Bleak

(Written in August 2008)
I’m in some very bleak place staring at a very bleak truth.  I really don’t believe that I have any worth or value in myself, I really profoundly believe that the people who are my “friends” only stay around as long as I’m helpful and positive, that as soon as I become a “nuisance”, i.e. need or ask for help, then they will go away and leave me.  This belief is so deep, and so obvious, that it’s hard to verbalize.  It doesn’t look like a belief, it looks like reality.  Well at least I can make that distinction intellectually.  And I can see that I learned that belief from a mother who treated me like I had no value (except when I could entertain her, except when I would do what she wanted) and who abandoned me when I was a nuisance — i.e. cried for food.
So what do I do about it?  How do I learn — or choose — to value this worthless lump of protoplasm?  Intellectually — maybe even spiritually — I hold the belief that every thing has value, every organism has a place and a part to play in the whole.  (God didn’t create the universe, God became the universe) there is a “seed of god” inside me as there is inside every other being.  I need to find that seed of god.  But when I go to that deepest place, I hit the hard stoniness of my worthlessness.
Two things I can do.  1) Why do I value the people I value? 2) investigate the stoniness.
1) I was thinking that I love Eleanor, my friend who struggles with PTSD — because she has done good things for me?  Not really. Because she is not a nuisance?  No.  She is a nuisance, she has meant a lot of hard work — but work that I value because it has taught me compassion for myself.  The actual things she has done are not as important as the fact that she cares about me, and is willing to be present to my pain.  I don’t value her for the things she does but for the values she holds and strives to live by in her very difficult life.  I love her for the things she values, not for the things she actually manages to do.  So can I value myself for the things I value?  Truth, integrity, compassion?  All the beings on the planet? For a moment my heart grows warm — this is the seed of god inside me — and then it gets cold again.  I value these things because I value them, how can I say that’s “god”?
Why do I love Bella? Well partly because she’s beautiful, and partly because she loves me, but also because she’s Bella with her unique personality, her stubbornness, feistiness, and passive-aggressive behavior.  I adore her and she’s a pain, and she makes me laugh.
Other tack.  2) investigate the stoniness.  How do I know I’m worthless?  The huge dull dead weight in my chest, the lump in my throat.  The heaviness that clogs my limbs and makes it hard to get up and … wash dishes, clean up the dog mess, make a cup of tea.  This heavy dull weight.  I can feel it in my jaw. Now my stomach feels nauseous.  The color is grey.  I see a grey blob sitting in a colorful world — there’s just a moment when my heart goes out to her — now there are tears behind my eyes and a lump in my throat.  Connected to the nausea.  I feel weak and frozen.  What does weak & frozen want to do?  Find a place of warmth, find someone to love me — o god. And then if there were someone who loved me I wouldn’t believe it.     And that’s the place I’m stuck.