Stale Mate

That’s how I feel, spiritually and emotionally, at the moment.

Like my life has reached one big stalemate!

I feel as though I can’t go anywhere really, just stay put moving between 2 squares, back and forth, back and forth.

I wish I could move but there seems to be no real option for movement.

Some of this ‘stale mate’ is caused by me feeling emotionally empty, unable to reach into my emotions and connect with myself, totally cold to how I feel and think, it’s almost a numbness, like not sure what’s going on not sure how I should react and unable to react all at the same time.

Now, part of this is almost certainly a result of the medication I am on for Depression, I am on very high doses of 2 different Anti Depressants and these do have the effect of blunting your emotions, this is a good and important thing to keep you ‘safe’ but it also gets in the way of true ‘recovery’ and anything of a ‘normal’ emotional life.

But the added thing is that I have, by and large sub consciously, pushed my own emotions into neutral, and tried burying the issues that I know need dealing with, the things that are getting in the way of my recovery and moving on. Part of this, as I said is largely sub conscious, learnt methods of protecting myself built up over a lifetime.

In some ways I know I need to deal with this stuff and in order to deal with it I have to face the pain but at the same time I am protecting myself from the pain by burying it because I have to ‘keep it together’ I don’t have the opportunity to allow myself to fall to pieces, I have to keep myself together and get on with everyday life.

I have to admit I am scared of letting myself deal with this stuff as I am scared of what is there; most of it I already know is not very pleasant.

I am also scared of finding myself back where i was this time last year and for this reason am protecting myself yet in a very real sense in protecting myself I am probably making the possibility of a repeat far more likely.

I am going to counselling and yet we are only able to touch around the edges of stuff as I am just finding it too difficult to open up to what’s really there, what’s really going on.

It’s not even as if I am feeling pain and hurt inside at the moment, I’m not! People ask me how I am and I can answer in all honestly I am fine, I am OK, because I am, just don’t delve too deeply because you might find it’s not as good as it first appears.

I can handle life like this but it is very dry, empty and, well pointless, I can go through the motions, with no emotion, I can do but not feel, it’s not that life is falling to bits around me but the truth is it probably needs to be allowed to fall to bits but I can’t allow that, it wouldn’t be good for me to allow that, it’s too messy, I have a life, well existence, to live, I have responsibilities and I am not sure I can handle these responsibilities and my emotions all at the same time.

There are no ‘quick fixes’ for the kind of mess that lies underneath the surface and I am not sure there is the energy within me to go for the long haul, it almost seems better to just stuff it all back inside and pretend like it’s not there, but I know that in the long run it won’t do me much good.

Spiritually I can go through the motions, read my bible, do my bit but there seems to be no real relationship with God right now, I am not in the position I was in most of last year, certainly the first half of last year, where I hated God, but I just don’t know that I can have a real relationship with him.

If I enter into much of a relationship with him he will only begin to open the wounds that are there, exposing the hurt and pain and I can’t allow that so it’s better to keep things on a flat empty level.

If I allow what’s inside of me to bubble out I know I will just fall to pieces, I will not be able to handle it and at the moment I can handle it, just about, I can just keep it inside and ignore it, that isn’t sorting the problem at all but it is saving me from the short term pain and the risk of the serious swing in my emotions I experienced last year.

I am afraid of letting my mind stay out of gear for too long because when it does all sorts of things surface, things that need to be kept under the surface, things that are best buried and hidden out of sight, the same applies at a spiritual level, I am afraid of opening up to God because it leads to my heart, it leads to the stuff that buried coming to the surface and I can’t do that.

It is so tiring and draining to live life where you can’t allow your mind to relax, where you can’t allow yourself to drop your guard and unwind, where you have to keep your brain active and mind focused on something, anything, as long as it’s not on yourself.

Now most of this is sub conscious thinking and behaviour, as I said before, learnt from a lifetime of having to protect myself from further hurt and I can’t easily change this even if I wanted to, and I am not sure whether I do want to.

How do you move forward when every move you make is going to lead to you loosing? How do you get from this place of being trapped and empty to a place of freedom? The only way of achieving it is via the route of PAIN and I am not sure I am ready for that, yet living the life I am right now is tiring and could so easily lead to the tinderbox that is my buried emotions blowing up big time.

So there you have it, I am not sure what else there is that I can easily and usefully add, I am struggling to make sense of all this myself, well not really struggling because I don’t want to make sense of it, if things remain as they are I suspect that I might as well stop counselling as it isn’t really going to resolve anything, part of me WANTS to resolve things but another part of me doesn’t, part of me wonders HOW I can resolve things yet another part of me wonders how I can keep it buried and prevent it from all blowing up on me.

If only someone could just say some words and make things better for me, but I know that isn’t going to happen, it’s not likely that God will just come and sort things out over night so that I wake totally better, there is a process that has to be gone through but it’s a process I am not sure I am ready for, not sure I ever will be ready for, in the meantime, life will trundle on, I will continue to exist and don what needs to be done, until I fall to pieces again. But as long as I can keep my mind from straying into undesirable territory I should be able to keep going for a bit longer.

Back to the title of the post, Stale Mate, I sometimes wonder whether it would be better for me to just end the stalemate by going for Checkmate! But that again is just too dangerous so stale mate is where we have to stay.

[houdini]