Chest pain
Grief mixed with loneliness is a weird feeling. I was on the train, thinking about my future husband and thinking about a situation that does not exist, a situation where I am mentally stable and mental stability comes from a peace within, not outside terrors. For so long I have lived with chronic loneliness that it is almost unheard of for me not to have my daily chest pains, its the loneliness. Loneliness is a physical pain for me and has been for a while. Add that to grief, which doesn’t hit me everyday (in a bad way) but when it does I am still the distraught daddy’s girl without her daddy who ran to his picture and screamed and cried when I heard he’d passed into eternity. How odd that these things do not get better…ever. I was told you just get better at coping. My biggest fear is that I will forget my father’s face, or his laugh, or on which side of his face his dimple was on. I worry that my kids will never know his voice, his stories his jokes. And that on their mother’s side they will have no black role models in terms of what a man should be like. I know I have been robbed of 25-30 years of joy, jokes, counsel, book recommendations and political conversations, and that hurts.
But on a daily basis it is loneliness I live with. I spend most of my time daydreaming… i.e. living in a world where I have a husband, someone who takes care of me. Its something I desperately need. I’d be a fool if I said otherwise. But I’m so often in pain its actually a rarity to not be. It’ll get worse over winter, and I hope it will get better once I get a boyfriend, then husband but every time it happens, I scares me how deprived I am, how sad my existence is, that I am in such want of crumbs of decent treatment and affection that I actually live with a physical pain that no one else has. I realise I have no standards for what decent treatment is, I know when boundaries have been crossed, but not when a man has gone over and above, because I have no frame of reference. I know my love language is acts of service and gifts but have no one to lavish that love on. So instead I walk around in pain. Knowing better than to go for the first person to come my way but desperately craving affection. The theme of my summer is that I need “Big love.” The big Disney love, where the man proves absolutely his love, my parents had it so don’t tell me it doesn’t exist. Don’t tell me to “settle for less” either. Already done. Almost killed me.
Safety starts within my chest, and I guess what I am going through is the physcial feeling of heartbreak. It scares the hell out of me, as I have said several times. Loneliness is more deadly than smoking and I can’t say that it doesn’t cross my mind regularly “what if this is what kills me?” My dad died of stress, some could say heartache. What if this is taking 11 minutes off my life everytime I feel these chest pains? What if I meet the love of my life and die early after a few years of happiness because of all the suffering? Its not paranoia, its a real thing. I lived a very unsafe life from adolescence and I wonder sometimes if it has done me permanent brain damage. I’ve always wanted my cortisol levels checked. Why? I want to know if its killing me. I have great reason to be afraid. I lived in an African household with first daughter issues, failed siblings, priest’s daughter, provider, lived through an abusive relationship, divorce and then the death of a parent. The last 2 were during a pandemic. Its not unreasonable to believe that this could kill me.
The only cure for my predicament is a good husband. Standards are so low its frightening.
A man doesn’t need to do a lot for me, and that terrifies me. I need to be looked after for a few years. Really looked after because I’ve been deeply unwell. Its not a matter of being bought flowers, its a matter of opening doors, it is a matter of hugs, emotional needs being met, consistency, serving me (I’ll reciprocate) for the rest of my life… and maybe in 30-40 years I can look back at this time and think. “That was then its sad that you were young, pretty and so fragile. my risk of dying from a broken heart is 0 now”
Now my risk of dying of a broken heart in the next 5 years is my number 1 concern.
Grace and Courage
Annetta Mother Smith.