Dear Narsil:

Welcome back!

“I would love your views on what ‘living your truth’ means and how much a city can influence happiness”-

– first I don’t believe in happiness, as an ongoing emotion;  I believe that “happily ever after” fits the fictional narrative of fairy tales, not real life. Happiness/ joy is occasional at best and limited in time.

-second, what I learned is that as an adult, I kept reliving my childhood emotional experience. As I travelled and lived in this or that new city, I experienced the exhilaration of something new, a new beginning, but sooner than later, I felt the same as I did as a child. Living my truth (using your words) is being able to experience the here-and-now not as there-and-then, but as… here and now, a new reality.

I re-read your posts in your other thread. I understand that you don’t want advice, and I will not give you advice. Instead, I will offer you my understanding:

You started that thread January 21 this year, living in Rome. That was exactly ten days before the first two confirmed Covid-19 cases in Rome (Jan 31, 2020). Ten days before Covid-19 reached Rome, and before the national panic over the largest numbers of deaths in Italy at the time, you were already afraid. But not of a virus.

I bet you don’t feel fear of your mother now. Children repress overwhelming fear and as adults.. we forget that we were so intensely afraid back then. But I believe that Jan 21, you were afraid of the same person and same experience that you were afraid of as a child: “I had to be perfect to be deserving of their attention and admiration. If I took A- minus in a test, they would ask ‘why not A?’ My mom sometimes would even tear my homework apart if it wasn’t perfect. She would yell at me for taking a B… it was really my mom who did all the judging and pressuring and asking for ‘excellence'”-

– you were afraid then and afraid since of your mother pressuring you to be perfect, pressuring you to be worthy of her affection, otherwise, you get her rejection and aggression (yelling at you, rearing your homework), not her affection.

You wrote: “They are loving parents and show much loads of affection. I had to be perfect to be deserving of their attention and admiration”- you experienced two things  with your mother: her affection and her rejection and aggression. An association was made in your child brain between affection and rejection-aggression.

Fast forward: you move in with your boyfriend who is very affectionate toward you, and for whom you feel affection, and boom!- the association is activated, and you experience your childhood fear of rejection and aggression: “the day we moved in together.. I had the worst panic attack I had ever experienced in my life.. I started vomiting, trembling, hyperventilating for hours”- your childhood emotional experience was activated, your repressed and forgotten emotional childhood experience erupting to the surface!

Having experienced such panic, your thinking brain has been trying to calm the terrified brain by removing you from the situation, where the association has been made, moving you out of the home you share with your boyfriend and out of the relationship with him, by focusing on his faults (“I focus obsessively on his flaws), by suggesting to you that you don’t love him anymore (“I am not attracted to him anymore… am not in love with him anymore”).

“every time he makes me laugh or I feel tenderness or affection toward him.. every time I feel warmth, something in my head snaps and I feel like I need to get out”- your brain snapping is the sudden reactivation of your early life association between receiving and feeling affection and fear (of rejection and aggression).

Your boyfriend did not introduce to you the experience of rejection and aggression, your mother did. Your boyfriend’s affection toward you (and your feeling affection toward him) within the circumstance of living together  with no time limit,  activated that fear.

Does this make sense to you?

anita

 The thing is that I wasn’t feeling this way when I was in London, even though it wasn’t perfect there at all. Life was tough, I didn’t have much money, I felt lonely. But also powerful and independent and free. And I keep going back to that feeling and I ask myself what does it mean to live by your values and whether a place can really change the way you perceive yourself – shouldn’t I feel free, powerful and independent wherever I am? Does the city I live in really matter so much for my mental health – 

Narsil this resonates with me so much too! I moved from my home town to the UK, and like you nothing was ”perfect” over there but i was happy, i felt independent and free too. I have been on and off in the UK for going on 6 years now and i still havent found my ”truth” as you put it so nicely. 

I dont think it’s the place as such but how you perceive the place itself, i find that i am mostly myself in a place where i feel comfortable and that tends to be ”home”. We can all make a conscious effort in making a new place home, but i have really struggled with this. I get on just fine here, i have a steady job, a lovely house that we rent etc.. but am i 100% happy? No, and because of this i tend to have more of a negative mindset which affects me mentally and physically.

The answer to your question is basically yes, it does affect your mental health because we are allowing it too.

I know that i want to go back home and could not see myself living here forever, but i need to do things before i can.

Much love

x