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 second and final time when, as a 21-22 year-old, I dared to mention that I was suicidal to my mother, and later the same year, to my father. My mother mechanically accused me of being manipulative and my father 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, self-centered, and usually manipulative, 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 (in fact, one of whom used to verbally abuse me because of my “negative energy”), suffer now from depression to varying degrees of intensity. This has made both my mother and brother more compassionate and tolerant of me; they have softened up a bit, even if they can’t understand depression, and even less, suicide.

Moreover, by the time I was in Finland with my broken foot, since I had been so long without regular communication with the family and I had been in Algeria, 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 me any lower than I was, nor could they do anything worse to 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.

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 2

This time last year, I was in Algeria and I had suffered a profound mental and emotional breakdown. This time last year, I had 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 to do it. 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 some hundred 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. The mere shadows of his love were like a fading supply of oxygen. 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 (suicide is 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 their consequences, but who did so without espousing a hardened heart or a mind which lingered in hatred or revenge; I wanted to become 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.”