Maybe I really am alone

The thought floats up unbidden while I struggle to articulate my growing grief, somewhat ironically sourced in my new inability to articulate my sense experiences. TBIs are funny like that. Mine acted like an earthquake in the great room that is my mind; carefully curated boxes of vocabulary were knocked off the bookshelves, words scattered all over the floor like flashcards - still available, but it takes a while to find the right one in the decentralized collection. Meanwhile, the space left behind on the shelves quickly filled with amplified and more sensitized senses and emotions. I feel so much more now. I even think in feeling more than language, and that defies articulation. Right brain has turned on.

I keep forgetting that singular experience is the only guarantee in life.

I can sense where someone else needs spaciousness and grace, and I unflinchingly provide it as an act of love and care. Often the other person doesn't realize what I'm doing for them because I don't say it. Then when I ask for care, they refuse. Maybe they find it unreasonable, or it feels like too much to them. I wonder if my silent gift of grace hurts me, because I think they don't realize I'm already giving them what I'm asking for, so it seems like I'm asking for something when I'm not giving anything. The result is that the refusal, even if delivered gently, rocks me with abruptness. The contrast between how readily I give away grace and the withholding of grace from me - it makes me reel. And I feel pain. I feel like maybe I really am alone. Maybe no one will ever give me the care that I want and that I model.

And I think one of my deepest rooted fears, so deep that I can't find the root but only its effects, is that I'll never be understood. Or that I'll always be misunderstood. Or that it is not possible for me to be understood. And if that's true, then that means that I'm creating my own pain by an equally deeply rooted yearning to be understood, that frustratingly eternal optimistic hope that prevents me from remembering that, really, we are all alone. No one will ever be fully understood. No one can ever occupy my being and experience life the way I do. I cannot truly and fully step into someone else's lived intersectional experience and live it as them, so I will never fully understand someone else. It's a guarantee.

I don't know how to find a way to be okay with that. The best I can do today is to hurt from the disappointment of yet another person not understanding me, of them seeing their version of me standing in front of them, asking for grace and care, and turning away. The best I can do is give myself grace and care, while gripped by the unrelenting optimism of hope that someone, somewhere, sometime, is capable of loving the way that I love and will give grace freely, not as a single act but a matter of course.