Five Minute Friday: Alone

This is my contribution, done in however many minutes it actually takes me, to the Five Minute Friday community. I don't do it by the rules, but if you want to, go check it out at Kate Motaung's blog, Heading Home. Just click the link at the top for Five Minute Friday to find out what it's all about. This week's prompt is....

ALONE

I am a naturally gregarious person and thrive when surrounded by friends and family that I love. I even thrive, to a lesser extent, when I'm in new situations with new people. I love getting to know people. I wouldn't say that I'm "the life of the party" but I would say that I definitely know how to mix and mingle in the crowd.

Given those aspects of my personality, you might think that I never feel alone, but I have and I do.

I know I talk about it a lot, but one of the things that makes depression feel so bad sometimes is that quite often, you feel alone in going through it. Obviously, this is the disease lying to you, but it is such a crafty and convincing liar, that you wind up believing it and that can be very bad. If depression can convince you that you are alone and no one else is struggling with it, then it makes it all the easier for depression's malicious twin to settle in whose name is despair.

Everyone feels alone sometimes, but when you feel desperately alone, it can cloud your judgment to the point that your ability to make good decisions is impaired. This is especially true of depression and feeling alone. People who feel that level of desperate loneliness while depressed often wind up wondering why they bother fighting the disease at all and those thoughts may lead to thoughts of suicide or a suicide attempt. People who survive a suicide attempt or a near-attempt quite often express the feelings that led up to that moment as hopeless, despondent, and alone. Hopeless and despondent are hard enough, but combine loneliness on top of it and it's a recipe for a very bad situation. 

While I have felt alone at many times in my life, I've never felt so alone as I did on July 10, 2013. Because I felt so utterly alone, I made a decision that irrevocably changed the course of my fight with depression and my life in the process. It was such an intense feeling of being absolutely and totally alone and with no one who was willing to hear me, see me, or believe me that I simply gave up. I gave into the pressure of a very bad situation and allowed myself to be bullied into something I never wanted to do. The end result was that when it was over, I was so much worse off than I would have been had I felt some kind of support and presence of another person who had my back.

I have looked back on that day many times and asked myself what I could have done differently. There are things I've come up with, but the reality is that I was all alone and, in addition, was very emotionally weak and vulnerable. The reality is that being alone and vulnerable made me collapse when I would have normally stood strong, fold when I would have fought, and allow myself to be manipulated by a big corporate machine when, under any other circumstances, I would have told them where to stick it and walked out. The loneliness of that moment led to me making the worst decision of my life and having to live with the consequences of that decision even some two years later.

Being alone has its positives too. I am largely quite an extrovert. That means that I tend to feel energized when around others. That is true in some respects, but I have a suspicion that my extrovertedness falls very close to the line between extrovert and introvert, because I also feel renewed in energy when I spend some time alone. This is particularly true if I have been spending a lot of time around a lot of people or a lot of time with people who, for lack of a better way to put it, drain me emotionally. When I get away from those situations, I feel a sense of relief and need some time alone or just hanging out with Gray or my bestie Sif to recharge my batteries. A true introvert would probably need to be totally alone, but I'm alone enough with one or two people in a relatively quiet environment. One place that I enjoy being totally alone is in the shower. It's nice to just relax under the hot water and I find that I do some of my best thinking as I'm shampooing my hair and washing the sweat and dirt off the rest of me.

Lately, I've really enjoyed alone time with Jesus. When I go to visit Fr. B for spiritual direction, he almost always hears my confession and then for my penance tells me to spend some time in the church before Jesus in the tabernacle. The first time I did it, I figured I'd spend 10-15 minutes and then leave. I wound up being there an hour and a half. I was amazed as I had no idea that I'd been there that long talking with Jesus and allowing Him to speak to my heart. I prayed and sang and cried and prayed and cried some more. I spent a good long time prostrate on my face crying amidst my prayers.

An hour and a half later as I was leaving I felt like I had left a huge weight there with Him. Even my body felt lighter. I also wound up having one of the most restful, peaceful naps that I've had in ages which was something that I dearly needed as I'd been up most of the previous week or two with nightmares every night and horrible insomnia. Thereafter, every time I go for confession with Fr. B, I spend a good hour at least, if not more, alone with Jesus. I think it might be healing something. I don't know. I would like to think it's helping some.

This way of doing Five Minute Friday is all new to me and I think I like it. I think it is going to work much better for me -- even if I wind up doing it this way, my way, all alone.

Five Minute Friday: Find

As of this week, I'm breaking up with Five Minute Friday.

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of writing for five minutes on a prompt, not editing your post, hitting publish, and linking up with a community of other folks who do the same. I really do love the idea.

The problem is that I can't write like that.

I have been a part of this community for over a year and thought that despite my inability to keep to five minutes with my writing most weeks that somehow, the "rules" just weren't as important as the spirit of the thing and the community. I had also fooled myself into believing that I wasn't the only one who went over the time allowance and who was really in it for the community. I further fooled myself into believing that if put to the test, I could actually write something that approached coherence and meaningfulness in 5 minutes' time.

I was wrong on all three counts.

Apparently, for certain individuals within this community, the rules are more important than showing grace to someone who just wants to participate and belong but isn't quite proficient at churning out a perfectly crafted inspirational nugget in 5 minutes. I am apparently also one of the very few people who goes over the time allowance with some regularity and who joined up with this thing intending to follow the rules, but wound up staying in it more for the community than anything else. I know there are others (I've talked to them), but given that I was surrounded by about 15 other women at the Five Minute Friday retreat a few weekends ago who all seem to have no problem with this, I think it's safe to say that I found I'm in the minority. Likewise, the five minute free write that we did at the retreat further served to illuminate the fact that when put to the test and the pressure is on, I am a failure at the "five minutes" part of Five Minute Friday.

I thought in participating in this blog community that I had found a like-minded group of individuals who were all in a similar boat with me -- even if not exactly the same boat -- in wanting to be part of a community that gets together once a week and writes together. For me, that's what Five Minute Friday was always about. It's what I thought I had found.

For the most part, I did find that there are a LOT of great individuals who belong to this community. Many of them write things that resonate with me and many write things that don't. I'm okay with that. I appreciate diversity of ideas and people. I've gotten some genuinely wonderful comments on some of my posts from the folks in this community and met a couple of really awesome friends through it too. I am always looking to find members of my "tribe" and I've definitely done that some through this.

That said though, I'm done with the Five Minute Friday rules -- both those that are stated and those that are understood. I'm also done with judging myself and how I do Five Minute Friday.

• No more worrying about time limits (I may not even set a clock when I write). 
• No more worrying about whether or not the small amount of editing that I do counts as "editing" vs "not editing." 
• No more worrying about trying to link up on Thursday night just so I can get toward the top of the linkup list and maybe get more than just one comment from my solitary regular reader. 
• No more worrying that it's Monday or Tuesday or even Thursday afternoon and I'm just linking up with the previous Friday's post. 
• No more worrying that I didn't write a post for the previous week.
• No more worrying that no one will retweet my FMF post when it seems like they've retweeted several other bloggers' FMF posts.

Of course, since I suck and have put so much of my heart into wanting to belong and be accepted by this community and still feel a great amount of pressure to conform to the rules and expectations of this group, I may not linkup very often. I may just write when I feel like it. For the time being, this will be my last Five Minute Friday post for a while. I think I need a bit of time and space to convince myself of what is important about this community and what doesn't work for me. I know these things cognitively, but my heart needs time to catch up.

So goodbye to the old way of doing Five Minute Friday. I'm breaking up with you and all the self-judgment I feel by trying to do it your way. I need to do Five Minute Friday my own way and be okay with that. I need to find my own way. Perhaps I'll see you again in a few weeks.

A Quick Update

It's halfway through August and I haven't written anything. There are several reasons why, but the biggest one is the one that underlies the rest of them.

Any confidence I had that what I write is any good or that it makes any difference has been shaken so hard that I wonder if I will ever get it back.

I think it began with a bad week of depression, but what really made me really begin to doubt myself and my abilities was a poorly timed weekend surrounded by writers who are well ahead of me on the writing path and whose voices are far different than my own. There was also a single moment in that weekend that made me feel like a total failure as a writer and like I was just a little bit smaller and more worthless as a person. The other writers were mostly really great folks and I made a couple of new friends, but my biggest takeaway from the weekend is that I am only deluding myself that I am a writer.

So I've written posts, but I can't bring myself to finish most of them or publish any of them. None of them sound right to my ears. They seem to lack coherence and anything worth reading. They all scream at me, "You are NOT a writer!"

I keep trying to write and the drafts of posts keeps piling up. Every time I open Blogger, it is a bit more depressing. Quite honestly, I feel like crying even as I write this. Even this confession seems not quite good enough.

I don't know why I'm writing this except that I haven't written anything in over half a month. I was contemplating doing the Write 31 Days challenge in October, but it seems pointless given that I'm also contemplating ending this blog and hanging up my writing hat altogether. This isn't just really bad writer's block. It's a total lack of confidence that what I'm doing with this blog is worth continuing.