Flight Chronicles of the Hummingbird - Day 25 – 5-1-2021 - The Fear of Loneliness

The Fear of Loneliness

I’m reading through my old poems that I wrote in high school and college now. There is a consistent feeling of loss with friendship and boys.

I never felt popular as I was the one to hang out with most of the groups and not just one particular group. I had lost my way inside of myself. As a teenager, I was always protecting myself from being hurt by others and so desperately wanted to be seen, I did some peculiar things to connect. They weren’t bad, just awkward.

That girl was so lost and bullied. Her nickname was Carrie (the first movie came out in 1976) and that didn’t hold up well in school. She was bullied for that name for years and from the traumatic experiences she had as a child up until that point, she had to learn to Protect, Prove, Hide and Defend. It became a habit throughout life and it the older she got, the less it worked for her.

She never quite fit in. She tried cheerleading to be popular and was accepted on the squad in her sophomore and junior year. Then it was done. She was still not really popular.

I’m not going to go into too much of her earlier life right now because I want to share the poems she wrote during that time, so I will get into that at another point. I just wanted to take a look at these poems and see where she was.

We were lost for a long time. That is surfacing now.

There was no relationship with her mother who left the area she lived when she was 12. There was no real relationship with her father because he was physically and emotionally unavailable and her grandmother was strict with her, although she was loved by her.

I want to share two poems that show how she had no idea how to connect with friends and certainly not boys because she was never taught to connect with humans. As an only child, she had no one in her life to guide her and learned everything on her own. She was sad and lonely and struggled a lot. Her magical place was the creek near her house that she went to every day when she was not riding her bike to a park that she frequented. Nature was her saving grace.

 

Friends

C & M

Friends come and friends go,

But a lasting friendship,

One will never know.

It is now time to find out why,

Why thought of friends

Make you cry.

We used to have fun,

We never stopped laughing,

All the fun we had, is now passing.

New friends come along,

New feelings become strong,

But the good times will not last long.

Some friends use, then betray you,

Others just last forever,

Why can’t mine?

I hope the next friend I find,

Our closeness will be like a bind,

We’ll never lose each other, dear,

We’ll always live for hope, not fear,

Please friend, come to me and always stay near.

 

This one is powerful for me even now. It was about two girls that I was friends in high school, one of which, we got into a fist fight and then became friends after. The caveat here is that I am not the fighting type. It was the first and last time I did that. Mostly, again, out of protecting myself.

The three of us hung out, played the original Atari and smoked pot. Shhh, don’t tell anyone about that, I didn’t inhale. (That was a running joke back then.) I had a car and was driving around that time so our trips to McDonald’s near the high school was always like a Cheech and Chong movie. Those friendships lasted a couple of years and then…the poem and my broken heart, again.

And then there was the boy…

Another friend of mine in high school was seeing him and somehow, I really don’t remember, we ended up together. Looking back, I do remember that the loneliness I was feeling attracted me to anyone. Please see me. Please want to be with me. I was so sad.

So, I think I dated him for about a month or two. It was a whirlwind “romance.” I don’t even know what happened. I just fell hard for him. Thinking he was my “forever,” I wrote the following poem:

Bill

We are a team, that’s like a tie

My love for you will never die

You live for me, I live for you

The feeling I had, you never knew

The feelings yet, they still are here

I will always love you and want you near.

I want you here, I want you still

Please come to me,

I love you, Bill

Going back to read and share these things is bringing up the part of me that I described as my biggest fear, of being alone. What I have come to see is that alone is ok, the feeling of loneliness is what has been haunting me for my entire life. I could be in a room of 100 people or in a relationship and still feel lonely. I have been so stuck in the need for companionship that my whole life has been stuck in looking for someone to be my friend or partner and still feeling alone. This is what I am healing, and this is what I understand…

The things that I’m most afraid of are the things that I need to face and heal from the most.

I am ready and willing to take this one on full throttle AND I am scared.

In gratitude for this opportunity and this portion of my journey for me to be able to look, what could be, the biggest demon in my life in the face and walk through this.

Here we go…