emotional intelligence

My pain is speaking today and rather than wait for it to pass, as I usually do, I'm choosing to write. I feel completely exposed in this, as these are the dark thoughts of my life, the ones I push on, the ones that crush me with incompetence to feel. I feel completely suffocated. I am unable to accomplish, learn, or study any of the things my heart is calling for. I am likely unable to afford to continue on a journey that is important to me, as usual, as has happened with all the journeys I've embarked on myself over these last four years. I continue to move forward toward my own sensitivity, to all the real life places where this existence in this place is too much for me. Places I've grown callus over have to come into exposure and one of those is desperate for motion, flow. Money. Abundance. Proven ability that I am here on this earth for some purpose. Is this the grand adventure? It must be. What is at the heart of this? I feel that I am cast out. I did not take care of my own interests when I was young, in favor of being in love and being able to rest in that. I did not want to worry for my survival but to focus on family, which is what I wanted most as a child, to mother and to serve the sweetest possible forces. I entered a ten year relationship that fed and clothed me, sheltered and provided, but sucked the tender life from my bones, leaving me nearly dead and completely crushed. I don't have confidence in my own abilities. I don't even know what they are. I never chose a career. I wanted to hide from the world, protected in a castle, able to be fully in control of my surroundings, to be rescued. And so I work menial jobs and am constantly pushing on a brick wall of frustration and pain, inside my chest, belly, and pelvis. Why is there no work that I do in the world? Why am I unable to draw meaning into my life and use that meaning as a foundation for self-reliance? I set off on an epic journey last year, sure that I could take my amazing grandmother's work out into the world. She is an extraordinary artist, with the karma to never have made a living from her work. I thought I could move west, connect with the tribe I was sure was there, and introduce her designs into the textile world with a bang. That didn't happen and as I spent the year homeless, with no stable place to land, no community to join, and total incredulousness that this was my life, I began to fold inward. We had small victories with Dharma Collextive but the truth was that I couldn't afford lunch, never mind afforded the creation of a stable space from which I could work. My heart just shatters for this. From the moment of my divorce, when I consciously traded security for the possibility of a happy life, I have been hit with a series of life events that constantly have me checking in to see whether I still want to be here, on this planet, in this life. What my responsibility is to this, as far as I can tell, is to stay alive and keep going. As each day passes I mourn a little for what could have been, in a happier life. I am a true introvert, and a shy one at that, and that has been picked on in the ugliest way, by people who believe that sweet means weak, and that shy means closed down, when none of that is remotely true. I am stronger than steel and as open as the night sky. I know I am not this sad thing, but I reject her, and so she stays, clouding my vision, adding weight. My heart is heavy for all the time I have lost, all the years that have been wasted. I wish to make up for this. To work in the world with joy, to serve. I realize that I am so isolated that I don't have the life skills that I see others using, I simply don't know how to get things done. My instinct is to go inward, as deeply as I can, into my meditation practice, into not wanting anything at all from or in the world. It seems to be in moving towards desires that I face the wall of impotence. I share these things with only two people, because I'm afraid that if I share my despair with you I will face judgement and shame. This comes from experience with this, as well as a lifetime of being a bewildered introvert in an extrovert's country. For most of my life I've been shamed by ignorance, by those who are not comfortable with pain, who see it as unnatural and something to be rid of, and I have taken all that on. A personality was created that uses a sophisticated defense system when under perceived attack and that has gotten me absolutely nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I was never able to grow up where there was allowance for my sensitivity, never mind it being looked at as a gift and encouraged by those who knew what kind of strength was on the other side of the coin. I was never safe. We live in a world of absolute stupidity, of total insanity in the belief in the absolutes of human ego and human mind. Our emotional intelligence has withered. I want to be part if the reblossoming of a kind of relational sensitivity that hasn't been seen yet in the world we know of, except in small pockets. I want to share the gifts I don't believe I have with those who may see in me what I can't see. I know my emotional capability, I know my capacity for love, I know my own stability in this body in this earth. What I don't know is how to make my way in this world. I will state it plainly, to show myself that I am no longer going to be concerned that if I reveal this, I will be labeled by it, and all that is strong and clear and beautiful and wild and bright and able and sacred and precious about me will be looked over and discarded. I feel that I am worth nothing, that I produce nothing of value, that I never will. From this place, the self-hatred is extraordinary, real, visceral, and powerful. Just because this is only a part of me doesn't make it any less real and powerful to experience. Regardless of what I know to be true, this too exists inside of me, this too is experienced by this incarnation. I am thirty-seven years old and there are many reasons why I feel I am a failure. I am honoring the process if growing by acknowledging the wholeness of my experience publicly. I am a writer first, before any other vocation, and often it is the only way I can communicate, unless I'm certain that you can hear and hold my heart. I care nothing for the ego and still I have to face my own, and continue to let it scream what it wants to at me and at itself and at the world, and pick up every bit of my discernment each day, every shred of solace and fruit from all the other faculties of my own extraordinary capacity to be whole, and keep on moving, keep on coming alive. I have to understand that those who can't see me just can't see me. It's time to completely discard the burden of taking in as true, what was always just the unverified opinions of those who could not see. I am walking across this bridge as though down a narrow plank, from one great ship to another on a stormy sea. The ship I am leaving is burning and I'm the one who set it alight. The ship I move towards is a crystalline paradise and so simply, I just can't see that I am supported on all sides by hands that serve both the burning and the rebuilding, that I could not possibly fall, and so am desperately trying to maintain my own balance, still certain that if I let go, I'll never make it and will be swallowed by the sea.