dead and alive.

i don't know what i'm doing with myself. i'm alive but dead inside. i'm lonely. like a lot and i'm not talking about i-need-a-boyfriend-lonely. i don't believe in love.
everything just seems so hard. i don't know what i feel half of the time and when i do know what i'm feeling i don't know how to cope with them. i'm hurting and i don't know how to reach out to people. i feel so much pain. how long do i wait? how long can i wait? i can't go through this once more. :/

Im sorry your feeling so lost butterfly maybe you could talk to someone about this they might be able to help you or relate to what your going through, I hope you feel better soon (((butterfly)))

Hi Butterfly, Welcome to PC!

Coming from my own experience, it sounds like the decision you've made to 'not believe in love', could be what lies at the root of your not being able to feel a true sense of yourself.

Love is the feeling that establishes a baseline for all our other emotions. If we are able to truly enjoy something, anything, then we are also able to define what we dont enjoy. Im using 'enjoy' as another term for love here.

Even if its a pet, or a favorite food, if you can say 'I love this" truthfully to yourself, at least for that one statement, you have a solid foundation about how you feel in at least one instance. The feeling can give you pleasure, excitement, a sense of belonging, self understanding, and a solid position to stand within about a particular issue. If you are unable to find even one thing that gives you pleasure, then you are un-anchored to any positive feelings, and it will be hard to name exactly what you feel and connect to within yourself unless its something you dislike.

Without love as an anchor, you might grab onto any emotional feeling and substitute that feeling instead as your emotional anchor. Lets imagine that instead of love, you feel dislike for something, maybe its the way your neighbor annoys you at 7am by running his lawnmower. For that duration of time, until some other emotion takes its place, you feel unhappy, irritated, angry, and, instead of love, these other feelings become your anchoring emotion.

You can see where possessing the 'sub' emotions leave you in a place mentally where you havent spent any time with improving your mood or enhancing your experience of life. Instead, you feel miserable and you wonder how to feel better, but, you've already discounted love, so in what way might you try to find more meaning and enjoyment in life?

Lets say you decide, since love isnt an option, that you'll be happy enough if you can create contentment. To create contentment for yourself, you'll still need to counter effect the annoyed feelings with something positive, like, relaxation. You can meditate yourself into a state of mind where you've successfully replaced the annoyed feelings with feelings of non annoyance. It isnt a feeling of love, but its an absence of annoyance, and you go about your day believing that things are all better now, and they probably will be for a time, until, another annoying thing comes along your way. Then you'll be back at being annoyed. What to do? Meditate again? Isnt that a never-ending, non fulfilling cycle?

By giving love to something, which really is nothing more than giving of yourself to something outside yourself, you build a bridge to something greater. When you give of yourself and that giving is accepted, appreciated, used, you can then feel a sense of satisfaction that your life does have a meaning and a purpose, and a direction. The empty is filled, the annoyance is removed, and you feel you have a new power that previously didnt exist for you. You have the power to lend healing to the dis-heartened with little more than your positive intention. Dark becomes light, night becomes day.

For some, for myself, learning to love again has been the path that makes life have meaning again. It isnt easy, it takes a lot of self examination, patience with self, and self acceptance. We need to be in a strong place within ourselves to persevere all the obstacles standing in our way. Start small. See if you can love something simple. If you can, hopefully that feeling will arouse in you the determination to protect and nurture that one thing you love and those feelings in turn will waken other feelings you've closed yourself off to. In time, the disorientation will lift and you'll discover that there are simply too many things to feel love for, that you are still inadequate in many ways, you dont have enough time to be everywhere you'd like to be, and you'll be able to love yourself for the contribution you're able to make in improving your own condition, and that of all other people you share space with. Better times for all.

A good therapist or good friend can help you with all this. If your feelings are deep rooted, and I suspect they are, I would recommend a professional.

Best of luck, I hope this helps, if not, keep searching, the answer is somewhere where you can find it.

Have you seen a doctor? Are you on medication? Consider getting a therapist if you haven't already.

I've been there, things do change, slowly but they change.

Phreak