Perpetual Loneliness

Perpetual Loneliness

I had an impactful dream last night, one that I wanted to get back into once I awoke but it wasn’t possible.

The dream started off with me in a gym ‘my happy place’ and slowly but surely the gym space filled up with hundreds of people, all of whom new why they were there but I had no clue what was going on!

Eventually the whole gym space was crammed full of people most of whom were sitting on chairs and waiting for some kind of concert to start. I remained confused and angry at not being able to train and for not knowing what the hell was going on! Some figure from the past appeared who I think was an old work colleague who asked if I was ok, and my response was to run away. Then my ex-girlfriend appeared at the ‘concert’ entrance, and I desperately tried to hide knowing full well that part of me wanted her to see me! Then I woke up.

I thought about this dream for a while and wondered what it represented to me and fairly quickly I was able to add past dreams and my lifelong relationship with loneliness to the experience and that’s when the heading of this article came to mind.

Throughout my life I have battled to be noticed, loved, and taken seriously, laregely due to a totally absent father. As a child I was very much an isolator and sought attention via negative behaviour, had few friends and was bullied at school. My happy place as a child was the boy scouts. As a teenager I was disconnected, and my happy place was gambling, drugs, and alcohol. For 23 years I was a career addict, and my happy place was no where to be found no matter how hard I tried, then I stopped even trying! At 35 I went to rehab where I discovered that I deserve a ‘happy place’ but I was of course skeptical and fearful. For 35 years I had been conditioned to repel happiness and viewed this as a luxury for the chosen few!

For the first five years of recovery my ‘happy place’ was a codependent relationship which I ‘successfully’ managed to sabotage leaving my ex-girlfriend (the one in my dream) no choice but to end the relationship which was the worst pain, still to this day that I have ever experienced. Feeling suicidal and thoughts of revenge filled my head for many months. This confirmed for me that a ‘happy place’ is a fantasy and nothing more! Amazingly, I did not relapse, and I put that down to the fellowship, my therapist, and my sponsor. Despite feeling dissatisfied and ‘separate’ from everyone else I somehow managed to create and maintain a support network which saved my life more than once.

I think my ‘driver’, in those early days was the strong desire to work in the field of addiction and mental health which came to fruition when I was offered a trainee counsellor position and of course I had absolutely no idea that I was letting myself in for by training to be in a ‘thankless’ and often lonely profession that cannot really be described as a ‘happy place’!

I have now been in recovery for over 26 years and my relationship with the idea of a ‘happy place’ has evolved into a mixture of denial, avoidance and occasional anger which is all lightly peppered with a certain amount of grief and an inner child that is not content but has resigned itself to the fact that life is not all about finding a ‘happy place’ but more about honestly evaluating your own expectations around happiness.

I don’t think I could ever be accused of being of a cheerful disposition and, of course my addict totally supports this, but I am capable and driven which, if I choose could be my ‘happy place’ but I don’t think that’s my answer to myself. I think my happy place is embracing that my version of a ‘happy place’ remains distorted, not totally based in reality, and was not meant to be integral to my journey.

‘In essence, focus on what is and not so much on what is not’!