Helpless and Annoyed by the Wrong Words

Today has been is being one of "those" days.

It is being one of those days on which I have — as I sit and write these words — already written no less than seven perfectly serviceable posts... none of which actually serve as an accurate reflection of my mood.

I laugh a little to myself at the consideration that I call these things "posts," because as much as anything they are journal entries.

Life, or some semblance thereof...

From my vantage point, "posts" cease to be posts and become "journal entries" when you move beyond the point of your words constituting writing for an audience, and instead you are simply writing in hopes that you can get certain troubling or difficult thoughts to percolate into some tangible expression as they dance a mocking tango inside your head.

I know (from often bitter and frustrating experience) that when I have these moments of stuckness I'm also close to some kind of insight or breakthrough. Or I'm close to looking at something that I have perhaps been avoiding because it's either unpleasant or it forces me to face pieces of myself that I'm not necessarily proud of.

Or at peace with.

I sometimes lie to myself and others about being "at peace" with certain things because not being at peace with them — at least outwardly — is so wretchedly exhausting that "not dealing" seems like the prudent course of action. Except it really isn't, is it?

I was thinking about the whole concept of "unpopular opinions," and how we tend to have a fairly well-developed sense of what somebody means when they say they have unpopular opinions, and how we often are completely wrong. @jaynie wrote about unpopular opinions a few days ago... which partly sent things stirring in my own mind.

When we hear unpopular opinions, we often think of this as somebody having some radical viewpoint that's going to outrage us, or not walking with the mainstream, or some other thing that is going to make us feel wildly uncomfortable.

They have been great swaths of my life during which I have felt unpopular, but I held no particularly radical or strong or controversial opinions... I simply experienced being unfathomable to people, and I could sense that they were made uncomfortable by the fact that I didn't fit into any neat little boxes their minds interpreted to be "a human being."

Even those who purported to "understand" me realized — in time — that they didn't actually understand me and I ended up feeling very alone.

I never felt this aloneness as an extension of having some secret self-destructive wish to be alone and to alienate myself; it was simply a biproduct of recognizing that the strange amalgam of feelings and experiences that made me who I am was confounding to most of those around me.

Some people — actually surprisingly many people — who feel radically out of step with the world end up with suicidal thoughts.

To be fair, I went through plenty of episodes in my life (mostly involving the betrayal of intimately offered trust) where I might have had somewhat suicidal thoughts, but most of the time when I spiraled into these pits of darkness and profound loneliness and aloneness (the two are NOT the same, by the way!) my response was that I needed to just get away.

When I say "get away," I meant things like seriously considering going and living as a sole researcher on some remote South Pacific island where my only job for the next 24 months would be to count seals on the beach and otherwise have no connection whatsoever with the outside world.

"Normal" people might think such thoughts, but they don't actually start making arrangements to follow up on them.

The only thing that kept me from actually pursuing such a course of action was my unswerving belief that maybe — just maybe — I would encounter someone along the way — and I only needed to find a single someone — with whom I would feel connected and at peace. Not disconnected. Connected to something else. Like an alien on a strange planet with "fair enough" other beings... but not a single member of its won species.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not some "hermit in the woods" necessarily, although I often have had a tendency to retreat into myself when I experienced that I was increasingly not seen and not heard and not understood.

Don't get me wrong. I've had plenty of relationships and friendships.

The words fail me again.

Perhaps the "trouble" lies not so much in feeling like an alien on a strange planet as it lies in having awareness of all your inner emotional states, and being able to identify and give voice to them.

Popular culture sometimes talk about people walking through life as unquestioning zombies.

Sometimes I envy them. But not really...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your week!

How about you? Do you ever struggle to find the words to express your state of being? Can you be honest with those feelings? Or do they actually defy being expressed and described? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.03.20 00:12 PDT
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