Tag Archives: healing

My response

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I’ve had something profound happen that I, unfortunately, cannot write about in any depth or specificity yet as there is still a great deal of fear attached to what has occurred. I’ve been experiencing abject fear since last week with this particular person, and it has come to a head.

By the grace of the universe, I am able to extricate myself from having this person in my life. Or at least I will be able to do so in short order.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few days dreading tomorrow when I will finally see this person since our last interaction. I’ve alternated between realistic and calm brain, and fearfully active brain. I’ve hiked, gone for walks, talked with friends in person and on the phone, and still the fear would not leave my being. I even resorted to watching a bad movie last night for distraction to no avail. The movie, You, Me and Dupree did not serve as a distraction for me, but that could be because I am a movie snob.

I woke up this morning with that fear that just envelopes me like a big heavy blanket thrown over me that I cannot get out from underneath.

And just so you know the bizarre way my mind works, here’s how I finally found some peace with this …

To distract myself I started reading the Kripalu catalog of upcoming workshops, and I found a workshop by Noah Levine scheduled for the upcoming fall season. His workshop is related to overcoming addiction using the Buddhist path as an overlay to the Twelve Step approach. I immediately looked up a YouTube video of a talk on Buddhism he gave at USC to see what he’s all about.

The following quotes from the talk, I believe, are the reason I came across this today:

“My goal is to meet every unpleasant experience in my life with love, with compassion, with kindness.”

“Compassion is responding to pain with kindness and love rather than aversion and hatred.”

I found myself listening to the entirety of his hour long talk, and I looked up others as well. Before I knew it a couple of hours had passed, but I noticed that I finally started to feel at peace for the first time in days. I finally started to feel like I could handle this difficult situation, or at least I finally feel hopeful that I can handle it.

I then headed out to the bookstore to purchase his new book, Refuge Recovery. Alas, though the bookstore indicated it was in stock I could not find it, and I was not in the mood to ask if it was shelved elsewhere. I then happened across Sharon Salzberg’s book, Loving Kindness, and I believe everything in this quest happened as it was supposed to happen because I opened up that book to find an exercise on contending with a difficult person. This was exactly what I needed.

I needed to read that compassion was tantamount to this challenge. The exercise advised to contemplate a good thing about this person (and in this particular case, that is not hard to do), and direct loving-kindness phrases towards them such as, “May you be free from danger, may you be happy,” Though, as the book advised, I replaced “you” with “we” because articulating the “you” was a stretch for me at this point. The author calls the compassion we send “metta.” It was surprising to find that I was able to do this. I thought of a couple of vulnerabilities that likely bring her suffering, and I was able to feel compassion for her.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve no background in meditation or Buddhism. Let me be clear: I know nothing, absolutely nothing aside what I’ve gleaned from today’s journey. All I have is a great desire for peace with this person.

There is still some fear left in me, but I believe in peaceful interactions with all my heart, and that is all I want. All I can control is my response, and my reaction to whatever happens tomorrow. I am asking the universe for all the strength we can conjure for the best response.

Coming back

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I’ve been silent on this blog for too long. My own life has been such a distraction that I’ve felt “blocked” from writing. Twice, over the last two weeks, I’ve started blog posts that I’ve abandoned out of the feeling that they made no sense, or that they were garbage. Finally, I realized that I just have to start writing again, no matter what, no matter how nonsensical, or “bad.” It’s true that it’s always harder to start up again after you’ve been away from the page for too long. Similar rule with running, always harder to start up again after a prolonged absence. Better to just keep going.

A lot of change is afoot for me, and that’s probably what’s been impacting my ability to concentrate on writing.

With regard to my dissociative identity disorder, I’ve been progressing with integration. My progress has been so notable that I’ve come to the conclusion that my current career is no longer a fit for my true self. This realization has been a shock, but the more I think about it the more I realize that this, in fact, is true. I am good at my job. I do it well, but it is not the best fit for the real me. The core of me desires a job that is far less adversarial, quieter. I investigate employee misconduct, and I represent management at arbitration hearings. I do it well, but it’s not how I want to contribute to the world.

This job is what I wanted up until now. There is no accident in how I got into this career. I can certainly connect the dots. But, the core of me of would like to contribute to the working world differently. I would like a job that is more social justice oriented. Just as a Hail Mary submission, I sent my resume in for a position that caught my eye. At the very last minute, right before the deadline, I crafted my cover letter, and pressed “send.” I waited until the last minute because it felt silly applying for a job in a field in which I had been notably absent for a while.

Meanwhile, I told my boss that I was looking for another job. I did this because my boss has been very supportive of me with my treatment efforts, and I felt like it was the right thing to do. I envisioned that this search would take months, perhaps longer, especially since I’ve not worked in social work policy for a while.

Much to my surprise, I received a phone call at 5 pm on Friday for an interview for the job I considered a Hail Mary resume submission. I know it’s just an interview, not a job offer, but I am still very surprised, and heartened at the fact that I have an interview. Even if I don’t get the job I will be grateful just for the interview. It shows me that I am a viable candidate for what I really want to do with my life.

Lately, life has seemed clearer, just crackling with clarity. One morning as I walked into Doc’s office I noticed a brass name plate on the door of his office with his name. I walked in and complimented him on the new name plate. He said to me that it’s been there the entire time I’ve been coming to see him, which will be two years next month. I was surprised to realize that I’ve never noticed the name plate until recently. I’ve opened that door countless times with no notice of the name plate right in front of my nose as I entered his office. But, that’s dissociation, or at least that’s what Doc says.

Who are you?

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You peer into the mirror, and you don’t recognize the person looking back at you. You want to ask, “Who the hell are you?” In your mind, you are still that gal with the long beautiful brown hair, nice olive skin and big brown eyes that will pop with just the right make-up. This could be the reason that you’ve held on to your clothes from that other time: the beautiful and flowy brown skirt with intricately embroidered blue flowers tastefully placed on one side of the skirt, and the matching blue keyhole blouse that hugged your figure perfectly. And let’s not forget the long black formal with strategic cut-outs that garnered the attention of all the queens at the LGBT holiday gala. You were so proud to be loved by the queens!

But, that’s not what you see in the mirror before you. Instead, you see a greasy head of brown hair that is in bad need of a hair cut. Your face is far chubbier than your imagination will allow. It stuns you to even look in the mirror. You have this strange impulse to dive into the mirror, in search of the girl you used to know. Surely, if you dig hard enough, you will find her.

In that other time, you could feel the effortless way that your clothes flowed around you as you walked. You knew that every part of your physical being was perfectly intact, and you knew when you walked into a room you could command attention. But, the perfect physical being on the outside was a shell for the internal deceit taking place inside.

You can only run from yourself for so long, eventually it all catches up with you. In essence, that’s how one can go from belle of the ball to looking like a woman on the edge of falling into the abyss of inpatient psychiatric care. You run into people you knew when you were belle of the ball. They pass you by because they do not recognize you. You know when someone passes you by because they want to pretend they don’t know you, when that happens there’s that nanosecond flicker of recognition in their eyes before they look away. But, these people just look past you as if they’ve never met you. Part of you is glad to forgo the humiliation in front of them, though the humiliation is still there inside of you. You know they don’t recognize you because you look incredibly different from that other time, the faraway other time that feels like a fairy tale that happened to someone else.

Somehow, some part of you knows that your current life is a purer one from the previous belle of the ball sham of a life. But, purity does not mean it is easier, or painless. In fact, it seems the more truth you find the more pain there is to sort through. In those moments when the dissociation and PTSD make you feel heavy enough that you can hardly sit up in your chair, you can’t help but wish that you were still in that blissfully ignorant sham of an existence. At least you looked great.