My year of detox

I stare at this blank page and struggle to find the words to express how I feel.

I thought I have been doing well, incorporating all the "healthy" things to get over the devastation of my divorce experience.  Exercising, training for 5ks.  Losing weight- my old friends are shocked at how skinny I look, saying it looks like I lost 30 lbs (though its really about 20).  Changing my diet to that of pescatarian. Focusing on work.  Focusing on the loving kindness that seems to be the one thing that helps me spiritually to overcome that sense of profound unworthiness that has followed me throughout my life, and had been accentuated by exhusband's behavior and disparaging comments.  Hoping that I have been a good parent, yet never sure because my kids are happy but not emotive when it comes to talking about how they feel being shuttled back and forth between two homes.  I have dubbed this my year of "detox" to denote my own spiritual, emotional, and physical transformation into the positive, happy, and self-sufficient person I have aspired to me all my life.  Unafraid, UNAFRAID.

External factors, personal and raw to the touch, feels like it pulls me down from those goals.  Three years after my ex's departure, he has this past week set up his new home with his girlfriend and her son, moving onward while framing our kids into his new world as it suits him, I feel diminished once more.   Setting up a house with bedrooms for our kids, while having cut out everything to do with my life, even when it is about the welfare of our kids (and of course, money, always the money).

That is the source of my fear most of all: the feeling that my kids are being taken away and placed in this world without me, where it is okay for my ex to have treated me so horribly, abusively, and still come out a "winner" with his new girlfriend, his new house, his bounty of salary fostering his "rich" lifestyle, concurrent with his blatant and continued refusal to pay for our children's needs which makes me struggle to make my own needs met at home.  I feel AFRAID.

I am struggling to find purchase in the slippery soil of my healing soul.  The fear is paralyzing, of being alone, of being destitute, of having no support or real friends, lovers, family.  The scary desire to make the pain stop, though I have no suicidal disposition.  It just hurts so badly.

Pema Chodron would encourage me to dig in, to use the opportunity to embrace this fear and really experience it.  To forgive and love myself, and accept the feeling of being alone, and to not to be lonely.  I don't want to disappoint: her, but even more so, me.  And I guess she would feel satisfied, because the pain is real and PRESENT.  I am trying to remember what to do as I acknowledge it, even push in to it because it is as if I am drowning, deeper and deeper. Can't breathe.  And at the same time, the words "loving kindness" are heard in my ears, invisible wisps of ghostly thought.

I pray to God, and to my mama to help me.  And AGAIN. Loving kindness.  Forgive myself and reconcile that who I want to become (and could not, with him) is still developing.  To remember that this is my BIG chance to finally reconcile myself with who I want to be, desire in life, to be happy
and fulfilled.  To accept this gift of opportunity to learn that it is not only okay to be alone, right now,
but that it can be glorious.  To not think it is a permanent experience, but a transformative, positive one.