We came here to serve but most of us have no idea how we are to be serving.

[rva_jeremy]

I'm still trying to figure out how to do that as I'm not 100% happy, I still feel like an outsider so loneliness and I feel I still myself get lost in the grief.

One of the things that Pema Chödrön has helped me start to wrestle with which I find most rewarding is a way to think about our dissatisfaction with ourselves.  That dissatisfaction, it seems, arises from an ideal that we have created in our minds about the "way it should be".  But perhaps there is no "way it should be".  Sometimes we're happy, sometimes we're sad.  Sometimes we're conflicted, sometimes we're certain.  Sometimes we're lonely, sometimes we're not.  Experience is always a contingent endeavor, it seems like: there's nothing solid and concrete beneath it.  It really, really is an illusion.  

If I understand her correctly, we amplify our suffering by putting this whole expectation on top of it about how we should not be suffering.  I know for me often it is the rejection of my feelings as inappropriate that causes the most pain, not the feeling itself.  It's basically a rejection of reality, in my opinion our childish inability to grow up and accept things as they are and ourselves as we are.  Until we do that, we have all sorts of excuses for deferring real work.

A thought just occurred to me: Chödrön (though I'm certain the Confederation sources have mentioned this, too) talks about treating your life the same way you would a dream.  If you go through something rough in a dream, it might make an impact on you, but you don't worry about that specific scenario in the dream.  Instead, you're trying to look for the meaning behind the dream, what the emotional resonance tells you about yourself and your lessons.  You accept the experience of the dream and seek to learn from it, instead of worrying about the fact that you dreamed it and whether you should or should not have dreamed it.  Seems like good advice for how to approach our waking lives, too!

We want things to always be good and never be bad, even though intellectually we know that's impossible.  That's why, I believe, the heart is so material to this work: because until we touch those tender, wounded places that we don't want our experiences to reach, we will always be looking for something better, instead of what's here right now.

You seem like you have a good sense of yourself, Glow, both who you are and what you have to offer.  The pain and distress that you have experienced in the past, far from being a sign of any failures, is instead the greatest strength you have in order to reach others who are also suffering.  I know you know this, just keeping the conversation going.