14^th of January 2022

My finger hovers over the contact button
I do not click
But I force myself not to
It’ll hurt too much
How many times have I scrolled through my contacts and found no one I could contact
The act of scrolling through it
Wanting to reach out
Wanting help
Not finding it

After decades of searching for answers I think I finally found them
I think I finally know what I need
I think that is why this time fells the way it does
Maybe this time doesn’t feel different from the other times
But I still tell myself it does

I know what I need now
But I don’t talk about it
Saying or typing the words hurt too much
The words feel ugly and uncomfortable
Which is the nice way of saying the words disgust me

The world feels empty of love
Not the world exactly
Just my world
My life
I feel empty of love
Not love as an action
Not love as something I can give
I give plenty of love when the opportunity arises
But inside I am an empty bucket with a big gaping hole at the bottom
No matter what anyone throws at me I keep feeling empty

I think it’s going to kill me
I believe I have meant it all these years
Now I need to stop using the word think to soften the blow
It is killing me
Parts of me is dying

I can feel parts of myself dying
And not the good cool kind, where I walk away a better person who grew and became a better version of myself
The fighter, the stubborn, the Live, live, live parts of me
It’s the adventurer, the scientist, the child asking questions full of wonder
It’s the drive to go do things and the love of exploring
It is every part of me I love
It is the part people call inspiring and the parts of me I know others admire
It is the parts of me I am proud of
These parts are dying away
And I can’t… give them a place to resurrect and grow and live and be and work and contribute and find out what they could do if I wasn’t just existing in survival mode instead of living

I know what living takes now.
I know what I need to get there
I also know I do not have what it takes to build it. I am empty
Empty of energy and love and support and empty of willingness to fight and break myself in pursuit of something you cannot chase down.
Most of all I am just empty of hope

And I am empty of trust, the thing we all need most to be able to build anything
I was a little hard on myself before
I am an empty bucket with a hole at the bottom
But I am also surrounded by people who have very different love languages than me
People who I do not feel connected to and people who do not understand me
Which means that though I am not in a great position to take in the love people give me
A lot of the love they give isn’t wasted because of the hole in my bucket
It is lost in translation between what they mean to give and how I receive
I want to give myself that little space of understanding
It isn’t just that I don’t fill up on the love people give me
It is also that the love I need isn’t the love I am being offered

I kind of hate the word love

I hate the connotations it holds for me in an amatonormative society

This wasn’t really a blog post, but it wasn’t a poem either. I guess it just it what it is. And I am ok with that.

If anyone is reading, thank you. Thank you for your time and for making me less alone in this. I hope whoever you are that you are less alone, less empty and more ok than I currently feel. And if you are not know that I am hoping and wishing all the best for you, even thought I do not know who you are.

Jace