Talking to Myself

 

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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I set up a new blog but I'm not sure where I want to go with it.  

Earlier this year, i wrote letters every day to a new friend.  It was exhilarating and fun and reminded me of how much I loved to write when i was an adolescent.  

What I had been feeling was that AT LAST I had a dance partner, someone on my wavelength someone I could describe life to and we could go back and forth and work it out between us. Something so hard to do all by myself, just talking to myself.  Life either is or is not just talking to yourself. This year I have spent so much time alone "talking to myself" as my partner of almost 50 years died.  

At the same time one of my best friends just stopped :: what? Being my friend? Being present for me? An event. A series of events that makes me think that I have hallucinated my entire life :: that is I have hallucinated relationships and friendships that may have been not-at-all what I thought they were. 

I am sort of a "too much" "over the top" person emotionally. I talk too much. I feel too much. I "share" too much. Etc. My friend is truly conservative - not in a political sense but in the sense that "too much" is probably an emotional setting that sets off alarms in her inner world and causes her to flee.

My love who stopped writing to me describes himself as a "stoic" but also as someone whose life journey is marked by trauma after trauma [both physical and mental]. Trauma and it's fight/flight/freeze and other emotional and physical patterning tells a story that would describe this lovely "stoic" as someone who is constantly called to fortify himself emotionally against any sort of emotional overwhelm or invasion of the compounded past traumas swamping his stoic boat.

Just writing this makes me remember another love-of-my-life who was my college soul mate. So much I never knew about him or understood about him. At the same time my wise-inner-knowing knew that this relationship was on a timer and the day would come when he would simply disappear out of my life with no explanation. Which is what happened. DECADES LATER we encountered one another at the funeral of a man who had been a friend and a mentor of both of us. I knew that he would be there. How could he not be there? Sure enough. After the service as I was in conversation with someone I could feel him seat himself quietly next to me. I turned and looked into his ravaged face [that was barely recognizable] and into his very intensely blue eyes [which were instantly recognizable] and I said,"I dreaded seeing you again" as he burst into tears. The words he said to me in the next hour have vanished from my memory. They vanished as he spoke them. All I recall is the furnace of feeling that swamped me as he was speaking. Feelings of love and feelings of pain of the lies and fabrications of mental and physical illness of all that we shared of the beauty and pain of deeply loving another person. Both with and without words we forgave each other for our adolescent failing to overcome the barrier to our truly loving each other.  

During these decades of life my fantasy was [as so many people fantasize] that SOMEDAY I would sit down with him and KNOW THE TRUTH.  I would FINALLY KNOW what happened. Like in a movie. Like in a novel.  But as this lovely man spoke about the past I didn't even recognize the past that he was describing. There is no script, no novel no final word no wrap-up that is neat and tidy and difinitive. That I would never ever get that. That I had to let go that gut churning "need to know." 

And I could. I did. I let it go. 

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"Giving up the need to know why something has happened to you will definitely count among the most rigorous personal challenges of your life. Everything about human nature craves an explanation for why events occur as they do. Our sense of reason is more than just an attribute of the mind; it is an archetypal power that governs our capacity to ground our lives and balance the forces of chaos in the world. The power of reason connects us to the rule of law and justice, directing human behavior on that tenuous path of right and wrong. Surrendering the need to know "why" represents the release of an entire inner archetypal map, one that the ego relies on for its strategies of survival in a world we perceive as heavenly influenced by the polarities of right and wrong, good and evil. 

To surrender runs counter to all your instincts of protection, grounded as they are in your need for personal safety. Your unconscious fear is that to surrender is to release the force of evil in your life without the rule of good to counteract it. We tend to believe, even unconsciously, that if we do good, bad things won`t happen to us. We do not only believe that principle, but also honor and live by it. Yet healing requires you to relinquish your need for an explanation- why, for instance, you experienced a brutal betrayal, or why you must take on the arduous challenge of healing an illness or assisting a loved one who is ill. Understandably, everyone asks, "How am I supposed to let go of this need for reasonable explanations?"

Caroline Myss

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