A bull in the china shop – and I feel shattered

It seems like so much of what I write about these days has to do with feelings. But when you try to suppress your feelings for as long as I had, that tends to be the overwhelming day-to-day experience as you come out of it.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m doing better, feeling stronger. I set goals, I work toward them, I achieve them. I can roll with things. I focus on the positive. I am changing.

But every once in a while, still – STILL – someone can say something unexpected to me, or in a wrong tone, and just that fast, it’s like I’m a fragile china place setting from under which the tablecloth has been yanked. Just that quickly, my emotions turn on me, drowning me.

Sometimes the trigger is a new landmine in the divorced parent tango. Sometimes it's intergenerational conflict on the homefront, age-old clashes about respect, responsibility, trust and boundaries. Sometimes it's normal (?) teenage drama, or grade-school whininess. And sometimes it's just an aching loneliness in a house – a life – full of people.

How do people walk around every day with all of these raw feelings inside? It’s exhausting.

And some days, it just seems to come at you from all sides. Those days are the hardest.

I am the bull in the china shop. I am clumsy and don't know how to act or react. Sometimes I just smash around within these feelings, lost.