398. Something Has To Change

She feels lack in everything that happens to her. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an experience she chooses for herself or one that is required of her. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something she wants to avoid or something she desperately desires. Always there is some unnamed thing missing, which means all of her experiences are tainted with dissatisfaction.

What is missing, she does not know, but she knows it’s missing and this causes her incredible frustration. Nothing ever feels as full or enjoyable as she thinks it should. At the very best, she feels a little happiness here or there. But she knows there is also a place beyond happiness, a place somehow more full than happiness, and maybe this is what she needs.

She thinks this must be a place free of pain. For that is how her frustration manifests, like a pain that cannot be placed, a pain that has almost become part of her existence itself. She thinks this pain has to be eliminated for everything to feel right. She wants the satisfaction of total rightness. That would be the opposite of whatever she is now. Now, nothing feels right. Now, there is always lack.

Something has to change. Something about the way she is or the way she is living. She knows this, so she tries to introduce changes. She tries to meet new people, to go where she has never gone, to participate in new activities. But none of this does anything for her. She remains the same no matter where she goes or what she does or who she sees.

Still, she hasn’t given up. The change she needs must just be a deeper one, she thinks, a kind of change that she does not yet understand. The possibility of a deeper change is more than a little scary, because she doesn’t know if she even can change to that degree. And yet, when she feels a little braver than usual, a little clearer than usual, she thinks she might just be able to lift herself into an entirely different way of being.