Thoughts on community, beauty, forgiveness, and saddness.

I haven't written on here in a long time because I started feeling guilty about sharing my thoughts. Partly I felt like I was getting repetitive. I was also worried that people would think I was just venting to get attention.

 Please know that is not my intention. I write to make sense of the thoughts in my own mind. I share my words with the hope that it will spark conversation because I love few things as much as I love dialogue.

Also I share my thoughts because I love reading other people's thoughts on the internet. I like it because it gives me something to think about and it is always so encouraging when I come across someone who thinks the same as I do, and so I shall continue to write. I apologize if it upsets you.

Anyways I have something to talk about.

Community.

I have been struggling with this concept.

When I am away from community I get seriously lonely.

However, only twice have I found a community that actually worked for me and both of those were years ago and have been over for a long time.
My problem with most communities is something I have attempted to express many times before but feel that I have failed to communicate properly and so I will attempt to explain it one more time.

At some point people always end up criticizing me and encouraging me to try harder to do better and then they turn around and say they are doing this out of love. In theory that actually makes sense. If you think a specific way of life is better then you will probably encourage the ones you love towards that life style.

Unfortunately it does not work in my experiential reality.

Constantly having my weaknesses pointed out makes me feel guilty. Guilt has discouraged me from change rather than working as a motivator. I have worked hard to forgive myself and encourage growth within myself, but participating in guilt ridden communities have destroyed a lot of the growth I have experienced.

Warning I'm about to get realish: I struggle with sadness. I've decided it is probably NOT depression because the only days I've ever been unable to get out of bed were ones when I didn't really have to get out of bed. It has never gotten too much in the way of work or school and although I sometimes have issues with seriously bad dark thoughts my family is such a support that I know I am not in risk of any self harm or anything that serious. However, I have a lot of fairly dark days. They may not be as dark as someone else's dark days, but they are dark and they are fairly frequent.

I have found that what helps most is noticing, appreciating, enjoying, encouraging, and creating beauty and then forgiving myself for being sad and a hug from someone else. What hurts is feeling required to be happy. A lot of people have harmed when they meant to help by encouraging happiness in a way that makes me feel guilty for my sadness and it has made community almost impossible for me.
I am doing pretty well using beauty and forgiveness to overcome my darkness but I'm struggling with choosing between loneliness or painful community. So that's where I'm at. Sorry if my thoughts bothered you.