Speaking For Myself: My Pain As a Woman and HSP
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The Depth of my Pain
My husband Dan and I separated over 3 months ago. The decision was mutual but our experience since, is vastly different. Dan says he is doing great, enjoying life and “It’s all good”. I am honestly happy for him. However, this is not my experience.
This situation is kicking my ass. I am bruised, I feel battered and broken, confused, lost and alone. Even with everything that happened during our marriage—Dan’s cancer, concussion, stage 4 cancer (he now has no active cancer in his body and indeed, is feeling great), financial difficulties, not having a home, moving 15+times, letting go of 90% of our belongings, or my lifetime of dealing with chronic illness and almost dying from it a few times—right now, I would say this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through. This is brutal.
As a Highly Sensitive* woman, I feel very deeply. Both joy and pain fill my body. Fear and Love do the same. For the 49 years before meeting Dan, I didn’t really see a meaning to Life. I did many things, had many adventures, felt joy and wonder, created beauty, but honestly, none of it really mattered. Truly mattered. And although I wouldn’t take my life by my own hands (despite having a serious fling with the idea during the hardest times of my illness) and continued to give it my all, I could take Life or leave it.
I was always bewildered and disappointed by humans and their lack of Love and Kindness, and never felt I really was meant for this world.
I couldn’t make Life matter because I did not have an outlet for the immense Love that was held in my heart. As a child, my outbursts of Love and hugs and kisses were criticized and made wrong. To this day, my siblings still bring it up and remind me how bothersome that was.
Then I met Dan and the dam surrounding my heart burst open. The Love that had been painfully held there for so long was free to flow at last.
Life finally made sense.
Was the relationship perfect? No, it wasn’t. Did I have flaws and faults? Absolutely. As soulmates we expertly reflected each other’s places of darkness and shone a spotlight on our deepest wounds for healing to occur. We couldn’t find our way through. I wish we had gotten some counselling to learn how to grow from those triggers, together. We didn’t. And so, after 9 years, we separated.
And life, again, no longer made sense.
This is what I’m experiencing right now: the shock of the dam closing again, the silence of the river no longer flowing, the wittering of the green things its waters were nurturing, the fleeing of the wildlife it was attracting, the dramatic change in the landscape of my life.
But because I believe in the benevolence and perfection of LIFE;
Because I believe Life’s sole purpose is the realization of the full potential that is encoded in the seed of my SOUL;
Because I believe the yearning to BE LOVE that has inhabited me all my life is TRUTH;
Because I believe it is my HIGHER SELF calling me forth;
Because I believe these circumstances are not designed to break me but to break me open to my GODLY ESSENCE;
Because of all this, I KNOW this END is also a BEGINNING.
I just have to live through it. This is my Mystical Initiation, my Vision Quest, my Inferno, my Hero’s Journey, and right now, it’s hard and it sucks.
But I KNOW in my soul and heart of hearts that on the other side, I will find an EMBODIMENT of LOVE greater than any vision my mind can conjure up. The ME that will BE after this journey I cannot fathom, but its promise, I can hear.
[…]
Last night, something happened. Something deep stirred inside me. It was awakened by a conversation with another beautiful women (the third in two days) suffering extraordinary circumstances, trying to find purpose to the pain. It revealed in me a sense of PASSION and POWER for WOMEN SPEAKING OUT I didn’t know I had. Or maybe I did, and knew it was sleeping.
But it’s awake now. It may be what life wants me to connect to. My HIGHER DESTINY.
This is where I found the courage to write this blog.
Something’s happening.
I plan on writing about this SLEEPING BEAUTY I just met.
I also plan on writing: SPEAKING FOR MYSELF / PART 2: Making Use Of My Pain
No promises though.
In kindness,
Annie
*HSP/Highly Sensitive Person. HSPs represent 20% of the population. We are neurodivergent individuals who have a physiologically different nervous system. We have a deeper more complex central nervous system that is more sensitive to physical, emotional and social stimuli. We perceive the subtle, process more information, and feel more deeply than non HSPs.
If this sounds like you, there is a lot of information available on the subject. I discovered this 2 years ago and it reframed my entire life. Throughout my life I was shamed for who I was, and I am still working at owning and understanding the ramifications of my HSP-ness and at replacing that shame with compassion, admiration and self-love.