Hot water bottle

Now that is an essential part of my winter kit....
Not only warmth .... but comfort ....

Could do with some of that ...

Loneliness?

I have been thinking about loneliness this afternoon. On one of my other interactive websites, I often say that I am lonely. It is a bit strange, if I think about it, as I have a number of friends and even though I'm not working at the moment, my days are reasonably full.

But the feeling of being lonely persists. Is it connected to 'not belonging'? Is it part and parcel of the Missionary Kid package? The constant moving and saying goodbye. Is that why I can't really trust that my friends are not going to abandon me?

Yet for me, it is more than that. Somehow in the past 7-8 years since I returned from Madagascar, the dislike of my own company has surfaced (maybe it was always there!). I struggle to have the concentration to engage in meaningful activity at home, or the energy and motivation to do the household chores.

I am learning that I have significant 'attachment' issues that stem from a very young age - and I know I experience that lack of attachment as a lostness, a sense of being on an asteroid hurtling into space, far away from human life.

My therapists assure me that what I need to do is to learn to nurture myself - to self-comfort the frightened, lost and lonely me. I am trying to learn to do that - so I went to the nuns - so that I could have a model of what being nurtured is like.

At this stage, I can't imagine feeling differently about myself, or about the 'empty time' that all of us have....