Sitting out on the deck of my mother and step-father’s house, looking out at the backyard and basking in the beauty that is autumn. Autumn was never this beautiful to me. It’s warm, 60° F. The sun is shining on me, as I sit on the hard wooden bench.

The sun warms me. It has painted the leaves with vibrant yellows and heartwarming oranges and reds. Golden carpets under our feet as we walk along the sidewalk beneath bronze and golden canopies.

For me, autumn had always signified a time of death, darkness, silence and alienation. Autumn – a magnifying glass on my misery, my loneliness and despair. My worst autumn ever was the autumn of 2005, when I wrote Finnish Autumn. Today, I can barely remember the depths of despair I was in when I wrote that, which, even as bad as it was, and as bad as my life had already been to that point, was just the precursor to the worst that was yet to come.

But today, this year, autumn is beautiful. My favorite season and a natural complement to my hair .

I am a different person. I am happy. I have peace. I feel loved; and this is the first time, ever, in my life that I can say this.

I love autumn!!!

The Finnish autumn is setting in again, and with it, the usual feeling of emotional desolation, fear, loneliness and despair come creeping inside me morning by morning, more intensely with each passing day. What is it about the dark morning chill that seems to torment me with my solitude and fill me with emptiness? What is it about the Nordic autumn that leads my thoughts to the edge of dying and overwhelms my once love-filled heart with a desperate fear that all society, all family, all humanity has left me behind and forgotten me?

I wake up alone in my bed morning after morning, like every day of every season, but only with the onset of autumn does the full reality of my alienation and estrangement in this world come crashing down on me, filling me with ever-increasing despair and loneliness, replacing my hopes and sense of meaning with a desperate sense of futility and abandonment.

The dawn comes later and later, the darkness extends ever-farther into the day, ever-so-gradually snuffing out the light of life…and the chill in the air…how do these things bear with them these tragic emotions and place them into my heart? And why am I always alone? Why always excluded on the outskirts of lives?

This time last year, I sunk into a deep depression for weeks. I cried profoundly, every day, I don’t even know why, there was no logic. I could not control my tears and, of course, being alone, there is never a need to even try.

This year I am so much better. My depression was so severe last autumn, and my inexplicable crying so frequent and intense that it drove me right into the arms of my fiancé, at least in my imagination. Still now, I am only in his arms in my imagination, but at least we are close in heart and in mind. That is the only thing that keeps me from falling apart again. Still, I am left with an intense loneliness, a yearning to be with him that is tearing at me more and more each autumn day, and the fear growing in me of the autumn’s foreboding of a cold, dark and wintry death.

10.10.2005 Finland

Yesterday, [I]the very same scenario[/I] occurred with my bf. A different trigger for me, but still he called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same – [I]or was it[/I]? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good!

Last week, I had a big fight with my boyfriend. Essentially, I had a reaction to something and he completely dismissed me by calling me crazy. I was upset already from the initial thing, but he has often called me crazy when he doesn’t understand me and it often sets me off. Meanwhile, he’ll call me crazy and then I start to get angry, ballistic angry, because then he disappears and stops talking to me for days and I’m left with so much upset and anger because he won’t speak or listen to me!

Last week when this happened, it was a big blow-up and I was questioning if I could salvage this and if I even wanted to. As I always do when I have bad feelings in my relationship with him, I reikied myself. As I reikied myself, I had the insight that I become “crazy” when he treats me like that, not because he is calling me crazy, but because he is dismissing and discounting me, judging me as crazy because he doesn’t understand me and doesn’t want to. He shuts off all communication.

As I continued to reiki myself, it dawned on me that this phenomenon hardly began with him. Indeed, this is a complaint I’ve had about all of my immediate and non-immediate family members ever since I’ve had a memory. It only began with family, but I have experienced it to lesser or greater degrees across the board throughout my whole life and it’s taken a horrible toll on my self-esteem and concept of self-worth. And here I found myself with someone, who is really fundamentally very good, moral and peace-loving, thinking he is the cause and blaming him for this recurring fight and wondering if I should even continue to stay with him.

This realization gave me the focus of my next reiki session. I spent the next 3-4 days without contact with my bf and doing reiki on myself for this upsetting issue of being dismissed, all the while not being sure if he and I would be together again. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that, if I didn’t heal this issue, it would recur in every romantic relationship I would attempt.

Then…

Yesterday, the very same scenario occurred with my bf. The thing that triggered my initial reaction was different, and my reaction too was different, but he still called me crazy and got angry at me. Everything was the same - or was it? No, because I had healed myself and no longer had pain or emotional charge on being dismissed offhand .

Soooo…when he called me crazy, I said “Just because you don’t understand me, doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” He continued to be angry at me, but not like last week, and I maintained myself the whole time. He was angry, but he was at least able to communicate with me, while last week he just shut me out and disappeared. Because he was able to communicate with me, I was able to answer him, explain my behavior to him a little. His anger at me didn’t bother me to such an extent that my reaction to it was controlling me.

Throughout the whole experience, I never once felt myself separated from my love for him by my own personal issues. Because of that, there was no fight and, in the end, I was able to get him smiling again and us speaking loving words to each other again. I was able to keep the peace between us, even though he got angry and called me crazy.

I am so happy about this, I can’t even tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to have the power of the solution in your heart! . I feel so good! I think that being able to stay with your love for someone as they are being poked and prodded by their own demons, and likely even to uplift them from the effects of their demons, in a relationship feels more wonderful and more rewarding than being in a relationship with someone who appeases the complaints of all of your own demons!

The most upsetting thing I am wondering, though, is how often is being told to dump someone actually the worst advice anyone could ever give you in a relationship??