Shipwrecked in life

I have recently been experiencing the breakdown of my marriage. It was a marriage I was deeply proud of, a marriage I had carefully built and nurtured over many years. I am left feeling completely shipwrecked, run aground and my bearings lost. The awful thing is there is no one to blame, just the gradual encroachment of circumstances and events, with directions chosen which have led to here.

I used to feel I was a very resilient person, having met many major difficulties in life, and having been through a divorce in the past, and the separation from my children. But at present, in this shipwrecked condition, I have to admit that I am deeply vulnerable, anxious and wondering if there can be some eventual peace and stability in my life. I don’t know how to re-build myself. Every direction seems impossible.

At present I am living in someone else’s house, and feeling somewhat homeless – having had my own home for nearly forty years. I am out of work and finding it impossible to be employed, despite having been employed almost without a break for 45 years. Perhaps being sixty has something to do with it. But it may also be that I have walked into the side-streets in which I exist at the moment, and am not sure how to find my way back.

I look about me and see there are many other people like myself – shipwrecks through one thing or another – a wrong turning, a choice ill made, a parting that wounded. I wonder how, with all our cleverness, we as human beings create such difficult lives and environments.

Even offered love doesn’t come easy. There is too much fear, too much pain about past love, too much conflict about what has been and what might be. I am broken in so many ways my bones ache.

If you are shipwrecked also, I do look at you with soft eyes. I am not reaching out, that may be difficult for you to take. I raise a hand though, as a companion on the beach.

Crusoe.