To listen or not to listen.... Or about my mental creative block.
I wrote this piece a few days ago.
I became aware that a recent experience, generated in me a major fear of sharing my life publicly, and that writing about my thoughts or about my pain and my process of moving through it, can put me in a vulnerable place, that could be easily used to ridicule me or even take advantaged of my openness, if I am not more careful.
I decided to publish this note anyway, for the sake of honesty and openness.
Maybe I should not have done so.... But maybe someone will benefit from reading something in it, or just by reflecting on this...
It happened on the day we left NZ.
We were sitting in our car, driving to the small regional airport, through green fields dotted with sheep, and bordered with green trees.
Under some huge trees, cows were finding shelter from the pouring rain.
It had been sunny and dry in Northland NZ for months, and on the day of our flight, the Bay Of Islands airport was delaying its flights due to misty weather and heavy rains.
I am no longer hoping for an easy journey back to the USA.... I lift my hands up to the Universe as if to say: "God, I leave it in your hands... Even if we get out of Kerikeri in time to make the tight connection with our flight from Auckland to San Francisco, we may not make it to Denver anyway.... Since major storms and the holiday season, are delaying flights and closing airports all over the USA...."
The green hills and the farmland, which we drive through, are loving this rain.
Despite the pristine idyllic beauty of the land, and the calm it brings to my eyes,
I am aware of the emotions that are weighing me down.
The pain of the past few weeks, does not feel like a bee sting, or a sharp knife any more.... But it is still with me... Only it feels differently.... It mutated into another form.... it feels like heaviness and numbness now....
It feels like I do not care any more.... I feel like giving up...
I recognize it as a defense mechanism that I've developed to numb down my emotions....and to push away the many words, and things that just do not add up... that do not make any sense to me.
It is as if my mind is tired of my emotional body being so slow to let go..... "not catching up fast enough and still holding on to that painful experience....."
I recognize that my mind advises me to stay away from the ripples of effect that are still coming back to me, from that mistake I've made.
They are expanding out of that event in concentric circles....
Nasty emails that he sends us, filled with berating words and accusations.... Made up points of views and confessions of things he had thought or done... That make me shiver.... How come so much poison occurred in his mind in six weeks?....
This numbness feels so heavy in my body, as if I am carrying extra weight... More than just an emotional pain, it feels as if I am actually carrying extra, undigested fat..... It feels physically heavy.... Like extra kilos..... An emotional burden, taking shape as weight.
Emotions have a resonance in the body.
Calmness and clarity feels light and airy.
Joy may feel giddy.
Happiness may feel expansive and uplifting
Caring may feel warm.... Etc.
The sensation of numbness and muffled pain, is the EXACT opposite of that.
It feels as if I could actually become overweight, physically...... if I will let this settle into my mind and into my emotional body for too long...
I wonder if this is why people become physically overweight?.....
If it is a result of the same undigested pain, numbness and heaviness like the one I am currently feeling, that they were unable to process and overcome.... Or to make sense of....
So many emotionally churning things happen to us during the years.
If we are impatient and try to push away the pain, we simply become numb and heavy...
Despite processing my pain from that experience, again and again.... Some things just do not add up and still make no sense to me, and the numbness and heaviness are my way of numbing down the residue of what I could not process or make sense of...
I am aware that my mind is yearning to understand what happened....
The mind knows what happened and it wants to put things into tidy little drawers and compartments.... Before it is willing to file that experience away.
But when you are dealing with irate, insane or irrational behavior.... things just do not fit neatly into pre existing compartments in your mind's drawers.
(Please note that I am referring to his CHOICE OF BEHAVIOR, NOT to the person himself, who like all of us, have many redeeming qualities and good sides.)
Hurting words he said, seem to be floating on an invisible wind, blowing in midair like paper planes, lifting on the currents...
I need to build a whole new set of shelves and cabinets of drawers in my mind... In order for me to file THIS experience away...
Doing this, feels like too much work... And it makes me feel heavy...and numb... because I am tired of feeling achy....
It brings to my mind a story I heard from a girlfriend of mine, who had been sexually abused by her uncle at the age of four and a half.
Argg... Just writing these words, bring to my mind a memory of a broken hearted father, who once said: "what is wrong with our society, that we have adopted these 'civil words' to hide the ugly truth..." (he kept on crying and said): "This man did not sexually abused my daughter, he RAPED my little girl... He RAPED her..."
Back to my girlfriend, she was never able to make sense of this experience, because it did not make any sense.... On any level.
If she could categorize (in her mind,) her uncle as a brute, an insane or a bad person, who is a rapist, paying for his mistakes by doing time in jail..... Or even just as an uncaring person,...... maybe she would have been able to put it into some perspective and file it away in the drawers in her mind, and overcome the pain.
But the same uncle, never went to jail.... Nobody ever found out.
Her family continued to visit his house almost every weekend.
She played with his kids and vacationed with his family.
The uncle was well loved by her family, by his wife, and by all of his friends.
To add to her confusion, he was kind and encouraging to her throughout her childhood.
The experience just did not add up in her mind.
Not being able to file it away, and not willing to feel the sharp pain all her life, she developed a "thick skin", which she said felt like numbness and emotional heaviness inside her.
Maybe not coincidentally, she had been overweight all her life, and despite good eating habits and many attempts at a variety of diets, she was never able to lose the extra weight.
Right now, I can sympathize with how she feels easily.
Of course nothing as painful as this happened to me here, but my mind is unsatisfied with not being able to make sense of what happened, and how a good and charitable deed, extended with love and friendship, can turn so tragic.....
My mind is tired of trying to make sense of it, because it seems to go in circles, and it does not come up with anything illuminating..... So it is generating numbness and heaviness inside me instead.
I ask myself if the heaviness and numbness are better than feeling the confusing pain? Mmmmmm...... I am not sure....
But I am aware that it is an automatic defense mechanism, instilled in me.
I sit to write it down, and the voices in my head start taking shapes like invisible spirits gathering over my shoulder..... Each has something to say, as I try to write this note... To put it down with the hope of letting it finally go...
I hear them say:
"Just let it go...."
"You do not have to go through the rubbish on the way to the trash!"
"You said enough!"
"You are fanning the flames"
"You are going to face more negative energy"
"More people are going to turn on you, do not be surprised when it happens"
"People do not know how to process their own pain, and they do not like to read about yours...."
"This is why people say slogans like "Let it be..."
"Trust God, Trust the process, leave it in God's hands..."
"Give it a rest!"
"Move on!"
"Why write about pain? It is unreal anyway... it is ego generated..."
"Be 'spiritual' and rise above this"
"Only love is real"
"Remember the saying that God sends us only angels?... Wait and see that he was one also..."
"It is in the PAST already"
"Let dead dogs lay"
"What good can come out of speaking about this? AGAIN...."
I am hearing these voices and I put my pen down.
Who can write ANYTHING in such a noise....
Not ONE voice is encouraging me to continue.... Why should I?.... Maybe I AM doing something wrong.....
I should NEVER write again about my life, about my sex life, about my process and about my pain.... Who cares about my problems, my struggles OR my joys.... I am ONLY making myself an easy target for attacks....
I feel more depressed and heavy now...
I feel as if I will never be able to write anything but fiction or nonsense coded poetry, that people may not be able to penetrate, decipher or bounce back to me...
And then I feel it.... It is NOT a loud voice...but more of an inner stirring from my guts....
It is the inner KNOWING that NOTHING ever gets resolved by burying it away... That this IS what creativity is all about....
It is about what is REAL in MY life.... And about what is happening NOW.... NOT about what I SHOULD be writing about.... But about the muck which is real, despite being unpleasant to deal with.
I should not be concerned with impressing people with my words, or be concerned with writing GOOD quality notes.
I can write from my aching guts and share my truth... However crappy the note may end up being... I am feeling crappy anyway....
If I'll bury it too soon, it will become a fossil, imprinted forever in stone.....or worse, mutate into a BIGGER form of pain.... Until it will become a natural disaster..... Waiting to explode.
Beside,....maybe my girlfriend will read this... maybe she will dare to write about her uncle also.... To process that cancerous growth and to let that energy flow instead....
Why are we so in love with beauty and surface happiness? When so much of what happens around us is ugly?....
So I pick up my pen, and grip it with my bony fingers....
I am aware that I squeeze it way too hard,.......but I keep on writing...
The tears are streaming into my notebook, making the paper damp,.... making the ink run into cloudy shades of grey clouds.... Making the letters unidentifiable....
Now my page looks like an old Chinese watercolor black and white painting.....
But I trust that I will be able to recognize the letters later, when I will type them into my computer....
I am putting things down, despite the paralyzing voices in my mind... Trying to stop and discourage me with a collection of perfectly "good" reasons....
I am already feeling a bit lighter.... I feel like the knot in my stomach is loosening... I even feel hungry now.... Luckily, there is a fabulous Japanese restaurant, adjacent to the coffee shop in which I planned to sit and type this note...
What about you? Have you internalized any pains, small or large that you cannot fit into any files in your mind?.... Because they do not make any sense?...
I became aware that a recent experience, generated in me a major fear of sharing my life publicly, and that writing about my thoughts or about my pain and my process of moving through it, can put me in a vulnerable place, that could be easily used to ridicule me or even take advantaged of my openness, if I am not more careful.
I decided to publish this note anyway, for the sake of honesty and openness.
Maybe I should not have done so.... But maybe someone will benefit from reading something in it, or just by reflecting on this...
It happened on the day we left NZ.
We were sitting in our car, driving to the small regional airport, through green fields dotted with sheep, and bordered with green trees.
Under some huge trees, cows were finding shelter from the pouring rain.
It had been sunny and dry in Northland NZ for months, and on the day of our flight, the Bay Of Islands airport was delaying its flights due to misty weather and heavy rains.
I am no longer hoping for an easy journey back to the USA.... I lift my hands up to the Universe as if to say: "God, I leave it in your hands... Even if we get out of Kerikeri in time to make the tight connection with our flight from Auckland to San Francisco, we may not make it to Denver anyway.... Since major storms and the holiday season, are delaying flights and closing airports all over the USA...."
The green hills and the farmland, which we drive through, are loving this rain.
Despite the pristine idyllic beauty of the land, and the calm it brings to my eyes,
I am aware of the emotions that are weighing me down.
The pain of the past few weeks, does not feel like a bee sting, or a sharp knife any more.... But it is still with me... Only it feels differently.... It mutated into another form.... it feels like heaviness and numbness now....
It feels like I do not care any more.... I feel like giving up...
I recognize it as a defense mechanism that I've developed to numb down my emotions....and to push away the many words, and things that just do not add up... that do not make any sense to me.
It is as if my mind is tired of my emotional body being so slow to let go..... "not catching up fast enough and still holding on to that painful experience....."
I recognize that my mind advises me to stay away from the ripples of effect that are still coming back to me, from that mistake I've made.
They are expanding out of that event in concentric circles....
Nasty emails that he sends us, filled with berating words and accusations.... Made up points of views and confessions of things he had thought or done... That make me shiver.... How come so much poison occurred in his mind in six weeks?....
This numbness feels so heavy in my body, as if I am carrying extra weight... More than just an emotional pain, it feels as if I am actually carrying extra, undigested fat..... It feels physically heavy.... Like extra kilos..... An emotional burden, taking shape as weight.
Emotions have a resonance in the body.
Calmness and clarity feels light and airy.
Joy may feel giddy.
Happiness may feel expansive and uplifting
Caring may feel warm.... Etc.
The sensation of numbness and muffled pain, is the EXACT opposite of that.
It feels as if I could actually become overweight, physically...... if I will let this settle into my mind and into my emotional body for too long...
I wonder if this is why people become physically overweight?.....
If it is a result of the same undigested pain, numbness and heaviness like the one I am currently feeling, that they were unable to process and overcome.... Or to make sense of....
So many emotionally churning things happen to us during the years.
If we are impatient and try to push away the pain, we simply become numb and heavy...
Despite processing my pain from that experience, again and again.... Some things just do not add up and still make no sense to me, and the numbness and heaviness are my way of numbing down the residue of what I could not process or make sense of...
I am aware that my mind is yearning to understand what happened....
The mind knows what happened and it wants to put things into tidy little drawers and compartments.... Before it is willing to file that experience away.
But when you are dealing with irate, insane or irrational behavior.... things just do not fit neatly into pre existing compartments in your mind's drawers.
(Please note that I am referring to his CHOICE OF BEHAVIOR, NOT to the person himself, who like all of us, have many redeeming qualities and good sides.)
Hurting words he said, seem to be floating on an invisible wind, blowing in midair like paper planes, lifting on the currents...
I need to build a whole new set of shelves and cabinets of drawers in my mind... In order for me to file THIS experience away...
Doing this, feels like too much work... And it makes me feel heavy...and numb... because I am tired of feeling achy....
It brings to my mind a story I heard from a girlfriend of mine, who had been sexually abused by her uncle at the age of four and a half.
Argg... Just writing these words, bring to my mind a memory of a broken hearted father, who once said: "what is wrong with our society, that we have adopted these 'civil words' to hide the ugly truth..." (he kept on crying and said): "This man did not sexually abused my daughter, he RAPED my little girl... He RAPED her..."
Back to my girlfriend, she was never able to make sense of this experience, because it did not make any sense.... On any level.
If she could categorize (in her mind,) her uncle as a brute, an insane or a bad person, who is a rapist, paying for his mistakes by doing time in jail..... Or even just as an uncaring person,...... maybe she would have been able to put it into some perspective and file it away in the drawers in her mind, and overcome the pain.
But the same uncle, never went to jail.... Nobody ever found out.
Her family continued to visit his house almost every weekend.
She played with his kids and vacationed with his family.
The uncle was well loved by her family, by his wife, and by all of his friends.
To add to her confusion, he was kind and encouraging to her throughout her childhood.
The experience just did not add up in her mind.
Not being able to file it away, and not willing to feel the sharp pain all her life, she developed a "thick skin", which she said felt like numbness and emotional heaviness inside her.
Maybe not coincidentally, she had been overweight all her life, and despite good eating habits and many attempts at a variety of diets, she was never able to lose the extra weight.
Right now, I can sympathize with how she feels easily.
Of course nothing as painful as this happened to me here, but my mind is unsatisfied with not being able to make sense of what happened, and how a good and charitable deed, extended with love and friendship, can turn so tragic.....
My mind is tired of trying to make sense of it, because it seems to go in circles, and it does not come up with anything illuminating..... So it is generating numbness and heaviness inside me instead.
I ask myself if the heaviness and numbness are better than feeling the confusing pain? Mmmmmm...... I am not sure....
But I am aware that it is an automatic defense mechanism, instilled in me.
I sit to write it down, and the voices in my head start taking shapes like invisible spirits gathering over my shoulder..... Each has something to say, as I try to write this note... To put it down with the hope of letting it finally go...
I hear them say:
"Just let it go...."
"You do not have to go through the rubbish on the way to the trash!"
"You said enough!"
"You are fanning the flames"
"You are going to face more negative energy"
"More people are going to turn on you, do not be surprised when it happens"
"People do not know how to process their own pain, and they do not like to read about yours...."
"This is why people say slogans like "Let it be..."
"Trust God, Trust the process, leave it in God's hands..."
"Give it a rest!"
"Move on!"
"Why write about pain? It is unreal anyway... it is ego generated..."
"Be 'spiritual' and rise above this"
"Only love is real"
"Remember the saying that God sends us only angels?... Wait and see that he was one also..."
"It is in the PAST already"
"Let dead dogs lay"
"What good can come out of speaking about this? AGAIN...."
I am hearing these voices and I put my pen down.
Who can write ANYTHING in such a noise....
Not ONE voice is encouraging me to continue.... Why should I?.... Maybe I AM doing something wrong.....
I should NEVER write again about my life, about my sex life, about my process and about my pain.... Who cares about my problems, my struggles OR my joys.... I am ONLY making myself an easy target for attacks....
I feel more depressed and heavy now...
I feel as if I will never be able to write anything but fiction or nonsense coded poetry, that people may not be able to penetrate, decipher or bounce back to me...
And then I feel it.... It is NOT a loud voice...but more of an inner stirring from my guts....
It is the inner KNOWING that NOTHING ever gets resolved by burying it away... That this IS what creativity is all about....
It is about what is REAL in MY life.... And about what is happening NOW.... NOT about what I SHOULD be writing about.... But about the muck which is real, despite being unpleasant to deal with.
I should not be concerned with impressing people with my words, or be concerned with writing GOOD quality notes.
I can write from my aching guts and share my truth... However crappy the note may end up being... I am feeling crappy anyway....
If I'll bury it too soon, it will become a fossil, imprinted forever in stone.....or worse, mutate into a BIGGER form of pain.... Until it will become a natural disaster..... Waiting to explode.
Beside,....maybe my girlfriend will read this... maybe she will dare to write about her uncle also.... To process that cancerous growth and to let that energy flow instead....
Why are we so in love with beauty and surface happiness? When so much of what happens around us is ugly?....
So I pick up my pen, and grip it with my bony fingers....
I am aware that I squeeze it way too hard,.......but I keep on writing...
The tears are streaming into my notebook, making the paper damp,.... making the ink run into cloudy shades of grey clouds.... Making the letters unidentifiable....
Now my page looks like an old Chinese watercolor black and white painting.....
But I trust that I will be able to recognize the letters later, when I will type them into my computer....
I am putting things down, despite the paralyzing voices in my mind... Trying to stop and discourage me with a collection of perfectly "good" reasons....
I am already feeling a bit lighter.... I feel like the knot in my stomach is loosening... I even feel hungry now.... Luckily, there is a fabulous Japanese restaurant, adjacent to the coffee shop in which I planned to sit and type this note...
What about you? Have you internalized any pains, small or large that you cannot fit into any files in your mind?.... Because they do not make any sense?...
