Dear Anita,

I am glad to read that you like the poem by Rilke.  I adore a lot of his work.  I never cease to find it amazing how much wisdom and depth of insight he manages to fit into very few words.  I realise in reading his poetry that he must have been a very accomplished philosophical thinker.  He had a pretty difficult life, certainly a very difficult childhood.

I feel big tugs at my heart strings when I read of your loneliness in the past.  It makes me very sad that you lived unheard for a long time.  How terrible for you, it must have been a very desolate time for you and I am truly sorry, but therefore also very, very happy to know you have a good life now, which I believe from reading your posts.

Do you know, I used to do the same thing too, talking to the stars and wishing on them.  I could only see a strip of sky from my bedroom window and I found their twinkling very comforting and always sang “When you wish upon a star” to myself.  The words filled me with hope:

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires will come to you
If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star as dreamers do

Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true     

I clung on to the hope that my life would get better one day because of the words “makes no difference who you are”, so I thought, even I can have hope.  Maybe the hosts of angels were listening to both of us after all!

The Rilke poem you quote about being too small is called “I am too alone in this world”, and he says

I am too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to honour every passing hour.

I am too unimportant in this world, yet not small enough to be able to appear to you as a mere object, dark and clever.

It is of course true that he himself uses words, though in “I have a deep dread of the spoken word”, what he is actually referring to is how he sees the development of humanity (at least where he lived) towards a very mental, superficial nature, not connected to the real world in a sense of what I believe we would call mindfulness today.  So he is saying that people think they are so smart, yet they have no real contact with “life”, the life in all things, which he experiences as hearing a song emitted from all life.  How much further humanity has strayed since then, yet in some ways I feel there is a new awakening on a much wider scale, which gives me hope.

I very much enjoy sharing about Rilke with you, but I must now go and fulfil a myriad household duties so I will have to delay writing about my piecing together of my puzzle until tomorrow.  My time is rather short, and exacerbated by the heatwave we are having, which makes me feel so tired (and not like having to do all those things!)

Juanita

Dear Anita,

I hope you are well?   I still haven’t posted what I was intending to because I think I bit off a bit more than I can chew.

I am still not feeling very well because of the heat, but also because I am trying to process all that I have become aware of recently, in addition to the realisations due to our recent communications.  I will try to explain …

A few days ago I happened to notice your conversations with another participant, Cat, for the first time.  I noticed some familiar themes and ended up reading through all of your posts.  I was very saddened to read of the pain that both of you have gone through in your lives, I am very sorry you have been through such terrible times, yet I would also like to say that despite all the darkness you have experienced and survived, a radiant beauty emanates from the writings of each of you.  I was also very glad to read that Cat has been able to make such progress during your exchange.

Obviously reading a lot of information has left me with a lot of information to digest, which isn’t usually a problem for me if it is just information, but there were many things which resonated with me, and also explained a lot for me.  In a lot of ways it was like being able to be more of an observer at a distance of what my own childhood and youth must have looked like to an observer.

I think that is why I have been so sad in the last days and am having to cry now and let it all out.  I keep telling myself that I am making progress and have to see how far I have come, how much I have survived, but at the same time it is just so damn painful and sad to have already used up so many years of my life already, and to be still stuck at figuring out the basics!

I want to read again through all the posts between you and Cat so that I can make notes and try to deepen my understanding.  I can see many similarities and it has also left me feeling quite stunned to have this experience of looking in on my own life, I think I’m needing a lot of energy just to process this.  I’m so exhausted, I’m literally dragging myself around to fulfil my duties.

I am at once overcome with a sadness of such proportions, it feels as if I could never get to the end of all the tears I would have to cry.  And at the same time following Cat’s progress has given me such hope, because I have been looking for a long time for a help to find a way to combine continuing to heal with living an independent life.  So far I was too overwhelmed to be able to figure out the steps.  As ridiculous as that sounds, it has felt to me for a long time now just as you described in one post, a feeling of such confusion that you can’t even see/figure out what you need to do.  Sometimes I feel as if my brain is too foggy to figure out things, things that any normal adult does without thinking.  Things I used to do without thinking.

One thing which is particularly noticeable for me is that Cat is able to describe her feelings and the emotional/mental situations very well.  I have had the feeling for a long time that many things which live within me are without words.  Reading Cat’s descriptions proved this to me, but also gives me words for my own similar experiences.  I have tried to explain this to various people of the years, including therapists, but no-one understood at all because they see me as expressing myself.  But I couldn’t express some things which were within me and needed to be expressed.

I think you will probably be wondering, so I would just like to say that I don’t have symptoms of Borderline or manic depression.  I had the only depression of my adult life in the last 2 years but it was clearly linked to my marriage problems.  I am not sure if I’m explaining myself clearly, but the common issues I see reflected are to do with beginning to understand both the structure which I grew up in, and the way it affected my behaviour and choices.  I find both your posts so helpful, Cat’s because she gives that silently suffering part of me words – I don’t know if you can imagine how that feels after 50+ years to finally be able to verbalise your own feelings?  It is immense.  And your posts are so helpful because I begin to see a pattern, and I also hope I can thus make changes.

I hope you are able to follow me.  I am a bit emotional right now.  The thing I was meaning to write about before is that I realised when I read your post of 7th July (11.06 am), I was a bit confused for a minute.  I wondered why you would say I should be discerning and self-disciplined, as I would normally have said I am both.  But I said to myself that you obviously intend to explain me something, so I reconsidered my situation, asking myself what you could mean.  Then I realised that I did not act in a discerning manner and was indeed impulsive.  I know that my basic character is usually not impulsive enough, so I wondered about this and then realised the following:

I was very sad and depressed at the beginning of the year.  I knew I needed help so I looked for a therapist.  I think she helped me in some ways, but I also think she misunderstood some things about me.  It probably didn’t help that we had to do some sessions online and the connection was really bad.  However, before lockdown she had told me I had social anxiety and I believed her.  It wasn’t until I decided to get myself a book on CBT for social anxiety that I realised I definitely do not have it.  I think one of the reasons is because I described how I felt after the first visit I had to my neighbours, (of the weeds and witches issue) some time in the new year.  I came home feeling ill.  I do not feel well with people who are totally drunk in daytime (night time neither, but daytime is extreme to my mind).  I also do not feel well where the men and women are segregated and the only thing the women do is to gossip about every single person they know.  I am not this kind of person.  I also felt the woman I was sitting next to, to be very bitchy and unfriendly.  Altogether, I did not want to go back.

However, when I described this to my therapist, she interpreted this as having social anxiety.  I interpret this as having social standards and I should have said so!  There is this theme of me not being able to speak things out sometimes.  This therapist never spent any time asking questions to get a general background understanding of my situation, so I think this haphazard approach was not helpful in my case.  I have nevertheless felt very guilty to tell her that I don’t want to continue and have delayed informing her of this.

When I read your posts to Cat, I began to understand more deeply that my behaviour with many people in my life has been marked by this failure to understand that they are not the saviours which my inner child is seeking.  This is SO good to begin to get this clear, but also very exhausting.

I realise now that my attitude towards my therapist was also that “she must know” and would be my saviour.  Therefore I started to try and force myself to have more contact with my neighbours and to be more open to relations with people more quickly (like the acquaintance re. the plants).  I see that this “order” of hers meant that I went straight ahead instead of having my usual filters in place.  I was confused as to why I should become friends with people who clearly had some very basic opposing values and could never feel really sincere with them, which makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Before beginning posting on TinyBuddha I had already started to feel better by trying to go back to listening to my own common sense and what felt right, but that fear that I would be failing in human relationships was instilled in me by that therapist and has caused me to be careless.  Though I can also now understand that my childhood was the real prototype for this kind of behaviour anyway.

I am very sad about my life, looking back.  Our recent sharing about lyrics and poetry felt so healing to me.  I started writing poetry when I was five years old and learned German by translating 18th and 19th century poetry.  I stopped for a long time because I had no-one to talk to.  I did meet a man when I had just turned twelve and we would speak about Sartre and Jung and all the things I was reading and thinking about, he offered me some intellectual exchange which my parents and school couldn’t.  However, it turned out that he was grooming me.  My parents sent me to him on holiday.  He was married but his wife had no idea.  I really liked her and was very conflicted not to be able to tell her.  He only touched me once and never dared do it again as I reacted defensively and told his brother-in-law.  But it ruined the pleasure of being able to share my thoughts and I have never found anyone else since.  Or perhaps not dared to look.  I just find that most people don’t want to look that deep.  Which is okay for them of course.  Just leaves me very lonely.

Oh Anita, I have rambled on a bit here.  I am so glad that I can write to you, more than words can say, and I will close by saying that you may not believe in angels, but if you want to see one, look in the mirror.

Juanita

Dear Anita,

I am so glad you like what I said about looking in the mirror, please do print it out!  I sincerely mean it because I believe that your actions demonstrate the qualities we associate with angels, especially your patience, understanding, and above all being there.

I have actually been taking a rest, thank you.  I have been physically resting all day and not engaging with those subjects.  I did a lot of gardening the past two days which was also tiring, but having read Cat’s thread, I suppose it is like having eaten too much at one meal and the digestion is troublesome.  I am hoping that I will feel better again in the morning.  I should be at least physically rested.  I also made myself my favourite comfort food today, “aloo paratha”, that is Indian pan bread, stuffed with a spicy potato mixture.  (I may have eaten a little too much of this too!!)

I felt so much sadness this evening and normally I don’t tell anyone how I am feeling but it did me good to tell you.  I think that my last post is also representative of the issue I feel I need help with; I know I have still a lot to work through and become aware of, also make changes, but at the same time I need to tend to my garden because it does me so much good, also my other creative things, also my housework, also finally begin a new business … and then comes the question of how to manage all these different things.  I see that Cat managed despite some very difficult personal issues, so it must be possible, but the answer to this question seems like something just out of my reach.

Could we talk about it in the next days perhaps?  I hope you know what I mean.  I read where Cat wrote that the thought of filling out a calendar with all the things she had to do made her feel powerless (to this effect, I can’t search for the precise quote now).  I have this feeling.  I used to be amazingly well organised, all my life really, super self-discipline even as a small child.  This problem arose with the depression.  I am a lot better already, consciously and consistently continuing to conquer all the stray areas of my life, and my garden, but I feel that I would benefit from some support in assessing priorities, and also receiving some confirmation that I am going the right way and will reach my goal of feeling peaceful and being financially independent again.  I guess I lost a lot of self-confidence because of my husband’s behaviour and my subsequent depression.  I haven’t ever had another problem with feeling foggy around him by the way.  Isn’t that wonderful?!  I so just needed to get clear on how to understand his character, and the therapist confused me a lot here too, but now it is actually quite easy for me to deal with him.  How things can change!

I am too tired to take in any new information now anyway, but I would really appreciate being able to talk these things through with you in the next days because I know that precisely a plan of how to integrate change and yet build on stability in my everyday life responsibilities is what I have been seeking for some years now.  I don’t need instant results, I just need to know how to find that balance.  If you google “Linda Garland Mystical Sapphire greeting card” you will see the picture I have here which represents maintaining balance in my life to me (a lady in a blue dress with peacock feathers around her head).

Juanita