(Written in October 2003)
Dear Spirits, I’m so angry at myself for creating all this misery. Please help me! Please!
Dear Jenny, you are being much too hard on yourself. This is why you really need a spiritual community — it is just too hard to do this work all by yourself, and too easy to fall into this horrible tight spiral of trying too hard and making yourself wrong. Dear Jenny, we love you very much. We are all around you holding out our love. It’s OK to collapse completely, it’s OK to stop struggling to be better than you are. You are doing just fine, stumbling around, getting the bills paid, making mistakes, being unable to get yourself up off the floor. You need a break. Something completely different like running downtown with the mail & then take the dog for a little walk — a minimal walk is OK.
Did that. Felt scared the whole walk. I’m so sad to be unable to enjoy a beautiful day like today. At least I was able to enjoy my two walks yesterday. At one point I looked at the fear and tried to understand what it’s trying to tell me — at which it vanished, and now I feel sad and vulnerable and precarious. Perhaps I’m scared because I’m refusing to listen to my feelings of sadness and vulnerability. And I’m feeling lonely.
What do I need? I need to enjoy the little things of daily life, I need emotional safety, I need to make heart-connections with friends.
Feeling pretty bummed out. Driving back from town it was feeling like Brunswick and Cincinnati, places I used to live but don’t live there any more — don’t feel at home anywhere.