Back home

   There is a quote that goes: "You can't heal in the same place you got sick", and, of course, it's everyone's dream to be able to leave and not look back. In fact, so many do. In today’s world it’s very easy to escape into another realm, another reality, another relationship or another country. In that movement we do find release, sometimes temporary reprieve, but always temporary. At some point we must come home. By “home” I don’t mean the actually physical place, but the home inside of us where we have to revisit it all, the good and the bad, the unspoken, the monsters and ghosts.

    

Upon returning, we feel it all like it was never gone. In fact, sometimes it all comes back with multiplied force, and it overwhelms us. Some people chose to live their whole lives on the run, and they can manage it, but for most of us it’s just not feasible. We have two choices: To sulk and be angry and retreat into ourselves, or to accept reality for what it is with grace and patience. In order to accept, we must learn to make space for our grief and sadness when it arises and also learn to make space for love and joy when they revisit.

   

Recently, I have come home. It didn’t have a choice; it was just my reality. In coming home, I have to face it all again. I imagine I feel like people who come out of rehab and have to use their coping mechanisms to stay sober and build a healthy life. Some wounds reopen, memories return, small anxiety attacks spike within me and I have moments of despair. I return to my young self needing to be rescued and praying for a savior, when in fact, I am the adult who needs to soothe and rescue myself. That is part of my coping skills, calming the inner child and reminding her that we’ve been through so much and we will be ok.

    

   I think we can’t be too strict with ourselves and our dogmas. If I believe that quote, it means I’m doomed to be sick forever. Maybe it is harder in the same place, however, there are other ways to create space to continue healing. Maybe the place is my inner world and I can continue working on making it a wonderful place to be, in teaching my thoughts to be kinder, and in having compassion for the cortisol levels that spike my morning anxiety. I am not good at playing the “glad game” so I won’t force it on me, but I can make small future plans to have things to look forward to to keep me going one day at a time.

    

   I know this is also temporary. Everything is temporary. Even home, is not the same home I left, and be being so it’s a different place. I can heal in a different place. I am not the same person. I honestly don’t even know what “healing” means anymore. It feels like so much pressure to be always healing. Maybe I’ll rephrase it. 

    

   I can live here, I can breathe here, I can hope here, I can love here, I can trust here, and I can just be. It’s my only job right now.       

End and Beginnings

     Someone with an unsettled mind has a very difficult time with change, because it usually means that something that was safe - or seemed safe enough - is changing and something dangerous is waiting around the river bend. It sounds a bit crazy, but an unsettled mind is relatively insane, either because of real trauma, a mental illness or just the way one was born. And don't judge, after all, there is real danger in the world and tragedy finds us all at one point or another. However, living in preparation for tragedy is no life at all. 

    It's a funny concept trying to avoid change in order to make one's life safe, after all, change is the only constant in life. Even if we are sitting still, everything is changing around us, and the person who sits down is not the same person who stands up. We are all always changing and morphing and just growing older. Still, an unsettled mind tries their best to control possible catastrophe and pain by holding on to anything that feels safe. But even a strong branch may break if you hold on to it for too long, and once more you are adrift in the river of life. 

   Recently, after struggling for years to maintain safety and security, that last branch broke off and I didn't fight the river anymore. Sometimes I was terrified and thought I was going to drown, but mostly I was mesmerized at so much world I was missing out on by trying to stay in the same place. And, although there is always danger, most of it was ilusory. The river seemed to be taking me straight onto a rock, but would gently change its course causing me to laugh with excitement at the thrill of it all. Learning new skills caused me panic at first - that desire to curl into a ball and hide - but once I crossed that line I realized that I was more capable than I thought I was and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Or maybe it was, but I had it in me all along to learn. 

   It's hard to rewire a brain to welcome change as new experiences. An ending is automatically a start. It's simply an empty vacuum that new life will flow into, and whatever it is, I can handle it. I can handle any possible danger, but mostly, I can handle all the novelty of not knowing. I don't need that branch anymore because my home is the river and I am the water. 

   One of my favorite quotes these days is: "Embrace the panic of having the rest of your life ahead of you." I am halfway through my life. If I'm going to finish with a positive, yet realistic, note, I would say this. The benefit of having had such a crappy childhood and so much sorrow in the past is that happiness in the present just feels so amazingly foreign, like tasting an exotic drink. The good thing about not peaking in your youth, is that you are constantly peaking and life is always getting better. The fact that I didn't get to have extraordinary life experiences in the past means that they are still ahead of me and I look forward to all of them. 

   I am less afraid of change. If I was not afraid at all, I wouldn't be human. If I wasn't a little bit terrified, I wouldn't have the amazing unsettled mind that I have ... which I have grown to love. 

My world

     There is this quote from Anais Nin that has been itching the back of my mind for months during this period of - perhaps too much - introspection. It goes like this: "Had I not created my whole world, I would have certainly died in other people's". I feel like I'm good at creating, yet I am also great at destroying. 

   My life is a series of settlements I have build with people I have loved and trusted and sudden explosions in which I absolutely destroy it from the ground up and find myself naked and alone again trying to figure out what happened. Don't get me wrong, it was necessary to destroy certain worlds that were sucking the life out of me, filled with parasites and death. However, one wonders if I got so good at destroying and escaping that I can't break the habit, even when I find myself in a "good enough"world.

   I have learned to adapt in such an impressive way that I hardly know if I truly love something, or if I'm just good at it. I can't recognize if what is wrong is the outside world or the inner world, or both. All I want to do is "smash", like some sort of hulk woman. It feels good to smash and save myself, but maybe, just maybe, what I have to do is stick around to see if I can find something from the rubble, or if I should really walk away and burn that bridge... yet again.

   To create my world I must build. Once more I have smashed it all to pieces, but I feel called to go through the rubble with compassion and patience and maybe rebuild, maybe forage, maybe save some memories, maybe walk away, but with ease, not fear. Like that old saying: "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water". Honestly, I don't even think I can tell if it's a baby or a bundle of trash, but I guess I won't know unless I pick it up and take a look. 

   I feel like I lost - or destroyed - my world once more and have had to live in other people's, where I felt safe and cared for. I feel afraid of going back to check the aftermath of my most recent bomb and be overwhelmed with a desire to escape and disappear, or curl up into a ball and cry. I feel I won't have strength to rebuild or I won't have the wisdom to find the treasures buried in the mess of my life. 

   I wish I wasn't this way, but I am, and all of it is also my world. Our worlds are built from the inside out. The chaos of my soul bleeds out into my environment. I will never be able to fully calm the chaos, so I must learn to accept it and love it and make peace with my monsters, for they are also my friends. 

   As I befriend my inner world I will be less afraid of my outer world. I'm learning to settle my mind, not by struggling with it, but my listening to it without acting. Maybe the day will come in which I will live fully in my world without the nuclear explosions. Maybe I will learn to be in tune with who I am so I won't have to get so lost in my path that I hardly recognize myself anymore.

  For now, I will calmly walk back, with humility and love. I honor my past, I live in my present. There was a time for flight and a time for rest and now it's a time to rebuild my world from the inside out. As I find myself in my own soul, I will find my place again in the world, my world.   

     

REST

    I feel genuinely happy today. Yesterday it rained and today the weather is cool and inviting. My mind is calm like a still ocean that you can stare for hours and not notice time going by. The water is so motionless it can mirror me clearly and I don't feel the need to explain myself. This may be the first time I had felt this way in a long time therefore I feel the need to give space to this peaceful feeling in the same way as I give space to the moments of sadness. This past week I felt safe to feel and express, whether alone or with people - safe people. I sang out loud, I cried in fountains and I laughed so heartly my heart remembered that I had the ability to be truly happy in the moment - not only in a memory. It wasn't because everything has worked itself out, but because this moment is perfect and that's all that matters.

   I'm not worried about growing old, instead I'm feeling how my long hair gently touches my back and my eyes need reading glasses. I'm not worried about money, instead I'm savoring every meal I ingest and trusting that I will always have food on my table. I'm not worried about the future, instead I'm feeling the goosebumps on my skin as I type this out on this cloudy morning.

  The truth is all my concerns are quite small in relation to my biggest worry of all: my fear of being sad; my ability to go to such low places where life doesn't seem worth it; my dread of being alone and abandoned. I fear the emotions more than I could ever fear the circumstances that bring adversity to my life. I fear the abstract more than I fear the concrete, but it is just as real to me, since our lives are perception and we spend most of our lives in our closets of our mind.

   But today I rest. Today I feel love. I feel as if the universe has wrapped its arms around me like a mother and allowed me to take a nap. I feel like laughter has released hope, real hope, the kind that wakes you up slowly, instead of with a incoming panic attack at the thought of living another day. 

   I can almost listen to that thought that is trying to snap me out of it saying "tomorrow you won't feel like this, it's not real, don't relax into the feeling, you must stay tough", and I allow it to be without judgement. I understand why the thought arises and I love myself for it. But it's ok, because life is only lived in the present moment. Tomorrow isn't real. Tomorrow is abstract. The only reality is right now and right now I am happy for no specific reason. I feel like I belong to everything, but mostly, I belong to myself.

POETIC INSANITY

    I listened to this quote today in one of my favorite YouTube channels The School of Life and it really resonated with me at this moment in my life: "The best way to recover sanity is to allow madness to have it's full unfettered horrific necessary run". The topic of this video was about getting over your ex. Yeah, taboo right? Something perceived as so childish and mundane, for teenagers, not rational adults. 

    I suffered horrifically in my last breakup from the love of my life. Yes, I sound like a little girl, but I don't care. Life is perception, so what we believe is real to us. If you believe in God, God is real. If you believe in sun signs, they are real, and if you believe that someone was the love of your life, then they absolutely were. Our lives are grounded on our belief and feelings, although we delude ourselves as thinking we are such rational, advanced beings.

    We live in a self-help society, evolved or whatnot, in which we are encouraged to be extremely controlled and level-headed at all times. If we understand rationally that a relationship ran its course, we should accept it with dignity and move on like a champ, even if our stomach feels like it received a mortal punch, our mind cannot concentrate in any task, our body cannot absorb nutrition and we cry or yell at anything that touches our embarrassing wound. Our body doesn't speak "Rationalan". It has it's own language that doesn't use words, but sensations.

    If everything is a balance then doesn't it make sense that there should be the same amount of madness for sanity? Maybe it's why we suffer so immensely for something so irrational, simply to activate that insane part of ourselves that also needs to be heard. The crier, the yeller, the runner, the binger, the dancer, the artist... the writer. 

    I lost my mind for a while. I really did and since I had nothing to lose, I embraced my temporary insanity with all its phases: the deep depression, the ecstatic thrill, the daredevil, the beggar, the crazy and the melancholic. There is poetry in losing our minds for a bit and returning to our humanity, a place where we learn to have true compassion for pain, ours and our neighbors. Also a place where we are reminded of true beauty, the one we only see when our soul is blatantly open and our guard is down. 

    Don't bottle up the pain no matter how ridiculous it is. Find your perturbed inner self and allow them to just be, with genuine curiosity. The rational world will still be there after your body has returned to its natural rhythm. I'll finish with a quote from the music composer Seal:

    We're never gonna survive unless we go a little crazy.       

   

ENVY AND GRATITUDE

     The "bad" and "good"emotions. If we were to put the emotions on the scale, I imagine envy would be at the very back of the list as a big no no. We are not supposed feel envy, in fact, we are supposed to feel gratitude, at least it's what we've been taught our whole lives. When we feel envy it makes us small and wrong, therefore we should count our blessings and bla bla bla. I've been learning slowly to eliminate words likes "supposed"or "should" from my mind schemata. 

   I believe our inner world should (yes, should) be a place where we are supposed to (again, I know) feel safe to feel what we feel with no judgement. We don't have to act on it, but we can have the curiosity and compassion to understand that our emotions have a mind of their own and we must make kind allowances for both the joy and sorrow, peace and rage, gratitude and envy. In fact, maybe if we understand life as a tenuous balance, we could accept that one emotion can't exist without the other, and they both need space.

   I feel envy at people who seems to be happy without effort. I feel envy at people who had a good start in life and have made so much more "progress"(whatever that means) than me. I'm feel envy at people who were lucky in love and have a companion for the cold nights. I feel envy at the young who have their whole lives ahead of them and I feel envy at the old who are gracefully accepting what is. I feel envy at those who have such an easy time making friends and being surrounded by love. 

   Now I'll give space for gratitude. I feel gratitude for the calm mornings and cozy evenings when I feel centered and at ease. I feel gratitude for every delicious meal that arrives at the precise time I needed it. I feel gratitude for my children's love in whatever form they choose to show it. I feel gratitude for a child's curious eyes that give me hope for tomorrow. I feel gratitude that my body is strong and my mind is sharp and my fingers can write. I feel gratitude for the people in my life who accept me as I am, even when I push them away. 

   I feel gratitude for life, even if it's not always a calm relationship and sometimes I wish I could just leave the train, I always find a reason to stay and observe. I act when I can, I wait when I can't and I believe that nothing is written in stone. Books open and close. Stories end and begin again. 

  I feel gratitude for this breathe I'm taking right now that reminds me that I have a soul and the I will always find new things to be grateful for. 

 

Unlearned Happiness

      Yesterday I woke up ok. I didn't have the grappling concern over all the problems of the world, real or imaginary. I had slept well - possibly had had pleasant dreams - and I woke up calmly and slowly. It was a strange feeling for me and it didn't feel familiar. My day usually starts with a need to calm myself with writing, meditation and sometimes tears. It's like my mental alarm clock is a ticking bomb that I have to diffuse early in the morning in order for me to be able to have a relatively smooth day without any extreme inner struggles. I've been feeling this deep morning depression/anxiety for over 2 years, so it's very strange when I don't feel it. And instead of relaxing, my body goes into full alert of waiting for when the fridge will fall on my head.

   Another strange thing happened as well, though not unfamiliar. I was in a situation where everything was ok, in fact, everything was fantastic and propitious for clean, healthy fun, the type your belly aches from laughter. Now, what happens in my body when I am in a situation like that is also to go on full alert. I'm not used to feeling safe. I'm not used to having fun. In a strange way, most of the fun in my life is derived from some sort of adrenaline rush like radical sports or unstable relationships. In other words, my nervous system feels safe when I'm moving, solving, fighting, negotiating or overcoming some sort of adversity on my own. I guess it's a danger I can control (or I think I can) so I feel safe in some sort of sick way. 

   What happens when I am actually safe and well is that it feels wrong and unfamiliar. If I have no danger to face I feel instantly lost and small. It's hard to describe what happens to me, so I'll try to give you a mental picture. It's like my cognitive self, the little person in my brain that is in charge of protecting me will recede and put herself in my third eye, like right between my forehead. I feel like it's going on overdrive and my eyes will start looking in all directions simultaneously, except into the safe person's eyes. Yes, I am terrified of looking in someone's eyes when I am in that state of alarm, which ironically happens when I am safe. 

   Maybe if you picture those episodes of black mirror of the little versions of us living in the brain, you can get a mental picture. I call this version of me "La neorotica". It helps if I bring some humor into it. I know she is trying to protect me, but I just need her to take a nap so I can actually experience the feelings of safety and happiness in my body and let them slowly integrate into my psyche. 

   I read somewhere that we must learn to be sad in order to learn to be happy. It's a balance. I feel I have gotten good at giving space to my grief, and now I make that same effort to give space to my joy. When I feel it, I breathe it in, I acknowledge it with gratitude and I welcome it with patience. Patience because she must come slowly. Just like falling in love should be something gentle and calm, falling in happiness is also slow. We can't force it and make it happen, but we can surrender to it when it's there and give it as much space as we can. 

  Nobody can be forced to feel "happy", even if the circumstances are perfect. Just like all emotions, they come when they come. We don't know what is going on inside someone's mind. May we be more gentle with ourselves so we can also be more gentle with others. All things can be learned, but everyone learns in a different speed. I'm still a toddler in learning happiness, but I have my whole life, so I'm not in a hurry.