QC

Last year I thought I had all this feelings stuff figured out. I thought I knew what to do. I thought I was listening to and trusting the wisest part of myself. And then it all fell apart, a little over a year ago.

I've been afraid to talk about the details; the very short, painfully incomplete version is that I learned that someone I trusted was hurting me and people I cared about, and I also learned that I was hurting someone I cared about, in ways I hadn't recognized or understood.

That paralyzed me. I felt guilty, ashamed, disoriented, betrayed. I lost trust in myself. I didn't know what to do. I didn't do much. I shut down emotionally. And, that experience taught me things I desperately needed to know, and I can sometimes manage to be grateful for it.

My heart and my gut hurt thinking about what to write next. I've been holding this for a year and I still don't know what to do with it. I still feel guilty. I still don't know how to trust myself, not really.

What I suspect is that I spent the last several years running on fear, and I spent most of last year running on hope. Hope felt a lot better. It felt incredible! But it turns out hope has all of the same problems as fear.

The shape of my hope was this: all I have to do is this feelings stuff, and then people will love me. And then I won't feel so alone. And then everything will finally be okay.

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1134955528545755136 …

It took the almost complete dissolution of my most important group of friends for me to begin to understand that hope wasn't the answer any more than fear. That, in fact, there was nothing I could do that would make it all okay.