flying through darkness

Last Updated on April 15, 2025

I’m 2 hours into a 5.5 hour flight across the country. The light out my window is waning as we fly into tonight’s darkness. I watched a movie for the first 2 hours called, We Live In Time. It had me shaking, crying, and trembling with grief for what I’ve never had and will likely never have. 

I watch a young couple on the small screen a few feet from my face. They meet, are drawn to each other, and fall in love despite each other’s rough edges and past wounds. They choose each other over and over through hard times, coming together and doing their lives side by side and intertwined over the years no matter what happens. They have a child. They are incredibly strong, achingly beautiful, and even when she dies and leaves her daughter and husband behind, I still ache to have been any character in that story where the love was so committed, palpable and obvious. 

I shake as tears roll down my face because I’m 47 now and even though I do not want to have a child, never wanted to be a mom, and chose against it when the opportunity arose twice, I can still feel sad that it’s no longer a possibility for me as my periods have stopped. I still grieve never being part of a love solid enough that it would have allowed me to consider wanting to create a child and a family. I ache for the imagined warm glow of being desired and part of a connection that could become a foundation I could trust and depend upon. I cry and struggle to breathe because I don’t know how I missed this window of my life or if it’s my fault or if there’s something I could have done to have created a different result. 

I feel the pangs of being a lone adult in the middle of my life staring down the path ahead considering what I will do with all of my time by myself. I decidedly do not want pity from anyone about my situation. I am under no illusion that being in partnership would solve my deep ache for connection or even make me happier than I am today. 

Still, I get to explore all shades of all the ways it’s different to be a single 47-year old, almost 48-year old, woman with no children, no past relationships of significance, and no measure for understanding what partnership is truly like beyond what I witness in my parents and friends. 

I’m coming from 5 nights with a friend across the country, where I spent 3 nights in her home with her family. She and her partner worked as a team on many issues, shared the tasks of cooking, cleaning, parenting, and keeping a household together. I can’t imagine what that would feel like to find myself in such a situation. 

I move through the world everyday seemingly a functional adult woman on the surface, but I’m furiously paddling under the surface to cope with the weight of how it all feels inside. 

I think all the time about how overweight and uncomfortable I am in my body. I try to take up as little space as possible in the shame of how my inability to control my body, my appetite, my desire, is so massively obvious by my obese body. 

It feels so vulnerable to be so fat, feel so judged and pitied, and the object of disgust for those who would never allow themselves to be so huge. For years I’ve wished that someone would carve all my flesh and fat away like a thanksgiving turkey and just leave my bones. I wonder if I could somehow make my body thin enough, if I would allow myself to be loved, if it would make a difference, if that is the thing I’d need to change in order to be attractive enough to be in a partnership that I would be able to relax into. All of that energy in action just manifested in an eating disorder that nearly took over my life over 2-3 decades.

I think that it’s my fault for never feeling good enough to be myself. I’ve always been lying and trying to be a person that someone might choose to love. Really I’m no one they even know. I create loops for myself to get stuck in. I never even give anyone a chance to know me until they’ve already decided against me and then I begin to try to convince them or mold myself into the person I think they wanted so that they might look back with regret. 

I’ve never even been at the starting line of a true relationship. I have no idea what it feels like. I’ve been a coward and hidden under my fat suit all these years knowing that no one would want me like this. 

I’ve slowly let go of the idea that I will change and become someone else. I have the option to make the most of the time I’ve been given and stop even considering or longing for, or thinking about the kind of love I always wanted. Each day it feels farther away and I come to terms with the fact that I was never even close at all. Even if there were moments when I seemed lovable or an option to someone, the hollowness underneath whoever I was trying to be must have kept them from ever feeling I was someone to trust. 

I could write all day about this sad story. I’ve created a million versions of sentences trying to convince anyone who reads this of how unworthy I am, and what a fuck up I’ve been, and how lamely I’ve wasted my time only to be the most benign human being who never captured the heart of any potential partner. Somehow I feel the self-indulgent need to dwell in this feeling. I need to feel seen for how hard and heavy it’s been. How lonely to keep inside the shame I live underneath all the time. 

I want to be brave, to tell my whole truth, to be more vulnerable than I’ve ever been before. Not being loved by men cannot be the deepest pain that I have though. It absolutely cannot be the thing that defines me. There has to be more. It’s just the tool I’ve used to distract myself from a much more powerful story that I have yet to find words for.  

I will find a way to live and tell this better story, to share something much more compelling about myself. I refuse to let myself only be part of this sad, lonely story of shame and ugliness. At the same time, I need help getting out of the quicksand I’ve fallen into. The stuck-ness I feel in this story is real and intensely powerful.  

I remember to pray, “Please help me. Please Universe, answer my prayer to be seen, supported and loved in a way where I can feel what it feels like to relax into and trust another human without the fear of always being abandoned.”

The truer prayer is, “Help me be this for myself. Help me be what I need.”

In this moment, I’m flying back towards my life, my cats, and my home. I’m heading back to where I hide out in my house, behind my screens, and continue being a good enough person to get by day to day, year to year, for all this time. Many people like me and want me around. I am capable of being loving and supportive. I am a very good friend. I have a uniquely, soulful way of being in the world. I like to champion people who I recognize as being receptive and available for my abundant love energy that doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I feel I can make good use of my life by doing what I can to inspire others towards peace, self-acceptance, and self-love/self-worth. 

Many times it’s been pointed out to me how I don’t often reach out, don’t ask for help even when I am drowning, and just muscle through whatever hard, heartbreaking thing I am feeling or embodying. 

One morning, I sat on my couch drinking my tea and watching a man who I wanted desperately to love me do yoga in front of me. I already knew clearly that there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d ever want to turn towards me for partnership or create anything sustainable with me. I couldn’t speak or stop the tears that streamed down my face. I have no idea if he even noticed my tears. He finished his morning yoga and left going back into his life away from me. I realized that I don’t really know or understand anything about him at all. I don’t know why I’ve spent years longing for his attention and waiting for him to realize that I’m someone worthy of his love. As if being worthy matters at all in matters of the heart. 

I cannot stop feeling sorry for myself. I do not know how to force myself to move on. I won’t ever let anyone see this, but I dig the knife in deeper and twist it around in my own wounds confirming that I am an unlovable piece of shit who should probably die sooner than later and stop taking up space. 

Who is the person inside of me who thinks that she is someone valuable and lovable, who writes well and inspires people? I don’t know who that is right now or how to find myself in the midst of my hardest feelings.

In reality, I’m farting on the plane and it fucking stinks. I’m having a hot flash. I have to pee, but I can’t deal with waking up my seat mate whose breath smells like a dumpster. The line for the 2 tiny toilets is 5 humans long and I can’t deal with how cramped everything is. Everyone else also has to pee.

Ugh. 1 hour, 25 min left of this flight. I’ve been wiring for an hour so far and it feels as if I’ve yet to even begin to address what really matters. 

What do I want to write about out? What do I really want to say? 

I want to be valued for who I really am. I want to share the sensitivity and depth I’ve been blessed with. I want to be a voice for women like me so that we can feel seen, have hope, and know that we are not alone, not crazy, and not powerless at all.

I want to write the words the can lead me from the hell of my darkest thoughts back into the light of who I truly am capable of being.