel You are Like a Plane Without a Destination
Yesterday I wrote a post on Instagram that said “For many adopted people, concealing how you really feel is a survival skill learned early on in the need to attract love. It later can become virtually impossible to name your feelings. How then can you know what you want or need.” The response was thick with me too, and so I thought I’d write some more about this today because feelings are what I’m all about these days.
Since my father died and I become an adoptee without those who adopted her, I have been living a new kind of life. In many ways it’s the same kind of life I’ve been living my whole life, but it’s like before I was trying to run the mile with blinders on, and somehow they have fallen off and I can see things I’ve sensed but never clearly seen.
Such as the fact that this is my body. This is my life. These feelings I have are mine.
Such as the fact that I have many coping mechanisms to help me be anywhere but in my body in the present moment. Money worries is a big one. If I worry about not having enough money, I don’t have to feel what it’s like to be in a body that culture and therefore I do not understand and therefore don’t support. If I didn’t have money to worry about, I’d have to be here, in this moment, alive and undistracted.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
If you learn when you are young that being alive means feeling a yearning that is never satisfied, why would you not become addicted to sugar or caffeine or spending or drugs or alcohol or narcissists or codependency or computer games? Feeling your feelings would be like sticking your finger into an electrical socket or blasting yourself into space on a solo, endless mission. Better not to go there. Better to distract. Anything not to feel what is at the bottom of the kettle of you: the desolation of loss.
We are not meant to journey through life alone. The origin story of Adam and Eve is about two people for a reason. It takes two to tango.
When we watch an award show like the Oscars, we watch person after person thank those who got them on the stage. Someone who thanks no one can appear dangerous and mentally unwell. Houses have foundations. Bert has Ernie. The sky has the ground.
Why would you want to be in the body of a baby without a mother?
Feelings course through our body endlessly through the day: anger, worry, joy, agitation, fatigue, concern, shame, gratitude, pride, determination. We need a mirror to help us see and understand what these feelings are all about. Without that, we’re everything everywhere all at once. Rush rush rush. Feel feel feel with no direction. When we are born and we feel fear, yearning, hunger, and on and on, and if those feelings are not mirrored in ways that feel authentic to our nervous system, do those feelings actually exist? Do we?
If our feelings are not meet and seen in an authentic way, we learn how to survive. We learn to present feelings that can be met in some way. It is better to be seen incorrectly than not to be seen at all, I think is how humans work. I think also this may be why I have spent my life going to doctors at one time or another, saying something is wrong but I don’t know what. My body turns to sickness when it does not feel met. If my joy and sadness are not real in the world, maybe a pain in my liver is. Maybe I can be seen if I am bent over in confusion and pain.
One reason I have decided to pare down so drastically and live in an Airstream for a while is I’m trying to take away as many distractions as I can so I can hear the voice of myself. My body has been speaking to me my whole life, but my mind is the psycho shopper at a Target sale who knows how to push her way into the door first. My mind is so loud and manipulative. It’s trying to keep me alive but it will even tell me that killing myself is a way to protect myself. My body meanwhile is an animal that wants to be held, be fed, be seen, be gentled and loved. My body wants to go for walks. My body wants to be in a loving partnership with all of me because that’s how the sky and the clouds and the sun and the moon work. They don’t hate. They flow.
That’s all for now. I’m going to take Bird to the beach.
