From my journal for June 16, 1996
Note: AIT stands for Auditory Integration Training. I hoped it might limit my extreme reaction to the noise of the planes.
I’m not looking forward to today. I didn’t want to get out of bed, not that that would do any good. I don’t feel scared, just hopeless. I can’t imagine that the AIT will work. I’m trying very hard not to have any expectation.
Sybil said yesterday “try affirmations” — I wanted to vomit — what am I going to say? “Everything is going to be fine”? “The AIT will work to adjust my hearing and the planes won’t bother me any more”? Well, actually, that one sounds possible — I do have some evidence that this is what’s wrong, and there’s evidence that the method works. What I don’t like about affirmations is the feeling that I’m lying to myself. The other thing I thought of yesterday is that the anti-depressant “didn’t work” and yet everything was very different afterward.
But I can’t say that things were any better. I struggled with fear and it got worse to the point that I couldn’t sleep more than 90 minutes, I lost weight, etc. But this fallout from trying Paxil hadn’t become obvious yet.
It’s a beautiful day, cool, sparkling, blue sky, sun through the leaves dappling the table where I sit. I can feel myself holding back, unable to contact it, unable to really be in it, because of the fear that if I let myself enjoy anything, it will immediately be snatched away. I feel such an ache in my heart. There is only the pain of loss. There is no ability to enjoy the present. I feel like I’m trying to snatch moments of beauty between bombing raids, but I’m too sick with fear to be able to do it. I know that human beings do have this capacity, but I don’t know how to learn it. I suppose I could have that be a vision: I want to live in the present moment. Yes, I suppose really that is the complete vision for my life — it goes along with wanting to really live my life, be engaged, involved, not be always holding back, or trying to be in the future.
And current reality is that I find it hard to be here, that I’m sick with fear, that no matter how hard I try to be in the present moment — well, no, the present present moment contains loss and discouragement as well as the beauty of the day. It would be a lie to pretend otherwise, a false expectation that the present moment will always contain pleasure or happiness.
Talking to Dana — I said I wanted to live in the present moment. He said he thought that was a process, not a goal. What would I have, or imagine I would have, if I could live in the present? I imagine that I would be able to enjoy the enjoyable things in my life. Dana says phrase it as “I want to enjoy the enjoyable things in my life.”
The “process/goal” distinction is an important one in DMA, which is a course in creating your life developed by Robert Fritz. Actually, given that I mostly feel pain in the present, wanting to “be present” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Wanting to enjoy enjoyable things makes a lot more sense. I have no idea what I’m up against. I’m suffering from severe depression rooted in early trauma, and it will be several more years before I understand what happened to me.