Dear Gaia:

I typed away the above spontaneously, without editing (my thinking developed while I was typing), so I don’t want to interrupt that. I will add it here then: I am making a distinction between a child growing randomly and a child growing up. To grow randomly is to mature physically but remain sick emotionally/ mentally. A child can grow up in a supportive home and become a healthy adult. A 21 year old newborn (one growing randomly in an unsupportive home with a crazy mother) can still grow up, that is, heal, become more and more healthy.

anita

Dear Gaia:

“By the way with the ivy analogy, the tangible thing to lean on isn’t necessarily only emotional support but.. “- I noticed you doing this before: I give you good input, and you point to something and proceed in a different direction, not staying in that one place I illuminated.(This is not criticism, so don’t be alarmed, I did it myself in the past, looking away from what would be painful to look at). I pointed to you not having anyone to lean on in your home where you grew randomly. But you ignore it and point to something else. Because you don’t want to look at what I said, not wanting to look at it emotionally, to feel it, that is.

Therefore, even though what you pointed to reads interesting to me, I don’t want to go there because I want you to go back to what I pointed to: how it felt being a child/ your whole life growing randomly because you were alone, no support, no one to lean on.

Interesting, the last words you wrote: “to make myself better known to you”- if you looked (if you were able to look) where I am pointing, how you felt then (and still feel) randomly growing, alone etc., it is you who will get to know you better!

I am looking forward to read from your journal entries and otherwise.

anita

Dear Gaia:

I love your attitude, so very pleased that you don’t withdraw when you don’t like something about my input to you and instead you are asking for “a balancing point for both of our perspectives”- I am so pleased that I am almost thrilled (and I mean it!)

Here is the balancing point that I am therefore suggesting: I will continue to tell you what I believe to be true, ask you about what I don’t know, and you will do the same. Plus, when you bring something up that I believe is a distraction from what I wrote to you, I will tell you so, but if I have input about about what I believe to be a distraction, I will offer you that input.

Is that acceptable to you?

Regarding what I refer to as a distraction in your post before last: “the ivy analogy, the tangible thing to lean on isn’t necessarily emotional support but again, ‘what makes you you'”- well, I don’t have input on it because I don’t know what you mean by it. Would you like to clarify it?

anita

Dear Gaia:

Back to the Ivy Analogy: I am reading it in a different way this morning. “a climbing plant.. growing ‘randomly’, without stable supports or surfaces to lean on it naturally needs.. it needs to lean, twist and wind around something else.. to keep growing and live.. I am that climbing ivy who gets bigger and longer but around my ground there’s nothing to lean on, I just keep growing ‘randomly’.. my ivy needs ..something happening. Departures. Responsibilities. What makes you, you… the tangible thing to lean on.. (is) what makes you, you.. you turn into a certain way because life shapes you in a certain direction.. with certain people and events+ inner traits. Sometimes I feel like life has forgotten that I exist and that I need happiness, challenges and newness to keep growing. Instead I feel stuck in a limbo of stagnation and negativity since forever. I feel like I have clothes that don’t fit me in and I need life to give me a valid excuse to throw them away, but it doesn’t.”

Yesterday I saw the “stable supports of surfaces to lean on” as emotional support in childhood that you didn’t get, growing randomly alone with the hysterics of a melodramatic mother. But what you meant (and I missed it because I was too attached to my understanding) is that the stable supports of surfaces to lean on are new events and new people in life so that it will be possible for you to grow with purpose, or with meaning, with passion, perhaps. (I got it now, did I, Gaia?)

Assuming I got it this morning, here is  my understanding at this point based on the quote above: to grow purposefully, with the feeling of being alive, you need challenges outside of you, in your life, new people and new events to react to, new people and events to give you new growths paths, above, under, in between, to the right of, the left of, and as you grow or move in new paths, there is an element of discovery and adventure, a truly living life-experience, as opposed to the “stuck in limbo of stagnation and negativity since forever” life-experience.

“I feel like life has forgotten that I exist”- you feel that life is outside of you, and you are stuck in non-life, is my understanding. “I need life to give me a valid excuse to..”- as if life is outside of you and you are angry at it, at Life, for not showing you the way in, so that you too can live.

I will stop here before I go on, because I don’t want to build on the above and then find out that you don’t agree with the foundation of what I continue to build. So, did I understand correctly by this point, or is there anything at all that I misunderstood?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I see it this way: there are new people in your life and there are new events in your life, but the old suffering in your brain is so intense, that there is no newness in you to meet the new people and new events.

Lots of suffering and lots of bitterness- you are like an old, bitter woman- not in a state of mind that makes purposeful, passionate growing possible.

The Ivy twists and turns as it responds to its own internal suffering, too busy to notice newness on the outside; to full to take-in newness from the outside.

Am I still getting it right?

anita

Dear Gaia:

Taking in what you wrote in your recent post I will correct my post to you right above yours:

There are new people in your life and there are new events in your life, and a lot of possible new people and possible new events, but the old suffering in your brain is so intense, that there is no newness in you to make new things happen.

Lots of suffering and lots of bitterness- you are like an old, bitter woman- not in a state of mind that makes purposeful, passionate growing possible.

The Ivy twists and turns as it responds to its own internal suffering, too busy to notice newness on the outside; to full to take-in newness from the outside, too tired, too bitter to make new things happen.

Am I getting it now?

anita

Dear Gaia:

If my last post to you has “some truth in it”, then what is the part that is not true?

anita