I guess I have come to accept that not only will I never be appreciated in life, but that I will probably never be TOLERATED by anyone.  This is sad to me but understandable.

The book I am writing, Mindful Listening, is designed to address this challenge that people have with other people, particularly people like me who speak our minds and who find judgment as a positive thing in life.

It is somewhat painful to write this, a pain that I not only accept but appreciate.  I feel the pain because I care about people.  Yet, I don’t feel trapped in this pain; I recognize I always have a choice.

I am feeling loneliness and loneliness is something I have written about before as being a CHOICE.  I have pointed out that it is silly to feel lonely given that there are 7+ billion people on the planet.  The only reason a person is feeling lonely is because they do not have the courage to reach out and connect with people.

Yet, at this time, I feel that I have TRIED to reach out and connect with people, and at every turn I have been rejected and shunned by those people.

Behind my loneliness is my feeling the pain of people’s fear they have of themselves and their reactions what I stimulate in them.  I want to feel this loneliness, this pain, for it connects me to people and helps to motivate me to find a way to help people.

I rarely dream of interacting with people any more.  If I do I imagine I am pissing off people (POP) as a talk radio DJ once described it.  To me, POP is about upsetting people, upsetting their slumber, waking them up.  I imagine that someday I will go back to public speaking where I intentionally say things that will upset someone, if not everyone, and then point out that only those who are asleep can be upset, and that my book, Mindful Listening, shows people how to develop the ‘ears to hear’ and that will enable them to ‘overcome the world’ as Jesus talked about.

One challenge with this ‘dream’ is that in practice when I do such things there is a lot of animosity directed at me and I still have a habit of reacting to that animosity with tension or resistance, which creates a lot of discomfort for me.  One benefit of the practice is that I get to work on my skills of loving myself IN SPITE of the animosity directed toward me.  Sometimes I feel intimidated by the challenge and other times I feel inspired by the benefit.  When I remember to practice loving myself then I choose the inspiration over the intimidation.

Of course, I just did this as I was writing this.

Practice is repetition and building a habit.  I get lots of practice living with the person I am living with.  She most often does not like me, or at least right now does not like me much, so she is constantly judging and rejecting me.  So I get lots of practice being at peace with judgment and rejection and embracing the habits of Emotional Self Care or loving myself.

I am so grateful to the universe that I was privileged enough to be able to wake up and recognize the value of things like Emotional Self Care and the value of loving myself.  I can see how others might not see or understand the value of such things, particularly as they seek out emotional care from others. For them, relationships are all about finding others who will stroke their egos and comfort them both physically and emotionally.

Yet, they cannot see nor will they even look at the inherent fear they feel at the thought that those people can and probably will reject them or leave them at some point in their life.  Although this may not be relevant to them in the immediate situation they still subconsciously think about it and carry with them the fear of this scenario.

Most people live in denial of this but it can be exposed if one talks to them about it and their reaction is often powerful and very negative.  Words are such a powerful tool for exposing people inherent dishonesty, particularly their dishonesty with themselves.

Since I am often one who sees these incongruities in a person’s life, and one who sometimes points them out, people find that being around me is intolerable. Sometimes I don’t even have to say anything for a person to recognize that I have realized their incongruities, which makes them uncomfortable with me.

After a while of being around this discomfort and associating that we me people no longer want to even tolerate my presence.  I wish I could find people who are like me, for I would love to be around someone who would care enough to point out my incongruities, the incongruities that are inherently causing me internal discomfort.