(Written in September 1995)
\nIt’s grey and damp outside.\u00a0 Yesterday when it was grey, I hoped that would stop the planes, but they flew anyway.\u00a0 They weren’t loud but they were frequent, and I’m pretty much ground down by it at this point.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m feeling so sad. How can I process my own sadness?\u00a0 I have to validate it first.\u00a0 I guess there’s a voice in me that says things like “What do you have to be sad about?\u00a0 You’re in a good marriage, you have plenty of money, you weren’t starved or beaten or tortured as a child…”\u00a0 And I say yes, I’m married to a man that I dearly love, and he loves me, and we have no sex life \u2014 isn’t that something to be sad about?\u00a0 I may have plenty of money, but I don’t have good health, isn’t that something to be sad about?\u00a0 I have enormous creative energy and I can’t find any way to give it expression, isn’t that something to be sad about?\u00a0 Yes, dammit, I do have things to be sad about, and they are real and they really happened.\u00a0 Because the worst of it is that I make myself wrong for “complaining” instead of giving myself space to mourn.\u00a0 The pain of loss is baffled and huge and tangled with rage, and those feelings are so difficult that I habitually turn away, they don’t “feel real” and so I trivialize them and then I’m left with the horrible dull dead ache that won’t go away and that tangles me into immobility.\u00a0 Ah, but I remember worse times, I remember the cold fog and complete immobility and thinking out methods of suicide.\u00a0 So this is better than that, and I know that I have healed some, if not all the way.\u00a0 I was going to say that gives me hope for the future, but the problem with hope for the future is that it sets up expectation and comparison, and my work is to learn to be OK with what I have now, to accept my disabilities and inhibitions instead of making myself wrong for them.<\/p>\n
I was typing up from July 22 where I wrote again “The acceptance of undeserved pain is the way to peace,” and I see how far I’ve gotten from that.\u00a0 I’ve been fighting the pain and I need to practice accepting, need to remind myself “soften around it,” “create spaciousness.”\u00a0 It’s easy to forget when the pain is so bad, I just want to get away from it.\u00a0 And I’m angry at the way I can’t “just live my life.”\u00a0 But who among us, at the end of the 20th century, is able to “just live their life” \u2014 we are all impinging on each other, we are finding out how “normal” actions on one side of the world have repercussions on the other.\u00a0 So I remind myself that this is my life, and it is lived on a battlefield more desolate and terrifying than the one in Sarajevo because it’s invisible, and I’m the only one in it, fighting with ghosts.\u00a0 It would be a relief to face a real bomb, real gunfire.<\/p>\n
For more information about the airplane phobia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Written in September 1995) It’s grey and damp outside.\u00a0 Yesterday when it was grey, I hoped that would stop the planes, but they flew anyway.\u00a0 They weren’t loud but they were frequent, and I’m pretty much ground down by it … Continue reading