When I was young, I experienced needs, feelings, fears, and sensitivities that did not seem commonly shared, well supported, or even allowed. It seems as though that lack of care and support somehow was framed as reflective only of my unworthiness and unlovability. I am rejecting that.

I seemed more affected by things than many of the people around me. My reactions, worries, questions, and needs did not appear to have a place within the common experience.

I did not question the environment.

I questioned myself.

When Feelings Felt Dangerous

What I recall vividly is not only the feelings themselves, but what followed.

If I was hurt, afraid, overwhelmed, hungry, lonely, or needed something outside what was expected or understood, there seemed to be an unspoken cost.

I wasn’t just sad. I was afraid and ashamed of my sadness.

I wasn’t just hungry. I was fearful of being hungry.

I wasn’t just anxious. I was anxious about being anxious.

The feeling and the consequence fused together.

The vulnerability and the diminishing or banishing response.

What I Made It Mean

For years, I thought my depression and anxiety were the problem.

What I recognize now is that much of my anxiety and despair may have flowed from anticipating what would happen when I had a need, feeling, preference, limit, or reaction for which there seemed no allowance.

What I learned to believe was that there was something wrong with me.

That I was less deserving of care, understanding, protection, patience, or support.

Not because anyone sat me down and said so.

Because that seemed to be the conclusion supported by the evidence available to me.

Care, belonging, protection, and support felt conditional.

When those things remained absent, the most obvious explanation was that I had somehow failed to qualify for them.

It still feels as though the only thing my family and I agreed on was my lack of value. Once I stopped agreeing to that, the system collapsed and I was said to have opted out.

That experience shaped how I understood myself, relationships, and what I could expect from other people.

Searching for an Exit

The problem was that I could not stop being myself.

I could not stop feeling what I felt or experiencing the world through the nervous system and sensitivities unique to me.

I attempted every means of escape.

Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.

They solved nothing. They offered interruption.

A way to step away from the exhausting experience of being conscious inside a life organized around fear, pain, and loss.

Being blacked out, distracted, consumed, or off the grid often felt preferable to being fully present.

What If I Wasn’t the Problem?

For most of my life, I assumed the missing piece was worthiness.

I believed care, understanding, protection, and support existed, and that my task was to make myself deserving enough to receive them.

What never occurred to me was that those things might not have been available in the ways I needed them.

That their absence was not evidence of my lack of value.

I don’t have conclusions.

Only questions.

What if I spent years trying to solve the wrong problem?

What if I mistook the absence of something for evidence of my worth?

What if the story was not that I was unworthy?

What if the story was that I was unmet?

And what if I had been baptized in the waters of being unmet by people who would not meet me, and came to understand that as truth, connection, love, and home?

What if those are not the same thing at all?