Gripping loneliness is one of my greatest struggles, so I find this to be a balance between wanting to talk to someone and not forcing my currently dour company on others.

There is a lie I live with nearly every day: a feeling of being unloved and at best barely tolerated.

While I know factually this is untrue, it is very hard to… shake. It makes friendships difficult, as I feel awkward and an outsider, which can be its own self-fulfilling prophecy as people misinterpret my aloofness. I show up in a public space… pleasantries may or may not be exchanged, and then I leave to while away the hours. One should not base their self-worth on others, but it is very difficult to disentangle it from how easily society handles your absence, I tell you.

Mostly it is the silence that eats away at me. In fact, I am listening to trance.fm at this moment (I heartily recommend it), to soothe my nerves and quiet the background hum of anxiety. The truth is, I’ve admitted I need to go back on medication, but our finances are not in a place to be purchasing them, so I am here, using writing as a form of self medication, realising for the first time that this has always been my way of coping. Trust me, I will take melancholy as an improvement over soul-crushing any day.

And it’s not as if in the midday I am truly alone… my youngest daughter has been chronically short on rest for days, which has expressed itself as nerve-rattling, full-on meltdowns. From her, not me. That she has fallen asleep despite herself and the house is silent save for a whispered, transient melody (currently From Ashes,) that I will take gladly, for in an hour’s time, I will have my sweet, sunny, bouncing child returned to me in exchange for this… this changling that groused and protested four poster confinement.

I matter. Of course I do.

I am helping prepare for a Halloween party my friend is hosting tomorrow. If I didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be trusted with such a responsibility, and if she caught wind of my self-depreciating pity part she’d probably threaten to swat me. ::laughs::

…but that’s the thing. People go home… they have families of their own to tend to; lives to live. Ours only intersect for brief moments at a time, and they leave not knowing they are a life line to more than those who call the same four walls as they do, home.

So the point of this all is… to remember to hold my head high? To lay bare my ugly secret  – this shame I carry, this unworthiness – and name it. To root it out and burn it to cinders.

Because I deserve better than what I allow myself to have.