My weekly ritual for looking at the week that was.

Let’s just state that since my life is full of hard stuff, all my logs will be late.
At least for now.
I started this log late last week and now it’s this week, so I’m logging for two. Because sometimes that’s how it goes.

• Every week I am faced with the daunting task of coming up with new words to describe my pain. I am at a loss for words, stories, metaphors. I am in excruciating pain. I cry so hard that my housemate overhears me and asks me if I’m ok. The answer is always “no”, but there is nothing anyone can do, and there is simply no way for me to be “ok”. I don’t even know why I am hurting, since most of the time the pain just pours out in floods of tears, seemingly without a “reason”. All I know is that I don’t want to live, I don’t want to be alive, I don’t want to experience what I’m experiencing, it’s all too much.

• Brene Brown says you have to be mindful of whom you share your story with, you have to know whether the relationship can bear the weight of the story. What she doesn’t say is that some people truly cannot bear the weight of your story. I go to my closest friends with “I don’t want to live anymore” and they proceed to lose their entire sh!t, which means I then have to reassure *them* that I am not going to “do something stupid”. So I end up not telling people how I feel, which means I have to carry the weight of my story all by myself, and I end up feeling “different” and “alone”. I am being thrown into territory that none of my friends has ventured into, and so they cannot possibly imagine what it feels like. If I tell them what this territory looks like, they don’t get it, or give stupid advice, or get overwhelmed. So I keep quiet.

• It’s actually funny (not) that people worry about me killing myself, when death is precisely what is going on, only I am not the one doing the actual killing, at least not consciously. I am being slaughtered. This is what it feels like. For proof I can offer my state of Supreme Indifference to All Things, also known as “Previously Unheard of Levels of Not Giving a F*ck”. It’s extremely disturbing. I literally don’t care about a single thing, not one. Not money, not career, not writing, not dreams, not goals, not love. I care about this one “thing”, but the Universe is pretty clear that I need to stop caring about it for my own sanity (such as it is), and when that is gone I will roam the streets in a completely catatonic state, being animated purely by the momentum of previous life. This is not metaphor. I don’t know who I am without the things I care about, and I no longer have any. This is what I mean when I say I am being slaughtered. I am being killed, so I can become something else, something I cannot imagine. In many ways I feel dead already.

• I went through a couple of days when I burnt some karma (stuff) and the peace that ensued was lovely. But alas, as it’s always the case, the after effects of burning karma don’t last, and now I’m in a state of such extreme despair and detachment I no longer have the words to describe it.

• I have friends in my life, people who love me. I want to stop and take a moment to acknowledge this. It’s complicated. I am grateful, I remember a time in my life when I didn’t have close friends, when I felt so isolated and lonely, and in many ways I truly was lonely. Now there are all these people showing me love, and in many ways it is wonderful. And yet… it just doesn’t cut it. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. There’s this deep need in my heart for something, and not all the support and love from friends can touch it. I am wondering whether it is an illusion, these notion that you can replace one form of love with another.

• The title of this log “trying to land” is a reference to this feeling of being without a story. I literally don’t know why I’m alive. I cannot imagine “life”, I cannot imagine my future, I cannot imagine doing anything. This might be what people refer to as “being in muddy waters”, and I would like to believe that the waters will settle at some point, but I have been in this state of “no future, no story, no dreams” for 2 years now, and I no longer have hope of things ever changing.

• The “pain” has reached new levels. I used to be “tired to my back teeth”; then it became “tired to my very bones”. Yesterday I felt exhausted to the very space between my cells. THAT is how tired I am of feeling this pain. A story I cannot share with people who cannot bear its weight.

• Friends. I have friends in my life with whom I can share a meal and talk. So there’s that.

A note about my log

Why do I write my log, when all of 7 people click on my website per day and none of them read my logs, not even me?
I often wonder, why bother.

And yet I am still here, after all these weeks, still showing up, even amidst terrifying and word-defying suffering.
So why.

I don’t know anyone who has gone through what I am currently going through. No one. I read a lot of “self-help, spiritual-yoga-woo”, and in this genre people are always sharing their stories. And I’ve never read anything remotely similar to what I’m currently experiencing.

My hero Charles Eisenstein talks about “the space between stories”, and that resonates with what I am currently going through, this state of not knowing who I am, where I’m going, what I want to do, what I believe, how am I to “be” in the world.
And yet… even he has never actually described this state while being in it.

I don’t know anyone who has gone through such long periods of Singleness, or who has gone for years without dreams or without hope.
I read advice from the “self-help, spiritual-yoga-woo” and all I can do is stare at it in disbelief. Things like “what do you want?” and “stay with your longing” and “work with your own stuff if you want something to happen…” they no longer resonate. It’s like I’m on a different plane of reality from them.
And it leaves me incredibly isolated.

I don’t know whether I will ever leave this state. For all I know, it’s permanent.
But whether it is or it isn’t, I want to write about it. I want for there to be a record that someone has gone through this, that I have gone through this.
This feels important, even if nobody ever reads it.

I’m not all the concerned with whether people read it or not. All I care about is that my story adds to the “collective”, so that nobody can say “this is how things are for everyone”, because my story says “no, not everyone, that has not been my experience”.

And, I suppose, if there is someone out there who reads my story, it might give them courage to share those aspects of their story that do not dare come to their consciousness because they might be too… “odd” to be real.

Moments of Insight

I don’t know if this will make any sense, but it is something:

Perhaps what we call “good writing” is the gravitas we sometimes have to give our story so that people can comprehend its weight.
They might not be able to hold it, but they can at least understand why it weights so much.
Indeed the very word “gravitas” comes from “gravity”. That’s one of the characteristics of good writing: a story isn’t just a story, it’s suddenly a life, and it deserves respect.

And here’s another something that might or might not make any sense. In fact, it might or might not be “right”:

We all have our own curriculum for “Life Lessons”. It’s uniquely ours. And it looks nothing like other people’s.

See, we have this idea in the “self-development” world that once you learn the Life Lesson, you can move on to Life’s Next Level. This idea might make sense, until you start comparing your own Life Lessons and your own Life’s Next Level to other people’s.
So you might find yourself wondering why on EARTH you are not moving on to this Life’s Next Level that Elizabeth Gilbert moved on to, seeing as how you have mastered Seriously Advanced Life Lessons, far more advanced than hers.
Or in human terms: “how come I don’t have a husband, when I have mastered “self-love” to Serious Levels most people with husbands have not even began to study”.
Well, it’s because their curriculum looks nothing like yours.

We have these toxic notions that life is supposed to go a certain way, and that if it doesn’t it must be because we are screwing up. Years of standardised education taught us that we must all learn the same lessons at the same time, if we want to move on to the next level.
But life doesn’t work like that. We are all learning fundamentally the same Life Lessons, at different times and in different ways. Some people learn the lesson on Unconditional Love while they are single. Some people learn it after they have found a partner.

Life is infinitely more complex than we think, and we do ourselves great violence when we compare our paths to other people’s, when we expect our lives to turn out like Elizabeth Gilbert’s just because her life looks nicer than ours from our perspective.

You learn the lessons you are meant to learn when you are meant to learn them. And you move on to the Next Level for you.

Things of Considerable Worth (Un-missables!)

“Dear Needy Girl”. I can relate to this. I can’t see how much of it is true, as I’m too deep in my patterns, but I would like to think some of it is.

“Life without the story line”, by Pema Chodron. This concept confuses me, but I found the story of the Buddha and Mara particularly helpful. I understand the value in letting go of the story, but how can we live without a story? Is that doable? Is it desirable? Is there some value in having a story? I don’t know.

Pema Chodron – Awakening Compassion Here’s a brilliant audio series by Pema Chodron. You can listen to it for free on Youtube. The audio quality isn’t great, but if you’ve never encountered her teachings before, this is a great place to start.

This log took longer than any other log, ever. Possibly.
I am here, and I am wishing good things for everyone.