The warmest of welcomes to you Ash. I'm so glad you've come here, to a place where there are so many incredible open minded deeply feeling people who truly come from the heart and from personal experience.
It's a strange thought, 'I don't know how to live' but a reoccurring one I can relate to. As a 52yo gal, it's actually only within the last month or so that I've seriously considered such a basic thought, one that can be so tormenting, so depressing and so anxiety inducing at times. Having managed the ins and outs of depression since my late teens, it's taken a long time to fully wake up to this thought.
It can takes a heck of a lot of work to live well, in ways that bring us to life. There are just too many skills or abilities to name when it comes to living well, some that people don't really talk about all that much. Because they don't talk about them, we can be left thinking there's so much 'wrong' with us. Perhaps the truth is...no one has ever shown us how to live under the circumstances we face. Because new challenges and new circumstances continue to come into play throughout our life, a repetitive 'I don't know how to live, under the circumstances' becomes more understandable.
How does one live through and beyond abuse? How do they gradually delete every depressing degrading mental program/belief system that was put into their head, beginning from when they were little? How does a person come to be a master at feeling, when all they've been taught is how to suppress feelings? How does a person bring out the best in themself when no one has shown them how to do it? There can be so many facets to us such as the adventurer, the upstanding intolerant sense of self that doesn't take depressing poop from abusive people, the zen like aspect that connects us to a sense of peace, the wonderer in us that thrives on curiosity and answers, the sage that sometimes dictates 'You can't do this alone. You need support and guidance' etc. How do we bring the best in our self to life or channel/tap into parts of our self that manage the way forward, under the circumstances? I'm so glad you found the part of you that managed to lead you to cut ties with your dad.
Ash, there'll be so many times in the future where we will not know how to live, how to do life under the circumstances we face. We won't know how to live through a specific type of torment or dark inner dialogue that comes up or stress that feels unbearable. While remembering no one has shown us how to do it, there becomes a need for a guide, someone who can show us how, in relatable ways. The ways must be relatable, otherwise such ways are useless.
