What on earth is wrong with me?

There have been a couple of things I've learned about myself in the past couple of months. First, I'm almost completely emotionally closed off. For years, my brain has been automatically shuttling away emotions before they can manifest themselves. Angry? No problem - the brain will stuff that away here...next to the sadness, hostility, and rage. Secondly, my biggest issue is feeling like I just don't matter. Feeling that if I disappeared right now, there would be no detrimental impact to that. If I were a pebble, I feel like I would leave no rings if someone threw me in the water. I know, rationally, that it isn't possible for someone to be here on Earth without having even a little impact. At least one person would miss any given person on this earth who disappeared. And I'm an intelligent woman. So I would think that my intelligence would recognize the irrationality of my position that I don't matter.

But it doesn't.

I was sitting with a friend who is working with me on forgiveness. Forgiveness of Adam, forgiveness of Becky (I haven't gotten around to the latter yet. I have never hated and despised someone as much as I despise that latter...person.) but when I was listing the sins Adam had committed against me, a necessary part of this forgiveness voyage I'm taking, my friend noticed something. She observed that the actions that seemed to have hurt me the most weren't the ones she thought they would be. I wasn't hurt most by the fact that Adam had an affair with my friend...I was hurt most by his actions that indicated that he just didn't care about me, that I just didn't matter.

And it's been that thought that hurts the most. Getting to the core of things, the very darkest part of me is the part that convinces me that I just don't matter. It wouldn't make a difference if I was here or if I wasn't. I would never, ever hurt myself...this isn't a suicide note. This is just me wondering why I just can't believe that I make a difference. Why can't I just believe that people might actually love me? That people care about me and that I might just be an important, or at least valuable, part of their lives?

I really don't understand. I want to feel that I matter. I don't want my cheeks and jaw to ache anymore, like they do right now, from trying not to cry about this. And I would have to believe that it is completely counter-intuitive to my faith to not accept that at least God loves me truly. But I just seem to dismiss that, to not be able to embrace that.

It's just that every time I think about that, about this feeling of not mattering, I automatically start to cry, my heart breaks a little more. And for someone who hasn't been able to access emotions for the majority of her years on this planet, that is a little strange. I don't know what to do with this pain, and I don't know what to do with this loss. What do I do? How do you start to truly believe and/or feel that you matter, that you make a difference?

I hurt a truly close friend of mine yesterday. I had doublebooked on plans, so I backed out of my plans with my friend. I felt that the greater obligation was with the other plans I had made. But I really hurt my friend by doing that. So Adam and I ended up juggling things around and worked things out. And I apologized several times to my friend. But I think that this issue was at the heart of that. If I truly believe that I don't matter, then it is like removing vapor from the evening. There were going to be three of us at dinner, but my unconscious thought was that if I wasn't there, it didn't make any difference. I wasn't that valuable of a contribution anyway (acutally valueless, I suppose).

And so, since last night, I haven't stopped crying all that much. It hurts too much to realize that that's how I feel about myself. And I just don't know how to turn it around.