Pain

So, I'll apologize right away on the off chance anyone actually reads my blog. This is not going to make a lot of sense, nor is it a "happy" mindless (well, mindless maybe)post. It's also going to be personal. I am an extrovert who hates journalling and need a place to put my thoughts down. So - if you have wandered onto this site by mistake - my apologies.

Pain is something I have struggled with and I have done whatever I can to avoid my whole life. Pain has come to me in so many ways - but the biggest cause of pain to me, as sad as it is to say, is rejection. Rejection manifests itself in so many ways as well, and I interpret/misinterpret way too many things from this vantage point.

Currently I am going through a divorce. One who knows me may not be surprised. Perhaps even wondering what took so long. The thing is - I believed in "love", believed in "working at it", believed if I only prayed harder for God to change me, then we would work it out. We have been unhappy for so long and things just didn't get any better. The truth is I didn't know how to be in a relationship. I can't speak for him. I just didn't know how to be a wife. Well, the result - he filed for divorce. Now, it doesn't matter what I have thought, what the "truth" is. I am now dealing with the dreaded rejection I was worried about. It has even been said he may be already seeing someone else. This makes the issue even harder for someone who already feels rejected.

It's been said to me to "embrace" the pain. I believe that to be true, however, at 46, and after running from pain any way I knew how - now I just want to stop this pain. I don't want to "feel" it. Plus, I have been filling my life for so long with "trying to make this marriage work", I don't know how to do anything else. Reading Henri Nouwen's book "Turn my Mourning into Dancing" has been helpful the past couple of days, however, I am still looking for the "fix". It's so difficult to embrace the pain without adding blame (mostly self-blame), judgement, regret, anger, hopelessness, blah, blah. Again - who wants to embrace all that??

Self-fulfilling prophecy comes to mind. Did I push and push until I could say... see, I knew he would be another person to reject me? Or is that psychological crap I'm trying to use to further drag home the feeling of rejection.

In the end - I would love to be anybody but me. I would love to be someone who "appears" - cause I realize I don't know the inside - not to take things to heart. I so often long to be someone/something I'm not. Again - a form of rejection of myself. I feel so much. My feelings are at the root of so much that I think, say and do and often it gets me into trouble. Right now, the trouble is I have to go through this pain and I don't know how. I am looking for some external source to take away all the pain. It's not even that the divorce is the only pain. The grief comes from so many sources and it's bombarding me. Loss of hope, dreams, plans, future, a regret having not been able to be who my husband needed me to be in order to make the marriage work, not accepting him for who he is. The "cutting off" of any communication between the two of us, the sense of isolation, and not to mention all the other losses I have encountered over the years which I didn't grieve. Note to self: grieve and feel pain when it's there - it doesn't go away until you do.

I am so unprepared to deal with all of this. Not that you can be prepared per se, but, like I said before, I have been running around my whole life avoiding deep emotional pain. And... it's led me here.... having to do exactly that. Live through the pain. Embrace it, feel it, stay with it, all the while being grateful to a God who loves me through it all. Why can't God be a tangible, touchable reassurance?? I intellectually know He is with me... but at 3:00 in the morning, when I wake up crying, it would be nice to have someone talk back to me - someone to reassure me I WILL get through this. This is life, and I need to be here. I just pray I learn something through this. I would hate to finally embrace all the pain only to come out the other end unchanged.