Today I’m taking a personal day off of…everything in an attempt to get a grasp on my sanity again. Yesterday was a nightmare that I don’t want to write about or even remember, even though I don’t know when I will stop living in the residual effects of it. I have a lot of healing to do today to get back up to where I was emotionally.

After several hours of reiki this morning, I began to feel somewhat human again. I even managed to bring out my logic again, which always shrinks in the behemoth of a shadow cast by my emotions, and tell myself not to worry, because I have enough money saved to pay 7 months of rent, and I can absolutely and easily turn my financial situation around in that much time.

All I can say is thank God I have a soul clearing tomorrow. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday. It must be some kind of blessing that it was changed to tomorrow.

Never Underestimate the Value of Delusion

Never underestimate the necessity of self-delusion in the life of a seriously depression or suicide-prone person. Self-delusion may be the very thread by which a suicidal person’s life is hanging. Self-delusion can save lives, literally.

In retrospect and through repeating the experience, I have realized that I got into love relationships that were so bad for me that I could never speak to another person about them, because I could not trust anyone to not be cliché. I could not trust anyone to see the real situation for what it was, nor to appreciate the situation as I saw it. I could not trust anyone to respect my perspective. I could not trust anyone to not immediately react emotionally.

The world is full of clichés who think they are special, unique, independent-thinking, tough people who “won’t take no shit from no one.” When I would desperately search my social surroundings, in the thick of this misery I was in with the guy I loved, it seemed like every person on the face of the earth was some kind of walking machine that had been pre-programmed to respond to my story in exactly the same way as everyone else. It was discouraging and tiresome.

I was in absolute and utter desperation to talk to someone about the mess I was in, but the times I dared to attempt to trust someone, I was barely able to speak more than two sentences about my boyfriend before all final judgments were passed by my listener. This happened time and time again, until I finally just determined to keep everything to myself.

If there had been someone in my life who would have listened to me, without judgment and without putting in their own 2 cents-worth of cliché and predictable garbage—without even having listened to a fraction of the problem—my situation might very well have gone differently, better.

The Folly of the Reality-Pushers

People feel like they are really clever when they think they are calling you out on your self-delusion. They feel good about themselves when they try to slap you out of your perspective, even when your perspective is literally keeping you from killing yourself. What such egomaniacal individuals don’t understand or care about, is that their harshness, their trying to beat their perspective of reality into the depressive person, could result in that person killing himself. People who look at a suicidal person who may be involved in some form of self-delusion and feel pity or feel hostility towards that person for being in self-delusion are playing with fire if they try to shake him out of his self-delusion.

I am a master at self-delusion. I have lived in both self-delusion and dreams ever since the violent divorce of my parents—and many years before that I believe. I may be living in self-delusion even as I write this. But you know what? I need my self-delusion in order to live!

If a suicidal person is in delusion, there is probably a very good reason for it. For me, any time something happened to challenge my perspective on the relationship I was in, those were the moments that I came crashing down. It was those times I began planning my death, those times I would research successful means of suicide. Indeed, it was the reality of my own devastation that the reality-pushers were trying to push on me.

What reality-pushers don’t know, is that people like me have no ground to stand on beneath their feet. So in order to stay alive, we weave an imaginary ground out of whatever shadow of good presents itself in our life. When a reality-pusher comes along and sets about destroying that ground, because he thinks that we have to see life and reality from his perspective, even in cases when he knows virtually nothing about the situation, he could be effectively hammering a nail in the coffin.

As an avid self-delusionist, I have struggled ad nauseum to grace the reality-pushers with the dismal and devastating experience of the reality they push me into when they start poking holes in the imaginary ground I have woven beneath my feet.

If I could just make anyone standing in judgment of me feel what it feels like to be suicidal, desperate, depressed, devastatingly frightened and alone… If I could have traded my heart with them for a day to make them have an ounce of compassion for me, or to whack them off of their egotistical soap box, to stop calling me selfish and self-centered, to stop shaming me into discounting myself and my own heart yet again by telling me to think about how other people will feel if I kill myself – stop trying to steal from me my life-sustaining delusions…or, if nothing else, just to leave me alone with my fate…

if somebody loved me
i know i would not cling to You
so unrelentingly
as these, the writhing limbs of the cursed,
tighten their grip
constricting wrathfully ’round my ankles
dragging me off with them
to eternal hellfire and damnation.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not clutch so desperately
onto Your shoestrings
fraying threads
dangling me over this wailing bottomless pit
sucking me violently into its black hole of eternally lost souls.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not grasp so frantically at Your heels
in futile attempts to save myself
from the fright of my living death
as i sink into my inescapable oblivion
momentarily pulling You with me
down beneath the line of sanity.

if somebody loved me
i could release my bleeding fists
too severely rapt in anguish
freeing You
laying to rest at long last
my abused heart
in a healing
bed of love

if.

So if you think you are going to rescue anyone from their self-delusion, you’d better make sure that you give them a soft and solid landing to fall onto when you cut the cord, because you don’t know to what extent their delusion is keeping them sane and alive.

My name means light. I wonder if that’s why I inevitably feel even just a hint of despair come creeping into my soul as the Scandinavian autumn ushers in the darkness of winter. The days gradually get swallowed up into the darkness, more and more with each passing day.

Darkness is a black hole of unknowing, unseeing. It emphasizes your loneliness and makes you cry to hear a friendly voice beside you, to hold a warm hand. You can’t see in darkness. You can’t see what is in the very same space you’re standing in. Snakes could come slithering around your feet, wrapping around your ankles, constricting, to pull you off into the depths of hell. Or something could lash out at you and bite you with its venomous fangs. In the darkness, evil can see you, but you can’t see evil.

Light dispels evil. Snakes don’t dare show themselves in the light of life. There is nothing to fear when light is shining around you, for you can see everything that is there clearly. Nothing can sneak up on you and capture you away to the underworld. Dark beings and creatures of the night fear the light as I fear the dark.

I love autumn as a season, but no matter how happy I become, I just can’t shake the lingering loneliness and the cold that comes with the darkness of the Scandinavian autumn.

There would be one solution to that, I suppose – get a husband.

Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely alone; I have a pet fly named Stanley.

P.S. Stanley escaped out the door a while ago.

Every month a screaming fear stabs me through from back to front, like an inextinguishable jagged sword of flames searing me in two right through the middle. As if my body is doubling over inside itself in anguish and screaming “For the love of God, don’t leave me!!” Wringing itself into a knot, gripping onto my insides with such a violence!

My body seizes up, writhing in despair within itself, as if it is straining to grip excruciatingly onto elusive and denying parents, onto something loving and soft, something safe, gripping onto an illusion of love and screaming “Don’t go!” Oh God it hurts!! Reduces me to a little child, in agony, lying on the couch, weak, worn, crying.

“I need love and softness and warmth,” the little girl said “And I need hugs. Since my birth, my agony and fear have been insufferable without these!”

And my body, desperate for love and softness and warmth, hasn’t understood, that physically torturing me every month does not bring love and softness and warmth.

Why do I fall apart when he stays away for days and days? More importantly, why does he stay away from me, why does he leave me…alone…wondering…writing…

“I sit alone here in my dark, silent room, writing to you by candlelight and staring out the window at the falling snow; each little snowflake living its brief moment in the light of the street lamp, lingering or hastened through this limelight at the whim of the wind, passing thus away, back into the dark space of night, becoming again invisible, forgotten.

Here I wait for you. I’ve waited for you all day. You said you would come. You did not come. I ask myself in my solitude ‘Did he forget me?’ I ask myself ‘Why does everyone forget me?’ like a small girl left waiting alone outside in the cold after her school has closed for the day and all her classmates have long since been picked up and taken back home to the warm embrace of a family. The small girl stands alone, shivering in the cold, unclaimed, abandoned, orphaned…scared. Nobody wants her, nobody remembers her – not even her own parents.

As I stare into the night, white with falling snow, deep inside me I feel this pain – my brief time in the light of your love is done.

I ask myself, ‘How many days will he desert me for this time? How many weeks?’

I ask myself, ‘Why did they forget me? Why did they leave me alone, waiting?’ Time after time, I only find one explanation – I am not worthy.”

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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.

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