Big, fat, open wound.

I have a big, glaring problem with loneliness. I hate it. I think that I shouldn't have to go through it, that no one else is experiencing it. I think that men should just fall in love with me and when they don't, repeatedly, I feel disgustingly, horribly, painfully alone. I feel alone in the experience, I feel alone for not 'having someone', I feel alone for not being doted on.

And I let this loneliness, or this deep fear whose origins I can't quite put my finger on, swim up around my heart and my head. I let it clench my chest like a belt pulling tighter and tighter. I let it make me cry enormous quantities of tears. I let it overwhelm my thoughts with this stupid idea that by not 'having someone', whoever that someone is meant to be, I am devalued. I am embarrassing, and awkward, and I think that being nearly 20 and a half and single is something to be quite deeply ashamed of.

I have this idea of what it is I am missing out on, what I think literally everyone else on the planet is experiencing. I have this idea but I don't actually know what it is.

There's this huge open wound that I have neglected and I keep thinking that someone else is going to come and fix it and heal it but they're not. They can't. It is my wound and 'having someone' is only going to make it worse.

Sometimes I feel like people in relationships have done something right and I haven't. Like they've been rewarded with an entire person for themselves. Like they must be happier than me, and less lonely. Sometimes I actually think that even if I go through a relationship that is not equal and in love and playing out its natural lifetime that as long as it lasted more than a month or two I will have gained something. I won't be so ashamed. I won't feel so lonely.

With these thoughts I not only devalue myself but every relationship I have ever had and still have. I mean flings and heartbreaks, and I mean family and friendships. I devalue every connection with another human being; everything they felt for me whether it was romantic or platonic love, admiration or desire.

I am writing this because I am so angry. I am so angry that I feel like this, that I keep this thought going round and round in my head to the point where it just becomes "I hate you, and you do not deserve love.". I am writing this and making it public because I need to expel this dark, negative, corrosive feeling. I need to get up and look directly into the heart of my own weakness, that big open wound, and I need to let it heal.

I need to stand alone. Away from other people's lives that I keep comparing my own to, away from social ideals I think I should have conformed to or achieved by now. And I need to say, over and over again, "I love you, and you are loved, and you can only ever be loved more not less."

I'll be okay.

On Tuesday night I went back through old blog posts, mostly from the past year. I forgot that I would find it a difficult process, that it would upset me, but I carried on with it anyway.

It's an odd thing to revisit feelings you publicly articulated in a way that was not too personal but personal enough. Reading some of the posts made me sad because I had been sad for a large part of last year. I noticed patterns in my writing such as always telling the reader, but mostly myself, that it was all going to be okay in the concluding paragraph. I knew that I was writing those posts, exposing such a deep and unsettling emotion, because I was going to be okay.

I felt so sad re-reading my own writing because I felt so far away from the girl saying all those things. It's a good thing that I no longer resonate with that feeling, that it has become something distant, but I forgot how lost I was. I had an overwhelming desire to tell this girl, who had written all these sad things, that she really definitely was going to be okay. It would not last as long as she thought it would (it felt like it would never end), and it would not get the better of her.

In wanting to reach back to myself and show her how I feel now I know that I will never be her again. I know that I will feel sad, deeply and painfully sad, and maybe I'll write about it here, but I will never feel so trapped and so endlessly low.

Because it ends, I know that it ends. And I can come back here, to this place where I'm sharing a lot of the things going round in my head, and I can remind myself that I did it, that I'll do it again, that it won't last. And that I'll be okay.

Existing.

I didn’t delete blog posts until recently. In fact, I’ve only done it once. Most of the time I am quite comfortable with writing something very personal and posting it on the Internet. If it’s something I’d be happy telling a person I’ve just met I know that I’ll be happy sharing it with whoever cares. But there is a line, it’s a deeply personal line in my head, and I know that I’ve crossed it when I keep cringing as if I’ve told someone an embarrassing secret. Not just someone, anyone with a WiFi connection. 

I think a lot about whether I share too much on my blog. I pride myself on always being my authentic self but I sometimes wonder if by constantly publicly writing about it I lose a bit of it to a virtual space. Or to people who aren’t listening. Because I am wanting people to listen.

Does it matter who you are saying something to or is it just the fact that you are saying it at all that counts? 

I guess it all just comes down to existing. To wanting to prove that you existed as much as you can. To leave footprints with words and feelings on the people you encounter, and expanding it out to people you never will. Do those people really care? Will they really remember? 

I think of people I look up to whom I will never meet because they are too famous or too famous and dead and I think of the impact they have made on me. I have pictures of Audrey Hepburn all over my room, and I declared an undying love for Regina Spektor at the age of 12 which is yet to die out. And they have shaped me, in small ways, and they have influenced how I think or behave or look. I was never alive at the same time as Audrey Hepburn but whatever she left behind still reached me, I still benefit from what she did with her life. 

I think about books I’ve read when I’ve felt scared or sad or lonely, or films that have helped me escape, or music I’ve felt inspired by and I realise that even if I never meet or know the person or people behind those things they still reached me. They still made an impact. They still made me feel less alone, less fearful, less weird. 

If I can do that on a much smaller scale, help someone, make someone think, then I know that my oversharing is worth it. I know that my being completely honest and open is good for me and maybe for someone else. And maybe I won’t just fade, and someone will know that I existed. 

Coward.

Last night I found myself standing on a stage in front of about 100 people completely butchering my lines. No one really noticed apart from the director and my cast members, and even then they weren't sure because, God knows how, I kept in character.

I only realised that I was getting things really wrong when I looked up at my poor cast-mate's embarrassed face as I repeated words twice and didn't make any sense. She has countless more lines to remember than I do and never butchers them, I had one monologue and was messing it up.

I knew immediately that I had let myself down through lack of focus. I had let myself go into autopilot and forgotten to be in the moment. I could have told you it was going to happen before I got on stage when I was silently panicking that the emotion I had brought to focus the night before wasn't there. And I could have done a lot more to stop my mind from wandering but I got so caught up in feeling scared and believing, before it had happened, that I was going to mess up my performance that I did.

I keep doing that a lot in various parts of my life recently. Believing that I can't do something and subsequently not being able to do it. Paradoxically I know that I can do whatever it is I'm trying to do, and that I have the potential to do it really well, but it's almost like I self-sabotage as if to prove myself right, or wrong, depending which way you look at it. Perhaps I do this as an excuse not to do things that scare me, or in an attempt to avoid failure. Perhaps I'm just being a coward. Perhaps I just need to stop pretending that I don't believe in myself.