Hi Nycartist

I wish you a belated happy birthday! A Mexican restaurant and karaoke sounds like a lovely night out.

It sounds like you are very much a people person. I think I text 1 person from college once a year. And maybe text another a couple of times a year and arrange to hang out once a year. I don’t remember either of their birthdays.

Unfortunately, people do move on. People are often very busy with careers and families. It is easier for many to focus on their immediate circumstances. But I don’t think this means that people don’t care about or appreciate the past. They may think very fondly of it from time to time. The added difficulty for you might be living out of state. Do you have friends where you currently live?

As someone who isn’t into big gatherings, 4 sounds like a lot of people. Are these people that attended generally closer to you?

Sometimes feelings of loneliness occur not as a result of other people, but naturally within ourselves. Outside of this birthday situation, do you often internally feel lonely? Or are these feelings brought up by the occasion?

Dear nycartis:

You wrote “this feeling, this Lack or Void has always been with me.. a dark hole that can never be filled“- this Lack, Void, dark hole that can never be filled-  it has been with me too and it’s been with lots and lots of people. I want to work on my own Lack-Void-dark hole that can never be filled (I’ll refer to it as Lack, the 1st word you used, and the only one of the boldfaced above that you used more than once, a total of 4 times) this morning, using your posts to help me with my personal work. I hope that as I develop this post, it will help you too. First, I will research your Lack, then I will look deeper into my own.

The title of your thread characterizes the Lack very well: “Feeling Down/ Like  No One Cares“. Words in the title of your previous posts also fit this Void as well: “Fear… not coping.. Struggling.. haunted… Anxiety“.

You wrote yesterday: “Even now that I have a loving husband, ‘lots of friends’, and a daughter, and now finally a very attentive mom, nothing can fill it”- your focus when it comes to the Lack has been your “friends”. You chose quotation marks around the word because there is a mismatch between your expectations in regard to friends and the  reality you experienced  in regard to friends.

“Sometimes it scares me a little. I know I would never do anything drastic, like take my life or anything“- this Lack is so distressing at times that a person feels desperate enough to end that distress any which way, whatever it takes.

“I spend way too much time thinking about the Lack. In this instance, the friends who didn’t come, and not the ones who did (or the fun time I had with my husband and daughter celebrating separately). My mind reverts quite naturally to the Lack“- the Lack is so distressing at times that it demands all our attention and all of our thinking. It takes priority over anything else.

“I have been living with this Lack, like an elephant in the room for a very long time“- this Lack is as big as an elephant in a room. It is not a minor lack, its indeed a LACK.

“This birthday just sort of shone a light on it, but it is there all the time“- we feel the Lack more intensely times than in other times, but it is always, there, the elephant in the room.

“I think you are on to something that this has a whole lot to do with my childhood“- I read and re-read what you shared about your childhood before, but not with the Lack being on my mind. I want to look for the Lack in what you previously shared. I will try to not make it very long:

“My family is very small… I was ALWAYS the peacekeeper” (March 2019): you were always the peacekeeper because there was no peace for you as a child, in the context of your family.

On October 11, 2020, you submitted your one and only happy thread titled “A Happy Post/Gratitude“: “My daughter spends more time with my husband’s family and is very bonded and comfortable with all of them. I’m thrilled because, in the last week or so, she has finally bonded with my mom!! Today we spent the day together and the two of them were just talking, and walking my mom’s dogs at a park, and it was as if they were old buddies, so comfortable. I kind of stepped back a bit and let the moment last as long as it needed to. It filled my heart so much… to see this new connection of love forming makes my heart so happy… Today is a day I won’t ever forget… my daughter really enjoys being with her“.

In the same thread, you wrote: “My mom..  has exposed me to a LOT of pain“.

Your mother exposed you to a LOT of pain, which took away so much from the child that you were: it took away a LOT of your peace of mind and heart (and therefore you became “ALWAYS the peacekeeper”). Your bond with your mother was terribly interrupted, your feelings of comfort with her was terribly gone. You were so-uncomfortable- the opposite of “so comfortable”). Your heart was so-much empty, and seeing your daughter and mother filled your heart “so much”.

“It filled my heart so much“, you wrote on Oct 11, 2020. Yesterday, July 17, 2020, you wrote that you have “a dark hole that can never be filled“. The image of your daughter and mother did not fill your heart for long. All that was filled on that day was gone some time later.

On the same thread, you shared: ” in truth I’m so weak and timid because of this gnawing fear that I’ll have someone mad at me, or someone cut me out of their life and cast me aside. It’s something I’m struggling with very much and am actually in therapy to try to resolve” (Oct 12, 2020): I noticed this gnawing fear in your various threads in regard to your friends.

The day after, Oct 13, 2020, you wrote: “My husband, thank goodness, is such an amazing person… so different than many of the people I grew up with. He’s decent, respectful, and loves me, and reliable… But this issue of mine baffles him. He can’t understand why I refuse to let go of some friendships or even family relationships that are definitely toxic“- I think that the reason you focus on unreliable friends is because the shape of your Lack/ “dark hole” is such that it cannot be filled by an amazing, decent, respectful, loving and reliable person like your husband. It can only be filled- so the Lack’s intuition goes- it can only be filled by the person/s who created it. Or people similar to the people who created it: non-amazing, indecent, disrespectful, unloving, unreliable, definitely toxic.

I don’t think that it is possible (for you, for me, for anyone) to convince the Lack to be filled by what it is not designed to be filled with. I think that it is not possible to fill it with anything at all. It will always remain empty, and the only possibility is to shrink it. All the efforts to fill it end in emptiness and a continued desire to fill it, a desire doomed to be frustrated again and again, forevermore.

There are euphoric feelings that accompany the images of/ thoughts about filling Lack, such as you experienced in your Happy Post. But these euphoric, happy feelings are deceiving because they cannot lead to success. They in fact lead to failure and misery.

– to be continued later. If you’d like to react to what I posted so far, nycartist. Otherwise, I would like to return to your thread in hours from now.

anita

Dear nycartist:

“Thank you for this epiphany that you helped me arrive to!”- you are very welcome.

“my family life was so unstable… I remember my childhood best friend moving away…  that abandonment hit me very hard at 7 years old. Another friend in middle school hurt me when she became ‘too cool’ and left me for the cool crowd… I remember I became depressed even as a child when these things happened“-  if you had a stable family life to come home to, it would have stabilized the disturbances that occurred at school/ outside the home. But with an unstable family life, stress was added on top of stress, culminating in depression.

“My mother gave me some wise advice, which was to try to have many friends, ‘This way when one leaves, you have others as a backup’. I have lived with those words in my mind regarding friends….always afraid someone would leave, always trying to make sure I have enough ‘back ups’. This led to some pretty poor quality of friends, as they say quantity does not always mean quality“- what you needed was one stable mother, not a backup plan of many friends. It was not really wise advice because it led to you becoming overly concerned about having enough backup and compromising what qualifies as a friendship.

“With regard to The Lack… monster… the way to defeat is is not to eliminate it, but to contain it, and keep it in the basement… I can now acknowledge The Lack, but not let it take hold of me, or consume me. I can choose not to let it darken the good and positive things in my life. This has begun to feel very empowering!“- very well said. I want to develop the monster imagery better, so I looked up the movie script (the script lab. com/ he Babadook pdf):

“.. Samuel (S): It’s in my room! Amelia (A): What? Samuel: The Babadook!… A: Sam… No Babadook. No nothing, alright?… S: Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in! (He starts to hyperventilate. Amelia carries him to the bed and covers him with her body, trying to calm him… Samuel lies in a fetal position and sucks his thumb as Amelia pats his back, singing him a lullaby. Her voice trembles as she sings it. Samuel stares into space)… A: There is no BABADOOK!.. IT’S ALL MADE UP IN YOUR HEAD!… It isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real…

A: Samuel! Let-me-in! (No response) I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW YOUR F****** DOOR IN!!.. You little pig. 6 years old and you’re still wetting yourself…  You don’t know how many times I’ve wished it was you not him that died… S: (Low) You’re not my mother…

S: “If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.”… A: YOU’RE NOTHING! (The hideous shadow grows larger, rising up to the ceiling, terrorizing her. The floors and walls shake)… You are trespassing in MY HOUSE! (Its growls turn to a deafening roar as the shadow touches the ceiling, a huge mass of black terror. Amelia fights a sickening, gut wrenching fear as she finally faces up to this thing. (Not turning away) If you touch my son again, I’ll f***** KILL YOU… Bits of the ceiling fall to the floor. The walls crack. Sam’s body is flipped up and pulled violently towards the shadows. He yells. Amelia grabs him by the hands and yanks him to her, there’s no way she’s letting go this time… Amelia jumps up on the bed end, her son in her arms, and lets out a scream so strong, so piercing, it smashes every window in the room. She looks utterly fierce. A mother enraged, protecting her son. Her scream dies away, but her eyes are full of life.

She searches the darkness. The huge shadow shrinks down from the ceiling, its growls reduce to a hideous moan. The shadow is slowly and completely lost to the darkness. The noise of the Babadook stops altogether.. An unbearable silence…. The ‘figure’ suddenly drops to the ground like a sack. Amelia starts. It collapses into a shapeless mound of hat and coat with nothing underneath…

By the time Amelia makes it downstairs, the Babadook has disappeared into the basement, door slamming. She runs over to it, locks the door, takes the key… Samuel: How was the Babadook? Amelia:  Pretty quiet today…. Amelia: Happy birthday sweetheart. (Sam breaks into a smile. He closes his eyes and leans into his mother, his face beaming) THE END”.

-In fiction such as this, the child has a very predictably patient and loving mother and the monster is a non-human that invades the lovely home and proceeds to attack and terrorize the child. Next, mother fights the monster and protects her child, and lovely home life resumes. In real-life, the monster is most often the child’s mother (or father), attacking and terrorizing the child from time to time, and.. no one to protect the child. And so, no lovely home life for child. Instead, there is the Lack we’ve been discussing.

In fiction, the mother scares the monster away. In real-life, it happens that the mother allows a monster (a boyfriend, a new husband) into the home and keeps him there.

In fiction, when the mother huffs and puffs and insults the child, the child immediately knows that it is not his mother, that it is a monster that took over his mother (“You’re not my mother”, Samuel). In real-life, the child is not this fortunate.

In the story, when Amelia denied the monster, it grew bigger and stronger. When she acknowledged it, facing it- not timidly- but utterly fierce with “eyes full of life”, it shrank and weakened. When she searched the darkness, the darkness shrank. How do we, in real life, face the darkness/ the Lack?

Back to your words: “I am learning now that when a friendship ends, it does not always have to be devastating. When a friendship is poor quality, I do not have to continue to hold on to it“- let go of poor quality friendships, and let go of the friends-backup-plan. Instead, stand on your own, utterly fierce with eyes full of life!

anita

Someone cares, nycartist, MeRRy ChRistmaS !!!

anita