Client Journal: Sad Lonely Boy Afraid to Express
The dialogue with myself these past couple of weeks makes me sad. I know (again) so many ways I have to keep the sad, lonely little boy quiet and alone. Repeating my family’s work on him. Very elegant.
Everyone has broken pieces, I think, resenting (more accurately: fearing) the prospect of healing work. It’s not like that just goes away.
My life is so fortunate, I think, outlawing feelings of sadness.
So I dwell on the things I’m grateful for, which are many, and genuine.
And yet. What I am aware of in myself is that enormous unwillingness, fear, to express, especially the negative. “C’mon, J,” you said in last session, “Don’t be a withholder.” I have tremendous fear of expressing the wrong thing, saying something only half-true and therefore hurtful.
I’ve been reflecting about how this shuts me down.
I am happy doing creative work: theater, lesson-design, teaching. I loved the No Holds Bard work. But I don’t work on such projects until a deadline is nigh. I don’t do any creative work just for my own satisfaction these days. (For awhile, before I met K, I carried Shakespeare monologues around with me, just to memorize for my own pleasure. I have about a dozen still by heart… I love them. And I think a lot about writing, but then quickly paralyze myself with thoughts of product and audience.)
And my life is full. I need much more exercise than I am able to arrange for myself, for instance. I’ve taken to getting up between 4:30 and 5 every day in order to have time for myself, which usually means I can go to the gym. But there’s school work to do as well, which takes up some mornings. Weekends and evenings I’m with N, or N and K, or occasionally just K. I’d like to arrange more social time with friends and family (my brother and his wife and kids moved here), more dates with K, more… you know. Life. I try to balance it all.
But what I got in reflecting last night is that the time constraint is an illusion, that I can take time for me if I choose. If I work out two or three mornings, for instance, that leaves two mornings at least that I can sit and write. That’s better than not sitting. I can schedule that.
I need to listen to the sad lonely boy and feel with him.
I need to write, for myself, until I discover what creative, expressive work I want to be doing. I have been feeling that yearning, for some creative passionate endeavor that I want to commit to 100%, as I did with NHB, and that loss to know what it is. I am aware that freeing that up is connected to the process of freeing my bereft lonely boy self to feel and express.
