Over the last few months, I've been in regular conflict with close family. It brings up feelings of isolation, feeling deeply misunderstood, invalidated, dismissed, or ridiculed. I feel so sensitive to the undertones and facial expressions people make and very hurt by what feels like insensitivity and ego manipulations. While I am experiencing this, it is painful and irritating. I do tend to feel victimized by it and call out the situations as I experience them - though it feels like speaking to others in a foreign language...it leads to more feelings of isolation, being attacked, misunderstood, and generally "othered".

I can get caught in communicating the impact and my feelings and in these relational experiences not necessarily take ownership of why I am creating this. This stream of posts is a good reminder for me. I feel intense headache and burning in my eyes, tightness in my solar plexus and my jaw and so much frustration at feeling out of place - deeper than that is the feeling of not belonging and not being seen or understood and that what I feel and think don't matter. I have been trying to remedy it and get others to fix their behavior rather than drop fully into how I feel which is the cause of it's creation in the first place.

Sychronistically I have been trying to grow annual veggies here in my garden and everyday I go out and some unseen critters (probably a few determined squirrels) have uprooted or eaten everything I've planted. Each day I have gone out and reinvented a new version of reinforcement for the plants. I've learned how to build many structures and persisted in my efforts to protect the plants, but now I wonder if the sun will even get through enough? This feels related to my other experiences but not entirely clear how yet...something to do with being uprooted, and creating protective structures and risking getting too closed off from the light in the attempts to protect.