Diary entry 5

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

I returned to the U.S. and to my mother’s home at the beginning of May last year (2008). Still on one crutch and relearning how to move and walk on my still-swollen and painful left foot, I arrived at Newark airport, where my mother met me. I don’t think I had ever been gladder to see her than I was at that time. In a sense, I felt as if I was just emerging from an all-engulfing and psychologically disfiguring fire, but almost physically unscathed, and all that had preceded the fire faded as I approached people from another world who led a normal life and I approached long lost familiar faces in the same little town where all of my past had transpired decades ago, in another lifetime, when I was someone else.

It was a most bizarre and odd feeling to come back into this world, a world of relatively stable and relatively satisfied people, together, living their lives, together, oblivious in their own back yards, completely unaware of the world I had been living in for the past ten years, and particularly the last two years. They were so distant from where I was living inside and completely incapable of conceiving the silence, isolation and turmoil in which I had been consumed throughout this time. These were people with families and jobs, friends and routine lives. Routine lives. “Routine? Friends? Family? Home?” I thought, “What are they?” And I was about to try to return to one of these lives, at least temporarily, after years of alienation.

My mother and step-father have quite a lovely home and my relationships with them had improved markedly over the years, so my initial recuperation was not too difficult. At their home, I reveled in the flowers of the garden and the warmth of the sun in the back yard. I relaxed in their jacuzzi in the evenings and began taking an interest in photographing interesting and beautiful things in their back yard. I wondered how a person could be depressed when in possession of such luxury and paradise. I felt there was so much to enjoy and delight in at their home. At the same time, I knew that if you are depressed today with nothing, you will be depressed tomorrow with much; if you are happy today with nothing, you will be happy tomorrow with much. “New toys” lose their shimmer and the initial happiness at receiving them and using them fades away as you inevitably return to your usual state. This is why I seek now to change my heart, not my surroundings or merely the thoughts in my head.

Outlining My Goals
My initial recuperation lasted roughly one and a half to two months. One of the very first things I did at my mother’s was to create a “vision board,” which depicted the main goals I had for my path and my new life. I printed out pictures and words that represented my goals and I pasted them to poster board and every morning I would look at the board and I would meditate on each goal on the board.

I had five goals:

1. My angels.

After all I had been through in my life, the sordid catastrophe with Lucifer being the worst, I wanted nothing to do with the human race. I had always dreamt of having someone love me, understand me and know me as I felt Lucifer did. Given the way that experience turned out, however, it was clear that I, with my judgment, posed as much of a danger to myself as others posed to me. I could never believe myself or what I felt and knew to be true in my heart ever again. I had resigned myself to living all of life alone, without a man, and I have taken a vow of chastity that is to last until I die. I told myself that there, in the place I go after this world, I will find my husband. But now I had to abandon this search for love and for my husband, which had always been the reason I lived; thus, I lost the reason for which I lived.

In my heart, I felt I had to abandon earth and humans, because I simply couldn’t live here as humans do, under the circumstances. I wanted to be surrounded by beings brimming with love and wisdom, beings whom I could look up to and harbor great respect for, who would guide me, beings the likes of which I have never even remotely experienced on this planet. I craved and needed beings that I wanted to model myself after. They don’t exist on earth, so I imagined them into my life.

I formed my own community of angels in my imagination. By this time, I had enough perspective on my past, especially through reading my old poems, that I could see that every “relationship” I had ever had with a male had only existed in my imagination, and this created a significant amount of my pain, because the man I loved was not responding to me in reality as he should have been responding to me according to what I believed about him in my mind. This time, therefore, I consciously decided to use my imagination to my benefit, for once in my life.

The angels I would imagine would be my angels, and they would be an entire community of “Lucifers.” That is, I “made” my angels in the image of Lucifer’s angelic aspect, so-to-speak. After all, it was his almost angelic, innate love and understanding of me that made it impossible for me to tear myself away from him, and last summer I still desperately needed that love and understanding. Thus, in addition to being angels, and all that entails, my angels would love me the way Lucifer did, they would understand me and know me as Lucifer did, and they would be as gentle and tender with me as Lucifer was—and they would be this way, because they were my angels. Finally, I would belong somewhere. Finally, I would be normal somewhere. My values and what I have in my heart would be normal, understood and upheld among them, and I wouldn’t need Lucifer, or any man, to achieve that.

2. Love, Truth, Wisdom, Intuition, Forgiveness, Freedom, Understanding, Compassion, Peace.

In all the years I had known Lucifer, one of two things he had always repeated to me in his very tender and loving voice was “You are an angel.” While I can understand why he may have thought that, compared to him and all those who surrounded him, I was no angel; but I wanted to be. Who would not want to be an angel? Angels dwell in inner peace, love, wisdom and joy that no man can even begin to fathom. Angels are above and removed from both experiencing and inflicting all of the emotional torture and abuse that people endure and impose on one another on earth. Not only that, but, being above and removed from these earthly afflictions, they can heal and touch people like no human can. I wanted to do that too.

I have always had a deep desire in me to be a source of love, healing and peace for suffering people, because my empathy, which causes me to experience another’s suffering as if I were the one suffering, has bestowed me with great compassion.

I realized that in order to become what I wanted to become, I had a lot of work to do on myself. So, I wanted all of the things in this list firmly inside of me, especially my weakest points: (knowledge of) truth and wisdom. I knew that if I had wisdom and knowledge of truth, my intuition, in particular, would always be rooted in truth and not in some emotionally charged agenda I was carrying. In situations I was personally involved in, the truth was always being clouded or distorted to my eyes by my active and vivid imagination, which was controlled by the agendas I had. I must forgive myself for having my agendas, however, because without believing what I deluded my heart and mind into believing, I would have killed myself. I knew, however, that if I possessed all of these virtues, I could let go of my agendas and not lose my life in the process.

3. Healing from Lucifer.

Many, or all, of the virtues in goal #2, I felt, were necessary for goal #3 (i.e. it would require nothing short of angelic qualities to forgive Lucifer). Last summer I could not fathom an earthly existence in which I had survived my experience with Lucifer. At that time, the only way I could survive was to tell myself that I was going to heal myself so that I could return to heal Lucifer from his suffering as well. That was my only motive for healing myself. Lucifer was suffering in his own life, after all, and I still loved him and I couldn’t let go of that tender love and understanding he once had for me. I still needed the depth of his understanding of me, combined with the softness of his love for all he understood of me, even though, by that time, it was all mostly a memory, or a mockery. I needed to feel known and loved, even if it was only in my imagination.

Information would emerge, later on in an email from Lucifer, that would enable me to let go of that motive for healing myself and that would enable me to let go completely of Lucifer as well. Nowadays I know Lucifer deserves any suffering he experiences, and maybe more. Furthermore, I believe that when a person dies, they are taken through a review of their life in which they experience the joy or suffering they have caused to others, and they experience this joy or suffering firsthand, as if they were the person who experienced it. When Lucifer reviews his life upon his death, he will live all of our time together as I did; he will be Lucia. He will be me in the relationship that we had. He will live a writhing emotional agony that courses through every fiber of his being, and he will live a paralyzing fear and soul-devastation caused by him and by all of the shocks he delivered over the years, then he will feel what it was like to love him for every moment that our life paths crossed. I find that to be a form of justice.

I will admit here and now, that, while I have come a long way in healing from my experience with Lucifer, I still have a ways to go.

4. Spiritual healing and therapy clinic in Algeria.

When I was in Algeria, in many ways I was living like an Algerian. I was subject to all of the frantic hysteria that characterizes many Algerians. I was subject to the corruption and lies, I was subject to a system that has no structure, save for the “might/money makes right” structure, which is a very scary structure when the might and money lie with such emotionally volatile, mentally unstable and vindictive individuals. Living in Algeria, one lie (or misunderstanding) from the mouth of another person could mean that your life is effectively over. Entirely unbeknownst to you, someone somewhere in Algeria may have started the ball rolling with a true or false word against you, and that rolling ball won’t stop until it has flattened you and turned everyone you know against you. Your life can change in a second based on an outright lie. I have first hand and second hand experience of this. This is a country where hearsay is evidence, your family and neighbors are the judge and jury and money and power are the law enforcement.

While I suffered at the hands of this system and the people in it, the experience enabled me to gain a certain amount of sympathy for Algerians, and to understand why so many Algerians were as they were—panicky or hotheaded, afraid, lying, corrupt, talking very quickly and agitatedly, with severely warped values. It is a scary system to live in, and I saw that if you don’t join them, you are likely to get eaten alive.

Considering the corruption, maybe it was nothing short of a miracle that I found any good in Algeria at all. In fact, Algerians won my heart. I was greeted with great respect, warmth and generosity everywhere I went. Even the poorest families eagerly opened their homes to me, though they had so little. People bent over backwards to help me when I asked for help, even adopting me into their families, and they did so with a free generous spirit and an open heart. People saw truly who I was. They told me what they saw in me and they spoke almost with admiration. They were interested in me, people listened to me, people liked me. Even though I was quiet, they never forgot I was there.

Thus, I saw a great potential for me to do some good in Algeria, mostly because it was the first place I had ever been where I actually felt the people were interacting with me, and interacting with me as an equal, as one of them and not as someone inferior or as some stranger or outsider they must be wary of or keep at bay. I felt I actually mattered there; I mattered to them. I was sensitive to how they spoke, which was often hurried and agitated, but I had a calming effect on them. I loved that someone like me, with my past and battered self-image and self-worth, could possibly bring something positive to people. It made me feel like I could have a value in the world and that made me feel good.

While I was in Algeria, I had a passing thought that I would leave Algeria and train myself in emotional and psychological healing methods, and return and set up a free clinic in Algeria where Algerians could go and, if nothing else, find peace from the pressures and struggles of their families and society, but, ideally, where they could get help to calm their hearts and minds in their daily lives and attain a more peaceful existence in community with one another. This passing thought, or some version of it, has now become my primary goal.

5. Money.

Money was a necessary goal to implement goal #4…and money is also a goal necessary for me to live.

These were the goals I put together on my vision board. Every morning I would wake up and meditate on each goal on the vision board, and right from the very first morning, I felt the effects .

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My very best friend calls me “big-little girl.” This is because no matter how many years I live, no matter what experiences I go through, deep inside where I don’t let everyone see, I am still the girl I was when I was 6 or 8 … and I relive the same fears and tears that I did when I was so young.

On Friday morning I woke up from a dream, which led my mind back to a time when I was 10 years old and my father had taken his girlfriend, my brother and me on a trip to Maine. We were all staying in a nice little cottage there by the sea. The cottage had just two bedrooms and a bed in the pull-out couch in the living room area. The first night, I had chosen one of the bedrooms to sleep in. My brother slept in the other bedroom, while my dad and his girlfriend slept in the bed in the living room. I remember I felt scared being alone in the bedroom, so the next day I asked my dad if I could sleep out in the living room. I felt scared and alone and that is the only reason I asked to change rooms. So, the next night my dad let me sleep in the living room; he and his girlfriend slept in the bedroom. I hadn’t understood they would leave the living room. That night, as I lay in the bed in the living room, I cried; I cried like a small child standing alone in a crowd after losing its parents. I wanted to go back into the bedroom again and my dad got angry at me. I didn’t want to be alone. All I knew was that I was scared and left on my own…and that is why I was crying – I didn’t have the solution.

After I had been crying for some time, my brother spoke from his bedroom to my dad “Dad, Lucia’s crying…” and I heard my father shout angrily in response “I really don’t give a shit!!” and I cried even more.

As I lay in bed recalling this moment on Friday, I felt that too-familiar scared loneliness again and I began crying – a 10-year old girl all my life, to this moment, and all the world, my father.

Finland-071105

Diary entry 4

(The diary entries are intended to be read in order.)

Before I begin to delve too deeply into my plan of recovery, or my healing path, I feel I ought to provide some background information concerning the past I was to heal myself from. The purpose of reviewing the past is not to dwell in it or in self-pity, but to bring to light all of the subconscious beliefs and pains, the thoughts and feelings we are unaware of which are subconsciously determining and perpetuating our reality, be it pleasant, or, as in my case, not. The fact is, that no matter how you work to change your present by changing or controlling your conscious mind, if you are coming from a traumatic background, you will find that you cannot affect your present reality well, because experiences you can’t even remember have been burned in your psyche as a child and are still affecting you and the energy you emit into the world. In order to effect real and enduring change, I believe you must start from your beginning and confront and then release all of the unpleasantness and pain from your past. For example, anyone who has ever had to clean out a fish tank knows that when you siphon out all of the putrefied food and fishy excrement stuck in the gravel, the water in the tank gets stirred up and filled with floating filth that had settled at the bottom. Only when the filth is stirred up out of its resting place can we vacuum it all out with the siphon. The first step, then, is to bring past pain to light.

I will separate the stages of my life neatly into chapters, as if it were a book.

Introduction to the World

I was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1968 to an American mother and father. I had a brother, born in the U.S., who was three years older than I was. Two years after my birth, my parents moved us back to the U.S.

According to my mother, once we left Canada, I was never the same again. Her claim is that I was a happy child in Canada, and that once we moved away, I withdrew inside myself and became quiet and shy. I personally don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised; what little girl wouldn’t cry at being forced to leave Canada? .

From birth, in my nature, I was inherently unlike anyone in my family, while my brother, by contrast, is quite similar to my mother, and even more similar to my father. Even physically, I was an oddity in the family–while all of the other immediate and extended family members had dark brown-black hair and/or darker skin complexions, I was born with strawberry-blond hair and very white skin. In later years at school, for example, I was always the one everyone liked to hold their bare arms up next to to see how “dark” their tans were while marveling out loud at how white I was. It was all in good fun, though, and I became fond of my fair complexion, even though it was never “in vogue.”

Health issues:
I had been born with a serious genetic disorder called phenylketonauria, or the easily-spelled version of the disorder, PKU. However, I had no idea about this disorder or what it was until I was in my early to mid-20’s, when I re-established contact with the Canadian PKU specialist who had treated me when I was little. This is to say, my parents never explained to me what PKU was or that I had it.

I had also been born with a severe peanut allergy, which my mother says she did not know about until I was 10 years old, at which time I was tested for allergies in association with a severe asthmatic condition I had developed. In spite of my mother’s lack of awareness of my condition, there were many occasions prior to my tenth year where I had become very ill due to having ingested something containing peanuts (usually cookies that had been made for us by my great aunts or my grandmother).

Chapter One – And There was Light

0-8 years

The first chapter of my life basically begins with my birth and leads up to the age of eight. For this era, I only have shadows of memories– of being at the house of some elderly woman, and maybe in some daycare or nursery school, of being locked in a dark classroom closet by my mother’s students (apparently my mother was some sort of teacher at that time), and being bullied into eating peanut butter by my brother. It was a dark and precarious period, devoid of parents, especially lacking any maternal presence or feeling of safety. The only memories of parents I have during this chapter include me and my brother spinning around dancing while my father played his guitar and sung, as well as the prevailing violent feeling of my mother and father fighting. My father had a violent temper and, as I learned many years later, nothing to everything would set him off, so life with him was a fearful existence. I became very scared when my parents fought, especially if they fought while one of them was driving.

Nowadays, my mother’s retrospective assessment of me as a child is “You were so quiet that I forgot you were there,” which reveals both my nature as a child and my mother’s nature as a mother, especially if you think about the implications of that statement within the context of a mother-toddler relationship. By contrast, my mother’s retrospective assessment of my brother as a child is “He was a pain in the ass. He was always shouting after me and demanding attention,” which says a lot about my brother’s nature. These two statements combined provide very accurate insight into the spectacular contrast in the fundamental natures of my brother and me.

A great number of the memories I still have from this chapter, though, actually deal with the time I spent with my best friend, Ann. All of the good times I had were with her, playing at her house, sleeping over-night etc. I liked her parents. I have more memories of her parents than of my own–and fond memories at that.

The final and most prominent memory I have from this chapter is the fright that consumed me in my alone-time, of which I feel I had a lot. I was full of fears as a little girl, the worst of which reared their ugly heads at night as I was supposed to fall asleep. My parents had a very big house and their bedroom was very far away from my brother’s and mine. Our bedrooms were upstairs and far down a hallway, while my parents’ bedroom was downstairs and far down another hallway. Our rooms were so far apart, it was like living in two different houses.

I froze in my bed in the winters, for lack of covers, and I often slept on the bare floor beside the heat vent to keep warm. The heat vent also had a second purpose; my brother and I would listen to our parents’ fighting, which always carried clearly through the heat vents.

On summer nights, I would lie in my bed frozen, again, but this time frozen with fear. I always heard a voice in the blowing wind calling my name, while the curtain on the window above my bed kept getting sucked in and blown out, and my door kept opening and closing all by itself…until it would finally slam itself shut–I was paralyzed with fear. I feared the ghosts in my room and in my closet, and I feared what was under my bed. And they never went away.

Finally, there was a painting hung on the wall in my bedroom which gave me a desolate, sinking feeling. It was a nearly colorless painting of a circus ring surrounded by spectator bleachers. The bleachers and circus ring were deserted except for a very pasty white, emaciated-looking clown in the middle of the circus ring. I can’t remember what he was doing, but I would stare at that painting while lying in bed, and I could feel the desolation and loneliness of it settling like a fog in my impressionable child-heart, which was just helplessly absorbing all of the emotions around it.

Chapter Two – The Divorce

8-20 years

The second chapter of my life began when I was eight, lasted until I was 20, and is primarily characterized by my parents’ divorce and the endless familial hell which inevitably ensued. Without going into details of the divorce, I will summarize the highlights.

For me, it all began when my dad punched my mom in the eye, breaking her glasses and cutting her eye, while I looked on from the back seat of the car (it was one of those car fights I mentioned, although my dad had pulled over to the side of the road this time–the fight appeared to be about directions). My mother determined to get a divorce at that moment. It was a violent divorce, with my parents making scenes frequently, public shouting and crying, kidnapping the of the children, one parent breaking in and stealing things from the other parent’s home, adult friends and family taking sides, as if in a war, no one at all even momentarily considering me or my existence, etc. etc. (I can’t speak for my brother–he wasn’t present at the “punching” and he did side with my father. He is much more aggressive and assertive than I am, as well as a few years older. He always makes sure he is taken care of above all else, so I think his experience was quite different from mine.)

As traumatizing as it might have been to see my father physically assault my mother and then immediately break down into sobbing tears, literally begging for her forgiveness, and then to be kidnapped by him and be forcibly kept apart from my mother at the age of 8 etc., those were all nonetheless mere moments in time. Traumatic moments in time, followed by stability, are easier to overcome than the prolonged conduct of my parents, especially that of my father, that ensued. So, without ever overcoming the traumatic moments in time that had happened to me, I was thrust into the worst part, which was the hellish dealings with and between my parents.

In a nutshell, my father was a very bitter and angry person, who had above average intelligence and was extensively educated in human psychology. My father was mentally abusive and highly manipulative and controlling of people’s emotions, minds and behaviors…and lives. He used his knowledge of human behavior and his exceptional intelligence without mercy. He exercised his manipulative behavior and mind control over everyone who he found he could have power over, and, as his daughter and a fearful, meek and highly sensitive girl at that, I was fully at his mercy, emotionally, financially, mentally, in every way that a child needs and is at the mercy of its parents. In retrospect, I know now that my mother was observing that my father was brainwashing both my brother and me against her, and he was succeeding.

Presently I have no contact with my father and have not had any for three years. I’m not so emotionally well-off that I could or would re-establish any form of contact with him at this time, and I don’t miss having contact with him in any way, as having contact with him would inevitably drag me down at a time when I am still struggling to get on my feet.

During this chapter in my life, I had some other bad experiences, all of which were either direct or indirect results of the divorce. One of them was that I began to get maliciously teased and bullied in school, most cruelly by girls. Eventually, my lifetime best friend, Ann, completely defriended me. One day she walked into school not speaking to me and pretending as if she didn’t know who I was and from then on she only associated with the popular and pretty girls in school. She and I haven’t really spoken since then. I think she was the first and the last friend I ever really had, because I’ve never really trusted another person the way I trusted her, the way you are supposed to trust a friend. I know she was deeply embarrassed by me because I was being so badly teased. She also contributed significantly to the bad image I have of girls as being shallow and preoccupied with vain aspirations to pretentious and insincere personas, popularity, money, looks, status, etc.

The final important elements to mention from this chapter in my life are the recurring nightmares I had. After the divorce, I had at least 3 recurring nightmares, all of which I remember clearly. I had these nightmares frequently and they didn’t stop until I left my hometown and my parents to go to college. Because I used to wake up frightened in the middle of the night from these nightmares, I slept with a nightlight on and a security blanket right up until I left for college, at 18 years old.

Chapter Three – Debris in Life’s Wake

20-40 years

In the third era of my life, I took my junior year at college abroad in Sweden, then transferred to a Canadian university and moved to Canada and finished out my studies there, moved to Sweden, moved back to Canada and moved to Finland (and I’m sparing you all of the moves I made within each of those countries), where I stayed for ten years. I left Finland at the beginning of June, 2007, after my ultimate emotional meltdown had already begun, also beginning the prelude to the next chapter of my life, which I am currently in.

At age 20, all of the damage had already been done. I was already highly dysfunctional and completely unaware of it. No matter what I went out into the world and did, my fate was sealed–I was to fail and suffer repeatedly, all the while trying to figure out what was going on and why.

At 20 years old, I traveled to Sweden to do my junior year in college abroad there. That year, 1988, was the first time I became suicidal. That was also the first year I began spontaneously and uncontrollably crying for no discernible reason at any given place, at any given time. I was beginning to learn how frightened I was and how horribly amiss things must be in my heart and in my mind. I prayed and bawled my way through this era, bawled until my stomach hurt, literally. In frustration and desperation, I begged God– I didn’t understand why things that made me suffer so unbearably kept happening to me. I had never hurt anyone, I had never even had the power to. I couldn’t understand the endless punishments that were being inflicted on me. I pleaded for a friend, someone to talk to, to help me. But the only answer I ever got to my prayers was more suffering. The endless punishment, as I felt it, really caused me to hate myself ever more as the years went by.

Through all of the moving around I did during this era, I was in and out of love several times, and this constituted much of my suffering. Each time was worse than the previous one. The damage I had sustained in my chaotic upbringing and hostile familial environment came to manifest itself in increasingly painful and dysfunctional love experiences. I was also beginning to experience a highly developed empathetic ability, which increased in intensity the more people I came into close emotional contact with. This only confused me more, aggravated my dysfunction and intensified my suffering.

For many years, I interpreted the empathetic connections and intuition, on several occasions even clairsentience, that I experienced when I loved a man, as being indicative of a deeply spiritual love between us, which convinced me that he, in particular, was “the one”.

I began to pay attention to the fact that this empathetic connection I would have to the man I loved only worked one way–I had a connection to him, but he hadn’t a connection to me.  I then I eventually figured out that this empathetic connection I was having with men I loved had nothing to do with the specific man I loved, but that it was something in me, my inward nature, and I realized that I would have that intimate empathetic connection with whatever man I loved, and, ultimately, as I matured in time, I would probably have it with any given person, no matter who he or she might be.

Basically, when I stepped out into the world and had my first relationship with a male, which began when I was 21 as a love at a distance in letters, I had sort of embarked on a learning experience, or a life education–I began learning about life, I began learning about the world and about myself, especially about how emotionally fragile I was compared to most others, how much I cared for others’ feelings over my own, how others were much more willing to hurt me than I was to hurt them, I began learning about society, about men and, ultimately, that this was not a world in which I could realize my idealistic spiritual dream of love, it was not a world that shared my idea of love, my morals or my values, but, most of all, I was realizing more and more how my past and family had affected me and malformed me, in such a way that I simply could not function in the world, and I really didn’t know how to live in this world. And I am still learning.

Specifics of this era are well-documented in the collection of poems that I call Debris in Life’s Wake.

Chapter Four

40-

We’ll see…

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Diary entry 3

( This is a continuation of the story I began in My Suicidal Foot )

The moment I had made my promise to Lucifer, I knew what I had to do. I knew there was only one thing for me to do if I was going to survive this life without killing myself sooner or later. I had to completely abandon the only thing in this world that kept me living–the pursuit of my true love–and heal myself. It became crystal clear to me that my present life and all I endeavored in it was so profoundly and severely subconsciously affected by all that had transpired in my life and by all that had happened to me, that until I had succeeded in fully and wholly healing myself from all of my past, I was going to continue to generate tragedy and suffering for myself.

Concerning my pursuit of my true love, Lucifer had effectively killed that desire within me, among other things. I had believed Lucifer to be my true love, but I came to learn that he embodied such an exploding paradox of both angelic and demonic aspects, a paradox that tortured me unspeakably over the years. I clung with a death grip to his angelic aspects, and then even to a memory of them; I was so desperate to unite with them again, and so desperate to reunite with his love and his innate understanding of me, and mine of him. Now, however, I proclaim to know nothing about my so-called true love and I don’t even entertain the possibility of the concept anymore. I don’t want to know.

Concerning my healing, I had to give myself over 100% to myself, to return to the place of my youth, the United States, for some semblance of stability and then delve into intensive therapy and other healing methods–I especially wanted to pursue energy healing methods, since I had tried psychotherapy before with no result. I concluded psychotherapy was useless, but I knew it was the preferred method of this day and of people like my family members, who would end up financing more than two thirds of my therapy.

As a very sensitive and empathetic girl growing up in a highly chaotic and hostile familial environment, I learned at a young age that I had to protect myself against the family around me. I would never confide anything of great emotional importance in any biological family member. As I became more articulate in my life, I was able to pick and choose things to tell, so it might have appeared as if I had been confiding important things in them, but I wasn’t. I had to protect myself from them at all costs, after all. For example, I had made it a point never to mention my suicidal inclinations, which I had had since the age of 20, to any biological family member. I have never forgotten what happened the one and only time when, as a 21-22 year-old, I dared to mention that I was suicidal to my mother–she became indignant and accused me of being manipulative–and to my father–he lectured me on how selfish I was. I deeply regretted having said anything to them. After their reactions, I hated myself even more; I especially didn’t want to manipulate anyone (my father was always calling me, my mother, his wife…his mother…actually, every single woman in his life selfish and self-centered, so his words had less impact than my mother’s). I contemplated my behavior and realized that I can’t be manipulating anyone if I never tell anyone about my suicide. Thus, that became my default policy on my suicide and suicidal thoughts and desires.

However, in the years since these experiences with my mother and father, both my mother and my brother have experienced depression second hand. It turns out that people they care about, their respective significant others, suffer now from depression to varying degrees of intensity. This has made both my mother and brother more lenient and tolerant of me; they have softened up a bit, even if they can’t understand depression, and less, suicide. Moreover, by the time I was in Finland with my broken foot, I had been so long without regular communication with the family, I had been in Algeria, had broken my foot, spent four nights in airports and was a step away from killing myself; nothing my mother or brother could say to me could bring anything worse upon me than what I was already planning. So during my stay in Finland, I might have hinted in an email to my brother that I was a little depressed, just to see if his reaction would be safe. Obviously, if his reaction wasn’t safe for me, I wouldn’t mention anymore about my depression.

In the end, my brother mentioned my depression in an email to my mother and, when all was said and done, I informed my mother that I had this plan to kill myself and both she and my brother pledged that they would help me pay for therapy back in the U.S., where my mother still lives. Had they responded in any other way, I would probably have remained in Europe and eventually killed myself, sooner rather than later.

Thus, I had my work cut out for me upon my return to the U.S. All I had to do was implement my plan–I had a certain amount of money and a limited, but indeterminate amount of time in which to heal and release 40 years of pain and purge my subconscious of all known and unknown effects of my past, most of which I don’t even have any memory of.

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