Worth

Every year since I can remember I asked myself what the coming year would be about. As a sensitive it always came to me. That, “Light bulb moment”. This year will be about “wisdom” or this year will be about “suffering” or this year will be about “growth”. I’d rarely have exact or specific insights, only general themes allowing me to feel it out. This year it wasn’t so easy. I spent weeks pacing back and forth, smoking cigarillo after cigarillo (I smoked at the time), asking the universe what was over the horizon.

Silence.

Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe looking back I can’t even say what it was all about, what the whole point of this year was. Maybe I settled on the answer, “Getting on top of things,” because deep down I felt it was furthest from the truth--or maybe, now that I think about it, it is the truth, but I don’t like the hell I’ve had to go through to get here. And when push comes to shove it’s all about my sense of worth.

Last January I was ending a relationship with the first person who ever made me feel like a piece of meat. I spent about three months with her. I put everything I had into that relation as I had the relationship before that and the relationship before that and the relationship before that. Didn’t matter. In the end it all came down to sex and because I didn’t put out while having a fibromyalgia attacks so bad I could barely move I didn’t love her.

I don’t like putting things in such black and white terms. I try to see the world in shades of grey. This is particularly important when you’re an intuitive. Just watch the show “Medium” about the fictional/non-fictional psychic investigator Allison DuBois. She has dreams and visions and is so sure of things because of them but time after time they only show part of the picture, incomplete pictures, biased, subjective aspects of the picture. Even so, seeing the future, seeing into people’s hearts, understanding the way of things, is much easier watched on TV than experienced first hand.

I was watching an episode recently where she admitted to someone that she doesn’t have many friends--actually doesn’t have any friends outside her immediate family and co-workers--which don’t actually count. She says it’s hard to have friends when you have these kinds of insights. I don’t recall her exact words but the summary is basically that people judge us, act uncomfortable with us, or aren’t particularly real or completely authentic with us, and all those things make having authentic relationships with other human beings incredibly difficult.

Having genuine friendships with other human beings has always been incredibly difficult.

It turns out this year has been about worth, my worth, and it’s come down to black and whites. Either I have worth or I’m worthless. Either I deserve to be treated as if I have worth or I don’t. There’s no middle path. There’s no, “Yeah, go ahead and treat me like I don’t have worth, I’ll wait, I’ll be there for you, I’ll forgive you, I’ll be patient for days, weeks, and months, until you realize just how rare I am, I’ll throw my self esteem in the garbage bin until you figure it out,” solution. People who have worth, people who know they have worth don’t do that, they don’t fucking (forgive my French) do that. They go through life doing what they enjoy and when people treat them in ways they don’t like they say something about it or at the very least don’t waste their time and energy on it, at least that’s what I’ve observed.

Now I’m not saying people have necessarily wronged me so don’t read this and think that I’m necessarily talking about you. The last few weeks have been particularly challenging for me both in my professional and personal life--and on top of it all I’m tapering my pain meds which makes me even more sensitive to anything that would normally be difficult. But I took today off, I’m trying to find my voice, and I feel like I just need to get this all out somehow, somewhere, before I explode.

I am struggling today. Took the day off a month in advance and got flaked on without even an, “I’m sorry,” and I have a hunch that if and when I say how it made me feel there will be consequences. I’m not feeling the Christmas spirit this year. I didn’t feel it last year either but I pushed and pushed and even though it was the first Christmas without my daughter I tried to live it anyway and celebrate it anyway and up went the tree and the stockings and I spent hundreds on gifts and hours of time and energy on gifts and for what? A year of hell? I don’t think anyone knows just how much effort it took for me to put up the decorations I have this year, the hope I had to dig out from the bottom of the grave...and today I’m almost glad that’s it because I feel ready to take everything, throw it all in the box, and say good riddance to Christmas. I don’t want to go to the one party I’ve been invited to and pretend I’m happy. I’m not happy. I know I have worth but when push comes to shove I’m tired of having to remind myself of it every day.

I want to be treated like I do.