I feel like I don’t belong to anyone or anywhere. I could be around everyone I love and everyone who loves me, and I still have an empty feeling inside of me. I don’t know if something is missing, or if I’m doing something wrong, but I know something’s not right. I feel like I’m such a waste of space. I don’t deserve love, or to be happy, do what I want, and have the people I do in my life. I always find such a negative way to look at things, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The worst part is that this feeling is a cycle, it happens every year around this time. This time of year, I get into such a depressed mood, and it only goes downhill from here. I don’t know how to stop it and I hate myself for it. No matter what I do, I can’t please anyone, or do anything right. Every time I open my mouth, I immediately regret it. So many people try to make me feel better and say it’s okay, and it makes me feel awful, I feel like such a burden. I love all of the supportive people in my life, including everyone in this community, and I am beyond grateful for the loving and kind words, I just feel like a waste of space. I feel like my comments don’t matter to those around me, and no one wants me around.
Isn’t that the worst part? To feel terrible despite all of the support you know you have around you? It makes you feel totally and completely unsave-able, unhelpable…totally beyond hope…
I know I’ve felt that way in my life – I went through the 12 steps for my addiction to porn and didn’t get total freedom. I felt embarrassed – this thing that works for everyone else didn’t work for me. I felt beyond hope too.
When you’re going through this period, in particular in this season of feeling it more intensely, you’ve got to do something different. The problem isn’t needing more support, the problem is actually needing to change the way you look at yourself.
YOU BELIEVE you are a waste of space, and so you SEE yourself as a waste of space. You can’t receive others’ love because it gets filtered out when you believe that about yourself. You literally erase their love and block it from coming into your life because it doesn’t make sense with the thing YOU believe is true about yourself – that you’re a waste of space…and so you see all of the little things that people may or may not be intending for you…but you interpret that “look” they gave, or the pause before they reply, or the twitch they made as evidence of your worthlessness…you fill in the blanks as “it’s my fault” as opposed to realizing there are other factors at play…
If you want to stop feeling lonely, you have to do work on your own heart to change that. Because until then, you can have ALL the support in the world and still feel completely alone!! Even though you’re not.
So where did this all start? Where did you start feeling this way? What were some of the painful situations you faced in your past that started to form this identity of yours as a waste of space? If you are up for the challenge, it would be good to write back some events you’ve gone through in your life and just start to notice the patterns – what did you feel about yourself? What did others say or how did they make you feel from what they did or didn’t do? How did you react? What did you feel you needed to do differently in order to prevent that pain from happening / what did you feel you needed to change in order to be loved?
If you can piece together that understanding, you can see more clearly the lens that you look at yourself through and understand WHY you have that lens and where it came from. Then, you can start to address it more clearly. You can ask your supportive people to speak INTO that lens, and help you adjust the way you see yourself and the world when you feel like you’re looking through it. They can help you find a lens to replace it with! To look at the world from a new perspective. And even help you change back time and time again – the better you can identify it, the better you can get help fro changing it, and the more love you’ll allow yourself to receive.
Because the truth is you ARE loved. Right now! Hoping soon you will see that 
-Nate