Journal entry from Friday, July 6<\/p>\n
Grief for my life \u201cbleeding away in hard dark places, among the cold faces…\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>What would it mean to have a real life?\u00a0 <\/span>I think of Oliver Sacks<\/a> saying \u201cI have loved much and I have been loved.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>If I could say that.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cBut no, I never loved, only the feeling of forgetting something never remembered.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cWanting to flower and not knowing how.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>All the people left behind as I kept running away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cBleeding away…\u201d and \u201cWanting to flower…\u201d are from a poem I wrote. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Blood and Stone<\/a><\/p>\n
\u201cBut no, I never loved…\u201d is from something I wrote in 1959, when I was 17, and hurting from someone I had hoped would be my first boyfriend choosing my best friend instead of me.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s a little bit scary, reading it now, and knowing that love was something I hadn\u2019t experienced yet.<\/p>\n
Because I\u2019ve had the sense that reading thrillers addictively was in an attempt to avoid something, and because phrases from my own writing kept coming up, I looked for the original quotes.\u00a0 <\/span>So yesterday I told Erica about that teenage pain, and read her the quote about \u201cforgetting something never remembered.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Then I read her all the poems I wrote around the time of Journey Into Courage.\u00a0 <\/span>I cried reading some of them.\u00a0 <\/span>I also talked about how what happened with B left me feeling that I couldn\u2019t trust myself.\u00a0 <\/span>I told her about things I learned, or saw, about my ex only after the divorce.\u00a0 <\/span>Erica, again, turned things completely around.\u00a0 <\/span>She said \u201cpeople are not their dysfunctional behavior,\u201d and suggested that I gave them space to be their real selves.\u00a0 <\/span>What a totally amazing idea!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cB\u201d was a friend who I was trying to help by letting her stay in my house.\u00a0 <\/span>When I put the house on the market, she yelled at me for being so cruel to Eleanor.\u00a0 <\/span>One of the hardest things about moving to Kendal was knowing that someone I loved a lot would have a hard time finding a new place to live.\u00a0 <\/span>I told B that she had no idea what was going on for me.\u00a0 <\/span>She didn’t listen to me, and kept repeating herself so I hung up on her.\u00a0 <\/span>When I was getting ready to put my house on the market, and asked her to remove her things, she trashed my house.\u00a0 <\/span>She was someone I really cared about, so I was very hurt, but now suspicious about things she had told me, one of which I found out was a lie.\u00a0 <\/span>I felt like the person I had cared about and wanted to help was not who she was, and began to doubt my own judgement.\u00a0 <\/span>How could I not have seen how dysfunctional she was?<\/p>\n
I see now, that I allowed her to exploit me because I cared about her, wanted to help her, and don’t have good boundaries.<\/p>\n
Session with Erica:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou give them the space to be their best selves\u201d
\na person is not their reactive behavior
\nI see the best in people, give them the benefit of the doubt
\n\u201cI can\u2019t trust myself\u201d is a mis-representation
\nIntegrity expects integrity
\nHonor and recognize that I take accountability \u2014\u00a0I\u2019m available for repair
\n“You take grief and turn it into guilt.”
\nneed someone to help me get that it is grief<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith this help, I saw that B was just like my mother, so of course I was vulnerable to her manipulations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Journal entry from Friday, July 6 Grief for my life \u201cbleeding away in hard dark places, among the cold faces…\u201d\u00a0 What would it mean to have a real life?\u00a0 I think of Oliver Sacks saying \u201cI have loved much and … Continue reading