Loneliness is hard to endure, when you first start to accept it. It's hard to be lonely, and it's easy to find many things to cover up the feeling. For me it has been TV, or being busy, eating, or grocery shopping. In the past, Old Carla would look to someone else to comfort her and tell her the truth so she would feel better again. These days, with the discovery of New Carla, I want to accept my whole self, my feelings, and work through them on my own. I want to know myself; I want to make decisions based on my own feelings and thoughts. Learning how to do this is ultimately a journey that only I can undertake. And because of this fact, it will sometimes be lonely.

One of my biggest fears in experiencing loneliness is that being lonely means there's something wrong with me. This isn't true.

Discovering that frees me to accept my feelings without judging myself negatively. Pain isn't always a consequence of doing something "bad". Pain is a part of growing. It's a part of any kind of breaking away from one thing to pursue something better. It's tempting to muffle it, but rewarding to have the courage to embrace it as part of the journey. This is what I want for myself.

I'm reading a book called "Honoring the Self" by Nathaniel Branden. He says, "Some measure of suffering is virtually inevitable for every human being. We have no choice about the existence of such challenges; our only choice lies in how we will respond. To be heroic is to perservere. To love the process and the struggle. To laugh without restraint and to weep without restraint. To remain open and vulnerable, which means to remain feeling... And to be able to say at the end, 'I loved the adventure of the journey.'"