I’m Fucking Tired of Shouldering It Alone.
Hello, I need your help.
I’m so sad, I’m so lonely, I’m so fucking tired of shouldering it alone.
I did all the things you told me to do. Tear down the walls so that I could let love in. Stop pretending I don’t care if I have a partner or not.
You said I needed to embrace my Sacred Feminine, to stop with the false masculinity, the false independence, but it’s gut-wrenching being exposed like this.
I don’t know if I have the strength to be this vulnerable. No one has any advice about how to restructure your whole life to work for your new normal.
They tell you it will be hard but no one explains that it will be devastating, that you will also need to develop faith in something and a solid belief in yourself in order to keep going.
In casting off your armor, you now sit in the world naked with baby flesh that needs caring for. And your belief needs to be in the newly exposed self that you barely know.
And you have to get to know it, believe in it and care for it, all at the same time.
And it’s so hard, it’s so fucking hard, it’s so scary, and everyone keeps talking about how beautiful it is and the wonder of going from caterpillar to butterfly — but no one talks about how you feel like a deformed alien with no idea how to operate.
No one tells you that you can get frozen here, the armor doesn’t fit anymore, but you’re also so new you don’t know what to do with your new skin.
Trust your instincts, have faith, blah blah blah… I’m so scared I don’t even know myself, how can I trust someone I don’t know?
Hello, right back.
I’m afraid there is no formula. I have no good answer to your questions. All you can do is take Rilke’s advice and live the answer…
“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
And I know that in the place where you are now that those are hard words to hear, because it just hurts so much.
But then it eases, then in making it through that hurt you realize that you have started to get to know that baby flesh, and have started to get to know that brighter you, that you before the callouses, before the shame, before you got scared and lost.
You may be a little timid but oh there is joy here, and truth, and my god, love.
Have faith, bright thing, for you are remarkable. I promise it’s worth it. You won’t miss that armor.
And when our roles are reversed (because life is this gorgeous cycle), please remind me to have patience with myself, to be graceful and to be as honest as you while struggling to hold on to that faith in yourself.
I love you, beautiful girl, in all your forms.
***
Charlie Pope is a restless thinker, a design scientist and a scribbler of furious letters to herself and everyone she loves. She spends her days exploring the interactions between communities and their environments, and finding solutions to help reconnect people to place, to nature, to each other, all under the guise of a fisheries and marine affairs professional. In between she writes about balance, sustainability, love, and fear. Sometimes she sends these writings out, sometimes these letters sit unsent waiting for their time. You can find Charlie on Facebook.
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