Diary entry 2

This time last year, I was in Algeria. This time last year, I had suffered a profound mental and emotional breakdown. This time last year, I unofficially quit my translation job of ten years. This time last year, I had a plan; I was going to kill myself and I had a plan. Prior to this, I had done research on effective and sure ways to commit suicide, and I had pondered and begun to devise plans, but I had never had a plan as likely to succeed as this one, and I had never had the preparedness to execute such a plan. This time I did.

My plan necessarily involved travel. In one week, my visa to stay in Algeria would expire, so I had to leave. My plan necessitated that I be in a specific country (not Algeria) and that I store my luggage in the airport lockers of an airport in that specific country. It necessitated that I then travel to a specific area of that country to complete the execution of my plan, all on my own. On this day last year, I had this plan.

On March 26th last year, I was walking to the bus in Ain Turck, Algeria to go into the nearby city, Oran, to buy food. On my way, I fell on the sidewalk and broke my foot. At 40 years old, I had never gotten any more than scrapes and bruises from falling down, and hadn’t broken a bone since I was six years old…until last March 26th, 2008. I would blame the miniature rock quarries that pass for sidewalks in Algeria, except for the fact that I was actually walking on a portion of sidewalk that was completely safe and in-tact. My shoes were a little big, and my feet were sliding around a lot in them, but still…

On this very day last year, March 27th, in meeting a certain Algerian…let’s call him “Lucifer”… I had fulfilled the reason I had gone to Algeria. In some parallel universe, Lucifer loved me; in this one, he lied to me, he cheated on me and he stole my heart, my mind and my money. I still loved him, because he had loved me and I had never had any feeling of being loved before and I was insanely desperate for it, so I just couldn’t let go of that love, or even the memory of it. I had to meet him one last time, just to see for myself how far away from his love for me he had come. He had come far.

One week after our meeting, I had to leave Algeria…with a broken foot, on crutches…with my luggage. My plan had to be postponed. I couldn’t even carry my own luggage, let alone carry out my plan. The Algerian doctor who had treated me had told me, however, that after two weeks with the cast, I should be able to have it taken off and to walk on my foot.

I left Algeria last year on Saturday, April 5th, the day my visa expired. I had nowhere to go. I had no domicile, I had no home. Prior to departing for Algeria on June 2nd, 2007, I had given up the apartment in Finland I had been living in for ten years and put all of my belongings into storage. I didn’t care what happened to me. You could say I had a death wish and, in a sense, I had become reckless.

So on April 5th I flew out of Oran, Algeria, headed for Paris. I spent two nights at the Charles de Gaulle airport. I had decided in the time at the Paris airport that I would fly to Helsinki, where I had to take care of some matters before dying, so I would also have a doctor take my cast off and then I would proceed with my plan. I was just biding my time at the Paris airport so that the prescribed two weeks would pass by the time the doctor in Finland was to look at my foot.

After two nights at the airport in Paris, I took a plane to Helsinki. I stayed two nights at the Helsinki airport too. On the second day, I went to a medical center, almost miraculously and thankfully located only several meters from the airport itself. I had had the cast on for two weeks to the day. The doctor and the nurse removed the heavy Algerian plaster cast and I became a little perplexed as to how I should be able to walk on my very painful and swollen, very purple and blue colored foot. The Finnish doctor informed me that I must have the cast on for two more weeks, a total of one month. Not only that, but he said I mustn’t fly. He put on a new cast and I was stuck in Finland with a cast, crutches, luggage, no help and nowhere to go but the freezing cold airport. I was forced to call for help.

I called one of the two friends I had made in Finland, knowing I had to impose myself upon her and knowing how the people in that country hate to be imposed upon, especially in their homes. I didn’t think I had any friends of whom I could ever ask such a great imposition. I was crying on the phone when I told my story. My friend said I could stay with her and her family for the two weeks until I got my cast off. Today this friend holds a unique place in my heart, even if our contact is sporadic.

I stayed two weeks with my friend and also managed to take care of the matter I needed to take care of before dying. What happened, however, during those two weeks…I continued to have email contact with Lucifer. Like I said, I still loved him and I still needed him, even mere shadows of his love. He indicated he was worried about me. I told him my plan. He was the only one. He was the only one I could talk to about what was in my heart, including suicide, because he had spoken to me of suicide, and, I believed, he had spoken to me from the depths of his heart.

In the end, I promised Lucifer that I would not kill myself. He had also made some promises to me which he said he would keep on the condition that I take care of myself, not kill myself, and keep him updated as to how I am and what I am doing. I don’t think either of us thought that he would ever keep any of his promises. The truth is, part of me was looking for a reason not to kill myself, part of me didn’t really want to kill myself, after all (it’s not as easy as people think if you think about what you’re doing). Lucifer’s seemingly heartfelt caring, though likely feigned, and his, again seemingly, sincere request for follow-ups on me, plus promises on his part to become a better person, were all I needed to abandon my plan and make a new one. And that’s what I did.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.

Diary entry 1

Given the continued unstable nature of my life, I decided I should post a diary on my website. In my life, I can never know where I will be or how long I will be there (geographically speaking), and even less, what I will be doing when I get there. Nowadays I can usually only see one step beyond my current situation, and even then, all is apt to change if things don’t go as planned (presuming there’s a plan). As such, there will be periods when I may not have any Internet access and I won’t know when I might have Internet access again. Since this site has become quite important to me, I want to add a diary, so whatever happens will be anticipated to anyone reading, and I won’t just suddenly disappear without warning. Because I know 0 about web design, the only way I know to establish a diary on my site is to add another category to my blog called “My Diary,” where I will post diary entries. I’ll try to keep the category limited to what is going on (or what has gone on) in my “real life,” as opposed to in my imagination, poetry or the thoughts in my mind. Most of the time, however, they all coalesce (usually without my awareness).

I had wanted to begin this website as a success story, rising from the dead like a glorious Phoenix out of the ashes of utter devastation and destruction, having triumphed over all my fears and miseries, having all of the answers, being 110% healed, my head and heart put together, successful and serving as a guiding light for others who were struggling in their suffering like I was. I passionately wanted to help others, not limited to – but especially – people like me, the commonly misunderstood, with serious and deep-rooted emotional troubles, who might be suicidal, self-mutilating, severely depressed, or whose lives have been defined by devastating and repeated childhood traumas/experiences that have burned a brand of patterns of suffering on them, to such an extent that, even despite recourse to all resources imaginable to them in their lives, they are still at a loss concerning how to free themselves of the suffering patterns. I wanted to have credibility and ability to offer compassion, understanding and wisdom, which I think is a difficult and rare combination to find anywhere. I wanted to be a model, not only of someone who had overcome extended childhood and adolescent emotional and psychological abuse and neglect and its results, but who did so without espousing a hardened heart and/or a mind which lingered in hatred or revenge, pay-back or justice, thus becoming a role model for breaking the vicious circle of the evil and bad we perpetrate upon one another in this world. And I wanted to do all of that without revealing any of my own lingering dysfunctions, depression, flaws or struggle. However, it turns out that the site, like the Phoenix, is up and…well, I’m not.

This site is the only thing I have going for me right now that I care about (and the only thing I’ve ever cared about that wasn’t a man), and I’m more than pleased about having this lovely little cyber corner where I can delightfully weave my own delicate, glistening dew-drop-donned web … pages, which are becoming like a real home for me now, so I’ll try to make all I write on the blog as coherent and organized as possible. (Routine and organization-two things I strive for but which always elude my grasp.)

Thus, rather abruptly and poorly transitioned, concludes the “Introduction to My Diary.”

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.

I remember my first Christmas in Finland, in 1997, just 4 months after having moved there for a job position. Imagine that in those four months, I had moved my life across the ocean from Canada to Finland, began my new job, gotten illegally fired from that same job and, consequently, also dumped by my Finnish fiancé.

I remember sitting on the floor that Christmas alone in my nearly empty apartment in the dark in front of a lit candle, sobbing uncontrollably to God and reviewing all that had happened in my life to enable that moment and that situation. I traced my life path even as far back as 17 years, when I learned the geography of Europe in middle school and was smitten with an inexplicable attraction to Scandinavia, especially Sweden. From that point, I traced my life path forward through intricate details, meetings and events which had to have been timed to a tee to have occurred. Then, considering how the life paths and events of key persons I encountered also had to have been equally meticulously designed and timed in their own right, I saw clearly that some supernatural power had to have planned all this out and I basically concluded that God was actively trying to make me kill myself. In my defense, however, I only entertained this sort of thought in my worst moments, such as that Christmas of 1997. All I could be sure of was that the minute details, timing and coordination of the events necessary to bring about my situation at that time clearly indicated the deliberate direction of some power somewhere. I felt like a pawn in someone’s play. My general default feeling all through my 20’s was that I was being punished, but I just couldn’t figure out why.

This is an excerpt from a diary I kept back in 1997. While mildly amusing in parts, I can’t argue with one of the points I made: “All I could be sure of was that the minute details, timing and coordination of the events necessary to bring about my current situation at that time clearly indicated the deliberate direction of some power somewhere.” It was my conclusion that was amusingly child-like. I had always believed that if good things came to me, it was because I was a good person and deserving of good things, while if bad things came, which is pretty much all that came, I was bad and deserving of bad things, even though I knew I had never done anything to hurt anyone else.

Most recently, however, I have reflected on free will and destiny with yet more confusion, and the hypothesis that, whether I want them or not, I am destined for certain experiences. This thought process came about when I was reflecting on the latest male person I loved. How many times I had thought to myself in the years I had known him “If only I had not reacted like that, if only I had been or reacted this way instead of like I did!” During the years of struggle with him, I thought many times that by changing my actions and reactions, he and I would be happily together and incurably in love right now. As I pondered these things again, I realized this time that this thinking was wrong. I realized that crossing of geographical borders does not change the inside of a person. Whether here or there, this male person was going to lie and cheat, no matter what had happened outwardly, this male person was going to have sex with female people who were not me while he was married or engaged to me. I realize now that, despite all his beautiful words, in his heart, he never really wanted to be with me, and that would not have changed. I realized that nothing I could have done could have spared me the suffering I had in that last relationship. Nothing I could have done could have prevented me from meeting and loving that very unique and specific person in particular.

I also recalled, as an example of another destined move, how back in 1989 I had spent my junior year in college abroad in Sweden. I really wanted to be in Finland, because there was a boy there I was in love with. Therefore, during my year in Sweden, I had arranged specially with a Finnish teacher at the University of Stockholm for me to transfer there to study Finnish. The teacher accommodated me, which was not routine. On the day I had decided to mail the application, I fell apart because I could not find a single person at my school to give me a ride to the post office at lunch. I quit and gave up the whole idea of studying Finnish in Stockholm and of going to Finland.

Upon my return to the U.S., I transferred from a small American private college to a big Canadian university, where I finished out my university studies in 1992. Then I moved to Sweden to live with a Swede, after which we moved back to Canada in 1994 and broke up shortly thereafter. My “Finnish fever” had returned. I went to university yet another year and obtained a certificate for teaching English as a second language and, amazingly, procured a job in Finland during a recession in 1997 when unemployment in Finland was at 18%.

Thus, in 1997, 8 years after my first attempt to be in Finland, and long after I had lost all affection and respect for the Finn I had been in love with, I found myself living in Finland. I have often wondered what might have happened between the Finn I was in love with and myself if I had mailed that application 8 years earlier. Would he have “deflowered” me? Married me? Or would he have continued to brush me off with more excuses, as he had done when I lived in the U.S.? I sincerely believe the latter.

Upon recalling all this, I became sure I had been destined to go to Finland, one way or another. I failed the first time I had the opportunity, but it didn’t stop it from happening. Likewise, I was sure that my latest love interest was my destiny to suffer, no matter the nature or situation surrounding us, I was destined to suffer his evils against me. Could I have avoided the experience of him if I had been wiser, less needy, more emotionally together? Yes. But the whole point is, I wasn’t.

My Tentative Conclusion:
Summing all this up, I think I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that we are born into a “frame” which destines our complex human minds and our fragile and mostly selfish human hearts to develop as they will within that frame, while taking into account our individual make-up; the life we are born into and our own individual natures shape the frame. There are then free-will choices we can make within that frame, but, ultimately, we don’t have free will, since this frame is determined for us and it has deep-rooted, indelible effects on us. Or, as a friend of mine said: “Choices along the path of destiny give the illusion of free will.” I agree.

My Questions:
What do your observations of your own life lead you to believe concerning destiny and free will? Are events, directions you go in, meetings with specific others in our lives predetermined? Can we have any effect on them? To what extent can we affect them? Or do we control, choose or unconsciously choose events and experiences and meetings in our lives? If so, how do you explain all of the meticulous foreseen detail necessary to accommodate meetings and events even decades in advance of their occurrence?

What’s in a drawing?

What do you see beneath the surface? What do you see in the drawing…?

Close eyes … feel … find peace … poetry …… love ….. look … dream … disappear …. see … sigh …… write …

I see a heart, the aging of a bounteous love, fruits of passion over-ripening, never won, never touched, waiting. A window, open to any who will see, yet never once seen. Chamber walls, worn with time and abandon. Emptiness in the chamber of a heart, deserted by its own soul.

I see a heart, not dead, in slumber. Fruits of love, not rotted, imperishable. But not the soul in sight. It is his heart, as he drew it. Sad, dejected. My love – he was the deserter of a wealth his downcast eyes denied to his sight.

This picture was drawn by the one I loved above all others in life.

*Finland-220905

Last summer I decided to forsake all other life pursuits and devote myself to healing myself, something I had realized was long overdue and imperative if I was ever going to stop my suffering. I sought out an EFT practitioner (Emotional Freedom Technique) for therapy. We had a fairly rocky relationship, as therapist-client relationships go. That was due to the fact that, as an EFT practitioner, she was not in any way educated as a therapist or otherwise suited to treat emotionally unstable individuals and wasn’t even intuitively tuned in to how she should behave while treating one (yes, I’m the emotionally unstable individual in this scenario, and in many others ). One of the ideas that she had espoused was the idea that “We are all one.” Now, I saw The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know, and I agree with the philosophy of “Oneness” (non-dualism). However, what irked me was that my EFT practitioner would repeat that statement at times, almost as if I had pushed a button on her, whenever I would be explaining to her that no one understands me, as if the fact that “We are all one” necessitates that everyone on the planet understand me (and each other), as if “Oneness” is synonymous with “sameness.” In fact, she would repeat the two phrases “We are all one” and “We are all the same” as if one could not be true without the other being true. I rebelled inside myself every time she said that, for I saw and knew intuitively it was not only wrong, but impossible.

Intuitively:
The problem with intuition, though, is that it only tells you what is, it doesn’t explain why or how, or give any information at all about the subject at hand, leaving you to try and deduce the riddle from its answer. Thus, I pondered the reasons for my inner rebellion to my EFT practitioner’s presumption that Oneness=sameness, in the hopes of identifying the truth about this issue. I recalled hearing from many different sources how each human being and soul is unique and fulfills a very specific function based on its unique make-up and gifts. I imagined a human being, a body. A human body is one. One entity. But in order for that body to be that one living entity, that oneness does not mean that all within the one body are the same, but, in fact, that oneness necessitates that all within the body be different from one another. To have a body, you need a head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. I acknowledge that you can have one of any body part, one hand, one heart, etc., on its own, but then these “ones” are lifeless, dead flesh. It is impossible for one heart, or many hearts, to have life. I have never yet seen a body made up only of one or multiple right hands, for example, yet they are the same. It is impossible for the parts that make up the whole to be “the same.” When we say “We are One,” we mean that we are all parts that make up a whole. How, then, has it come to be understood that it could even be possible that we are the same?

It is in being ONE that we all are inherently different from one another. Look at your own body, look at your hands and arms, think about your joints and all the organs inside. Watch a movie about human anatomy and consider all of the dramatically different elements working inside you, how vastly different from one another all the parts that make your body one single functioning entity are and how, if they were all the same, you would just have a big lump of detached, decaying, lifeless flesh.

Intellectually:
Upon further analysis of the semantics of these two words (”Oneness,” “sameness”) and of the deductions put forth above, I reached an understanding that logic and semantics dictate that it be absolutely impossible for a universal One to be in a state of sameness, either with itself or with something within itself. The reason for this is that sameness requires that there be two separate entities. If you have a state of sameness, you necessarily have duality, two separate things which you are comparing, which is the polar opposite to Oneness. Therefore, the claim or belief that “Oneness” can or does co-exist with “sameness” is an indication of mindless, misunderstood dogma, or else someone who is misrepresenting him or herself as someone who doesn’t believe in duality.

In conclusion, through this thought process, I realized that my rebellion to my EFT practitioner stemmed from my intuitive feeling that, under some noble and wise banner of truth, she was preaching to me things she had no clue about and which I, as her client, was supposed to mindlessly absorb, as if I were a student of her wisdom. She had memorized some New Age dogma and had no understanding of it. Like the followers of most organized religions or other type of group, she had heard something within her chosen religion and committed it to memory with no understanding of it and that kind of mindless, drone-like adherence to a group disturbs me sometimes, especially times when I’m seeking guidance and help from the drone in question.

So remember, anyone who equates Oneness with sameness has no understanding of either state.

Each of us, unique and different among ourselves, we are like snowflakes, no two souls alike, as we dwell together within One.

“Where is your consciousness located? Where (in your body) is your consciousness (and/or awareness) located?”
I read this question once on a personal development forum. I found it to be one of the strangest and misguided questions with one of the most obvious answers that I’ve ever read. However, I found the answers posted to it to be yet stranger. Perhaps I’m incapable of understanding the question? It seems clear that my understanding of consciousness and others’ understanding of it are not the same.

I have always understood consciousness and awareness, similar to “attention,” to be something that you direct with your mind wherever you want it to go. It doesn’t have a “location.” If it does, its location is where you have focused it at any given moment in time. If you are paying attention to a person you are observing (but not interacting with), your consciousness is with that person. If your eyes are closed and you are focusing on the sensations in your body, your consciousness and awareness are in your body. If you are doing a breathing meditation, your awareness is with your breath, although this is an example of a state in which your awareness of what exists may expand its borders, for example, to other realms, or to encompass understanding which you didn’t have before. Even so, your awareness is still where it is because you are deliberately focusing it there.

The consciousness is the awareness you have in the moment to be able to choose where to put your attention in any given moment. When you extract the element of consciousness, you are left with a person who behaves and acts by rote, like an animal, like a machine, like a computer program which is functioning on all its defaults, but whether or not the individual is aware and conscious of where he is putting his attention, his consciousness and attention still exist, he is simply unaware of where he is putting them. In a moment, he could “wake up” and realize that he is putting a cereal box in the refrigerator, or that he is about to smear toothpaste on his face instead of shaving cream. At the moment he “wakes up,” he realizes his consciousness/attention was somewhere else, away from his body (which kept functioning automatically nonetheless).

The concept of consciousness embodies and necessitates an element one can be conscious of, an object of the consciousness and the attention, plus the one being conscious of it. The focus of consciousness must exist somewhere, and wherever that is, that is where the consciousness is. As such, the question of where consciousness is located is irrelevant.

That is my current understanding until I acquire a better understanding.

My Questions:
So…where is your consciousness located? And is “your” consciousness any different from mine? Are they located in different places? Does the question “Where is consciousness located?” have a different answer from the question “Where is your consciousness located”? If there is some “universal consciousness” (a concept I don’t quite grasp either), how could and why would it be located in your body, as indicated in the original question and in many of the answers it received?

One Man

I had believed all my life that somewhere in the world there was one man that God was saving for me and I had this dream of love and what it was…

because I had seen it in my dreams and written it in my poems and felt it inside myself…

and then I went out into the world and tried to find it…

and all I found was the deceit and manipulation of self-serving love, cowardice, denial, a proud feebleness for vulgar, carnal indulgences, narcissism, soul-devastation and plundering of hearts…

and after too much suffering, I conceded that the love I had dreamed lived only inside of me and in my poetry…and only when I died would I find that love…maybe

and I gave up

I stayed alone, left with just the tattered remains of my used up heart and mind, fragile, disillusioned, devastated, irreparably out of order…

and then, one man came along…he came along and I heard words come out of his mouth–the very words that I had written in my poems so many years ago–and they reverberated faintly in my mind like ancient echoes excavated from the core of my own heart

and he unwittingly spoke to me of things that I used to dream and imagine a lifetime ago in a forgotten existence

and I could even feel how he loved me and it felt exactly like the love I had inside myself and he was as crazy and intense in his love and passion as I was

he was so close to me that he spoke my words as I felt them and he felt my thoughts as they came

but not even merely because he loved me so much that he could come inside me, but because we are the same, our love is the same and there is no distance between us to travel, in heart or in mind, for us to be inside one another

because he is the mirror image of my soul.

*Finland-230605