Feeling Lonely

 
Today I am feeling lonely.

And yet I am not alone. I’ve been around people all day. Funny how that is.

At first, I was tempted to label what I’m feeling as “depression”. Cause, hey, a girl with Bipolar Disorder does indeed get depressed.

But then, I thought, “Hey Jennifer, let’s really, really think about this.” . It’s easy to label unpleasant emotions as depression, but that really doesn’t serve me in the end.

For a long, long while, I’ve been working at discerning my emotions. I have a lot of difficulty identifying how I’m feeling. I don’t well understand subtle differences in what it is to be anxious vs. panicky, or know how to differentiate between being content vs. happy. I’d look at you in bewilderment if you were to ask me whether I was more distressed or afraid about a situation. Fortunately, my *amazing* therapist has been helping me with this rather large task by offering me ideas for the names of emotions and by encouraging me to actually feel them in my body. 

I find this to be extremely difficult. In fact, I get all squirmy when my therapist challenges me to tell her how I’m feeling. It’s just terribly uncomfortable and feels well, wrong to talk about my emotions. I get the same physical discomfort when I touch popsicle sticks or newsprint. It’s just icky. It makes me so uneasy that I find myself trying to trick my therapist into changing topics. But she sees through my sneakiness. Of course she does!

Interestingly, one of my favourite magazines recently introduced me to the term “alexithymia”. As it happens, this word was coined in the year of my birth (it was created for ME!) and gives a name to lifelong mystery for me. Wikipedia says alexithymia is:

a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions; from the Greek, literally meaning “without words for emotions”.

Luckily, I’ve got a great set of tools and supports to help me learn how to actually manage this lack of knowledge. It’s a surprisingly steep learning curve, but I’m working on it…

For now, I still feel lonely, but I’m not running away from it. In fact, I’ve pinpointed the location of the loneliness in my body – it’s hanging out in my shoulders and chest.  There, I said it… Bonus points!