From my journal for June 14, 1996
Karen said “You started off meandering and came back to yourself,” but I’m not so sure that’s where I arrived. The organic process of thought, that arrives not at some pre-ordained goal, but perhaps at some new connection, some reweaving of disparate pieces into wholeness. Having no agenda, being open to all possibilities. The issue of a hidden agenda, being constrained by old patterns, old woundings. There is also the kind of “hidden agenda” or strange attractor that a vision is for a life path — or one of Deena Metzger’s core questions — it keeps the path circling in one particular area, tho never repeating and always new, it doesn’t wander randomly off into the void. And I think of my attempts to follow “the wily red fox,” to follow some elusive truth through a baffling complicated world.
I find this so interesting now. My intellectual struggle to understand the process by which I explore ideas and come to a truth.
What constitutes a “good day” — having had three of them in the last ten days. A good day is one in which I feel comfortable in my body, able to walk the dog, or putter around the house, not feel driven by anxiety to “do something” i.e. something “meaningful,” that would justify my life. … It seems like a “good day” is one in which I’m able to “be” with my life, to fully be there for whatever is happening, no matter how low key or ordinary. For some reason this brings up Jenny and her mother from Stern’s book, where the mother was always in her face, would not let her self-regulate but kept over-stimulating her. I think of my mother’s need for “excitement” and my difficulty being with quiet, subtle, unstructured states — it was never safe enough for me to learn how to do it.
A good day is one in which I feel neither depression nor anxiety. At this point in my life, I did not know about the early trauma, nor had I had the advantage of knowing about what Erica called Mother’s “mis-representations.” Instead of mirroring me, so I could learn who I was, she managed to convince me I was a very negative person. I “thought I was so great,” I “did not care” about anybody, and other negative things I supposedly did. Fortunately, I did well in school, so I had good grades, and she could never have convinced me I was stupid. In fact it was my intelligence and enthusiasm that she was both jealous of and threatened by, so she tried to stop me from expressing myself.