Little bits of the past come up, and it\u2019s so painful.\u00a0 I was remembering when Daddy dislocated his shoulder riding, and Granpappy\u2019s palomino Rey del Oro and how I would call him \u201cRay Dell\u201d in teenage fashion \u2014 or so it seems to me now \u2014 I look at that lost girl, trying to… what? be like the popular girls? claim something for my own?\u00a0 I look back and I see her trying so hard, and my heart just goes out to her.\u00a0 I want to put my arms around her and hold her and say \u201cthere there.\u201d\u00a0 She was wanting romance and passion and color.\u00a0 She never really found it, she found sadness and pain instead.\u00a0 I sit here, lost and sad, at the end of a wasted life.\u00a0 Part of me knows that\u2019s not true, but that\u2019s an objective observer, not my experience.<\/p>\n
Painful painful session with Erica.\u00a0 I cried a lot.\u00a0 I told her I was lost.\u00a0 She asked if she could get closer, I said yes.\u00a0 She put her feet outside mine and her hands on my knees.\u00a0 I grabbed her wrist and held on.\u00a0 She asked if I felt connected.\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 I told her I saw my life stretching away in greyness, like being in the desert, no excitement, no color, no friendship.\u00a0 It felt a lot like that twilight feeling<\/a>. \u00a0 I read her the pages about life \u201cdesigned by god.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0 I asked her why the good times come and then fade and are completely forgotten.\u00a0 She said something about \u201cshelf life.\u201d\u00a0 I said I don\u2019t have the receptors for good things because they didn\u2019t get built when I was very young.\u00a0 How can I build them in now?\u00a0 There was something about it wasn\u2019t OK to feel good about what I do well, because that would be \u201cthinking I was so great.\u201d\u00a0 She asked me if I could tell that I had done better with my life than my parents had with theirs.\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 My life right now looks like a wasted life.\u00a0 Erica wondered if I felt disloyal to have a bigger life than they did.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s loyalty or fear \u2014 I think it\u2019s fear that keeps me small.\u00a0 Erica asked again if I felt connected to her.\u00a0 I struggled, searching, and found \u201cnot allowed.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s like Mama Greene<\/a>, I\u2019m afraid of mother\u2019s jealousy. \u00a0I was afraid to build a relationship with the woman who came to take care of us when I was three.\u00a0 I told Erica about telling R \u201cI just want to go home and be taken care of,\u201d and her saying \u201cEverybody wants that,\u201d and how it diminished my actual experience.\u00a0 Mother did that all the time.\u00a0 But everybody doesn\u2019t<\/span> feel the same terrible lostness and loneliness I\u2019m in.\u00a0 I think maybe R\u2019s remark was one of the big triggers of this baby state I seem to be stuck in.\u00a0 I guess claiming that my experience is more painful and deep than most people\u2019s is also \u201cthinking I\u2019m so great.\u201d\u00a0 No, you are not allowed to be any bigger or feel more deeply than your mother.\u00a0 I feel like my whole emotional life has collapsed to a flat line.\u00a0 Francis Weller<\/a> talks about this, he described our culture as being a \u201cflatline\u201d culture because we aren\u2019t allowed to feel great joy or deep sorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Little bits of the past come up, and it\u2019s so painful.\u00a0 I was remembering when Daddy dislocated his shoulder riding, and Granpappy\u2019s palomino Rey del Oro and how I would call him \u201cRay Dell\u201d in teenage fashion \u2014 or so … Continue reading