Me: What just happened?
She: You tell me.
Me: I wrote those two stories -- my first drink and pouring a beer. I felt OK. But then I felt that hard cold hot pressure in behind my solar plexus, and I started feeling really sad. I felt alone and scared and small. I got a hottie and a blanket, and lay on the couch. I noticed how the small vulnerable part of me always wants to be warm and cosy -- which might explain why I lug a hottie around all day, even in summer. I decided to just lie there an be present with this feeling, accept it, without trying to stop it or numb it out. It was uncomfortable. I was trying to remember the process Tara Brach recommends for uncomfortable emotions, but I couldn't remember. I looked in my old journals, knowing I'd written about it before. I found the page, and read that entry. It was exactly what I was experiencing now. The pressure, the distress of lonliness, the fear, the smallness. That sense of a chilling whisper "You don't even exist." The date on the journal entry was 15 July, 2013. Exactly a year ago today.
I feel like I'm not making any progress at all. I keep on ending up in this sad, scared, lonely crumpled heap.
She: Good description.
Me: But I want to write something inspiring!
She: Stick with writing something honest.
Me: Like me, going round in emotional circles, lying on the couch with my hottie and blankie in the middle of the day? I need something to eat!
_________
When I look deeply into the emotions that derail me (or trigger me as they say in the self-help books these days), I always end up at a feeling of imminent annihilation -- like I'm about to be eliminated. This is a tangible animal fear feeling that I'm about to get snuffed out. My body's reaction is usually to freeze -- no time for flights, no practice at fighting -- freeze is my first response.
The things that trigger this rather dramatic and yes, embarrassing descent into emotional wreckness can be very small things: a sharp word from someone (and an even not-so-sharp but potentially just not that warm and fuzzy). Someone not responding when I speak (being ignored). Being misunderstood when I speak.
So many of us grew up hearing that we were not welcome, appreciated, loved or cherished -- we were naughty by default and had to learn to be good, we were expensive, we were usually a nuciance, too big for our boots, "what did we do to deserve you?" "Bloody kids, always wanting something". A dissappointment, constantly on the verge of doing something grieveiously wrong, ungrateful. I grew up ashamed of myself. Just for being alive.
In my deep, wise core, I did know that this was total bullshit. One just didn't verbalise things like that in our family. And deep down I think I knew the adults hadn't thought this kind of communication through -- they probably did it in the name of character building. They were children themselves. They were scared and lonely and small too.
This scaredness, loneliness, vulerability is universal. I know that. I know that by not numbing it or glossing it over, running like stink from it, it can heal. Not just in the freezing hot knot behind my own solar plexus, but down the chain of history, way way back.
Did you know my paternal great great grandmother got so drunk on gin she fell in a fire and her leg got so burnt it had to be amputated? And my maternal grandfather was a member of the "Sunday Morning Drinkers" club -- that's what they did instead of going to mass.
She: Save those stories up for tomorrow. You've had a big day.
Me: Good idea.
NEXT Straight-Laced Party Animals
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