How does this work when you are 37, not 23? When you *have* taken all the advice, read all the things, established a life that you try to make independent and fulfilling, when you have the cats, the home, the career, the hobbies...but also the dating apps that are literally matchless, the in-person events that yield nothing? Today I told myself that I would take myself as I am -- and I again find myself crying the way that I did yesterday. I am so tired of grieving what was and embracing what is and still feeling as though -- beyond the walls of the life I have made for myself -- I am invisible.
I don't know if this helps, but there are people stuck in bad relationships who feel even more invisible. Not just invisible but deleted, because there is an intimate partner erasing them within the walls of their own life.
I'm not trying to minimize your grief or tell you how to feel--the frustration is real. But the solution the original LW has in mind (being in a committed relationship) is rarely an actual solution. The book Polly is reccomending (Banal Nightmare) has close-up portraits of several of those relationships.
I totally get it, I’m a bit older than you, and also single.
But the one thing I have learnt - expecting your life to always feel fulfilling, and to look for one day where you will settle into it once and for all without any more grief, that’s an illusion. It’s like the single version of the Prince Charming fantasy. One day will come where I will live happily ever after (by myself). And you tend to take every day of tears as a sign that something is missing, happily ever after has not arrived.
I think asking what does my body want today means accepting the answer - it wants to sit in pyjamas, cry, eat a lot and be grumpy.
And at some level be like - wow! I get to do this! Don’t have to force myself to go meet my partner’s friends when I would rather be grumpy!
Oh hell yes. Life could be so much weirder!
How does this work when you are 37, not 23? When you *have* taken all the advice, read all the things, established a life that you try to make independent and fulfilling, when you have the cats, the home, the career, the hobbies...but also the dating apps that are literally matchless, the in-person events that yield nothing? Today I told myself that I would take myself as I am -- and I again find myself crying the way that I did yesterday. I am so tired of grieving what was and embracing what is and still feeling as though -- beyond the walls of the life I have made for myself -- I am invisible.
I don't know if this helps, but there are people stuck in bad relationships who feel even more invisible. Not just invisible but deleted, because there is an intimate partner erasing them within the walls of their own life.
I'm not trying to minimize your grief or tell you how to feel--the frustration is real. But the solution the original LW has in mind (being in a committed relationship) is rarely an actual solution. The book Polly is reccomending (Banal Nightmare) has close-up portraits of several of those relationships.
I totally get it, I’m a bit older than you, and also single.
But the one thing I have learnt - expecting your life to always feel fulfilling, and to look for one day where you will settle into it once and for all without any more grief, that’s an illusion. It’s like the single version of the Prince Charming fantasy. One day will come where I will live happily ever after (by myself). And you tend to take every day of tears as a sign that something is missing, happily ever after has not arrived.
I think asking what does my body want today means accepting the answer - it wants to sit in pyjamas, cry, eat a lot and be grumpy.
And at some level be like - wow! I get to do this! Don’t have to force myself to go meet my partner’s friends when I would rather be grumpy!
Ooh, Polly, you are in a lucid frame of mind today. Reading this felt like taking a lovely long bath.
If only I had gotten this memo forty years ago.