From shadow to light

 I am so used to being sad for no reason that whatever reasons I find to snap out of my sadness seems like a distraction and I tell myself that it's only just until I get to numb my feelings, as if numbness is my destination and I just can't get stuck with taking a detour to working on feeling something more than sadness - it's as if I am letting myself be sad and the sad truth is my family has been seeing me this way day in and day out and just accept me as if it's a normal thing with me being all so quiet and introverted but with all my frozen sadness within and which they don't care to see and are hardened by their own veils to bother to look beyond them.

This dead end that I was not able to work past and without anyone's support and believing that I am too weak to support myself in any form or way made it a no way out but to get stuck with this ruminating path that leads nowhere.

I feel more sad having realized the huge hollowness that this numbing has led to and this grieving for being avoidant, dismissive, and insensitive to my feelings as if my life mission for each day is to get past this dead end but keep trying to feel alive to face it every day like a routine. How can I be so self destructive? How can I shut myself off feeling anything but just sadness? My mother made me feel like an extension to her tragedy and frustration, agreed, but do I stay in that as a shadow in order to adapt to this limited interpretation which I believed is who I am all about.

And when coming to the light through this hardened ignorance and thick fog, it feels like I had remained disillusioned in my own make-believe illusion world of living like a shadow to my mother's self absorbed feelings about losing my father and the world is all set against her in some way or the other and that sadness and getting sympathy was her ticket to thriving in a joint family along with her brothers and their wives and their children. What works for her need not work for me and this distinct voice to express what feels like truly me is something I am opening myself to and hearing myself out and trying to be compassionate and unconditionally accepting and give myself some flak for whatever I manage to do or not.

It's very hard to want to thrive in your own space without having to feel like a shadow to another being specially and all the almost realistic imaginary explosion in my head proving that I am this and good enough for that are just ways to cope up for having compromised on my emotional/mental space and for having gotten weakened more and more for carrying a lot of overwhelm, guilt, anger, helplessness, and lack of power and control over claiming what is truly mine.

This staying wrapped up in her shadow has made me doubt my identity, my existence, purpose, direction to take in life, and a yawning wide in coming away from myself as if I need the imaginations in my head to be my shadow for a lack of rebuilding my self from scratch. I am working on it but can't seem to get myself together for my true self seems to be out of grasp similar to a shadow that doesn't know how to survive by itself and needs someone or the other to justify to being one. 

And so all the knowledge, creativity, and problem solving abilities and so on get wasted to being a shadow trail and not wake up fully to my inner light which has been the reason for coming out slowly from being a shadow as I express about it in this writeup.

Clinging to being a shadow as well as wanting myself out of the shadow is like being aware of the obsession but not able to cut off from practicing that obsession which is like a habit.

Freedom of expression

I grew up trained to be in fear and worry about how to be good enough for my mother as she had made a habit of making me feel bad about my body. I feared deep down and was caught up in confusing feelings that the person whom I trusted most made me feel like an outsider to my body by criticizing it so much and quite regularly so that I didn't know if I had to be defensive about it or defend my dead father whom she brought up in every health issue of mine (almost) as he had left us prior to my being born due to a sudden cardiac arrest, and all her broken dreams of a long happily married life with him and their future together with the baby had all gotten shattered. The ensuing anger that she had bottled up kept coming up whenever my health failed to meet her expectations - the point was that she had been through enough already and that my frequent migraines and other not so life threatening issues and maybe one or two serious ones had all been treated by me as dust that need to be suppressed under my life carpet and which I did but not realizing then that this act of suppressing and stifling my feelings in order to look good for her was laying the seeds for being a fake from within. 

When you are not true to yourself and sensitive enough to understand how best to deal with your body, your emotions, and how to process stagnation of your feelings and release them from time to time through some proactive means if possible that could be for your good and more importantly to have someone next to you who cares enough about you to see how far you are going away from yourself is the start to feeling disconnected from your reality - the reality that you create as a response to adapting to someone's mood swings and judgements is the most limiting feeling and that when practiced for a long time becomes your belief that you need to fear to stretch yourself beyond a point physically specially lest it makes you feel weak all over again to seek support and withdraw from giving yourself a chance to come out of that comfort zone. Fear and withdrawal are not healthy means to train your mind to discipline yourself and just rotting in the pent up energy, drive, missed opportunities, and weary enthusiasm is the outcome of lack of self discipline. 

How long to hang on to such dead end habits is the question...Having fought within myself for so long that all the courage to actually face reality seems worn out. I know I will get up not because 'I have to' live but living through it all, pains, suppressions, withdrawals, stagnations,  over thinking, procrastination, lack of clarity in goal setting is something that had made me who I was but to be true to myself in such vulnerable times is who I am now and I am proud of how far I have come despite the emotional abuse from my mother, my long term dormant depression, addiction to stress, self destructive coping up and so on.

I don't doubt myself anymore if I had really gone through so much and just downsize it to make it sound like nothing because it was terribly hard for what it's worth to be your own support system emotionally and mentally and having a huge family like my mother's relatives besides her to live along with makes it all the more harder to release that family makes you biologically and materially nurture you but when they are not with you truly in your times of real need, then it's not worth it to hang on to such memories. 

Families are made and sent to us while we are born and we can't get to choose them but how to navigate through a bunch of people who see you but don't see the depths of despair that makes you believe that you are invisible to them and just cope up with it anyway is the loophole that only unconditional self love can provide. I can't jump through this phase by just suppressing my truths but discovering my true courage by being open to my vulnerabilities and accepting them for what it is is the way to allow myself the freedom of expression.