There was a day last year when I was walking on Blue Stack outside Donegal. Me and my jaunty pace, my hat, my backpack and the map. The map! The map was drawn by the local Irish walking enthusiasts….it was a series of lines and dashes and arrows with one reference to something I never found. The hostel manager who told me about the walking trail said to follow the markers but the markers were all the same no matter how many were at the junctions….and none matched the map. I was all alone as usual, can never find anyone to go walking with me. I don’t have good discernment when it comes to finding people to journey with….but at that moment discernment didn’t matter.

I could have been lost. I probably was by some definition but I was just misplaced. I didn’t know where I was in relation to a reference point but I was somewhere with birds and tall plantations of pine tree, mist and water drops hanging off leaves, even a lonely goat on a precipice on the edge of a peat bog….no lonely goat herd though (sorry it brought to mind that Sound of Music song in the moment). My mobile phone which might have been helpful: out of range of a tower to find out. So I kept walking. What else could I do….someone knew where I went walking but she wouldn’t think to look for me. neither would anyone else. Over there no one seems to have the same concerns about going walk on a mountain as we do over here.

I wasn’t lost just misplaced. i didn’t understand where I was. i and never been there before. Now is like that. It feels so often that I am alone here. If I get lost no one will notice. It isn’t an emotional statement it is just true. No one will notice and certainly there will be no rescue party. I am venturing into an exit plan from my past job with lots of skills but no idea where to sell them. There are things I know and understand about my capacity to cope with pressure and big groups now. i even understand that I have boundaries and so often I let them be crossed by me and other other people I didn’t understand that I had feelings about what was happening.

Like being misplaced on that amazing mountain. it didn’t matter. Such beauty held me spellbound. It displaced the moments of anxiety and not knowing when I would find something recognisable, displaced it with vivid memory of sky almost as blue as my kitchen walls and warm sun that made the air wet as it called the moisture of the early morning back to the clouds. Green as emerald as the story books portray and tiny brown birds in the hedgerows. Misplaced and alone in that landscape displayed over ancient mountains was to me that day felt safer than walking into a room full of strangers to join a group.  It felt less alone than walking in a city full of people whose eyes are closed off.

This new place for me is empty right now. I have people who care about me but they are all off finding their own lives. That is fine, it is as it is and for me as it has always been. I want to find a life I fit in with people whose eyes are open to see me and share some of the journey together with me in person. I want to find a way of earning my living expenses that is kind and happy and makes others happier along the way. So far I get to be happier most days than I have been doing what I did before. Even in the middle of the night when I am full of feeling and huddled into a pillow hoping one day a person might be there to hold, even then I am more alive than before. I am feeling.

Most people are not sure about feelings. And certainly I have not been allowed to have my own. Always told that other people are far more important than me I had to choose the right feeling response to the situation, not allowed to have my own and have it respected. Some think maybe I need to be healed so I feel and think like them about what is happened around and in me. Some think i should talk to a psychologist because unlike them I am broken somehow. neither is right response for me. I have to have these feelings and know them. They happen more deeply and sometimes it is scary but if I don’t allow myself to know how I feel about a situation and respect the response there is no going forward there is only going back. After hers of being told there is something wrong with me when there hasn’t been, I am fine as I am and new requires new response and new awareness of what the place is that I am in each day.

One day i will get to journeys with someone who loves me and doesn’t want anything from me but to look at the sky and the trees with me. One day there will be someone who wants to go to the same place as me. One day there will be someone with time who gifts it to me some days to be in my place with me and they like it so much they ask to come back again. I don’t mind going to other people’s places it is just I want for someone to come to mine too.

Anyway. Last night I was misplaced and today i still am but I have memory of a beautiful place that it brings back. I can smile at the memory of the beauty. if I can remember then I still exist which last night I wasn’t sure of.