Hortus Deliciarum

So.  The point of my post a couple of days ago, which apparently did not translate well into the written medium and which I’ve set as private out of respect for the individuals involved and apologized for, was that I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to fix things.

That person who hunts down old friends online and gets back in touch?  Me.

That person who tries to get arguing friends back together?  Me.

That person who carries around guilt for things that were never my fault in the first place (from toddlerhood on)?  Me.

I’m tired of carrying that responsibility.  I’m one of those people whose dreams very vividly reflect emotional issues…and I remember my dreams.  My great-grandmother died eight years ago and yet I still visit her house in my dreams, trying to find her, trying to talk to her, trying to say the goodbye that I never got to say.  When I argue with a friend, that friend visits me at night and I relive those emotions over and over again, not just in the dream itself but when I wake, upset and disturbed.  Arguments I have never had flare up in dreams.  Angry confrontations that I never intended happen in my subconscious and I live them in vivid color, feeling as miserable when I wake as if they had all been real.

Even more, when niggling stresses of any type, be they work-, relationship-, or school-related go undealt-with, I eat to cover them up.  I find myself visiting the fridge constantly in search of something, a gaping abyss of emptiness looming inside me; like the TARDIS, my emotions become far, far bigger inside than they show in my external shape and I struggle to fill that black hole with something.  I have spent many years of my life trying to stuff in enough food to heal the shame, the sadness, and the grief.

And in the end, I make too many things my problem.  I make too many things my job.  I take on too much guilt and shame that I just don’t need to carry any longer.  I still writhe in shame over events that happened decades ago.  I fight for friendships even when they are unrequited by contact or correspondence except for that initiated by me.  I look at an A- and, rather than congratulating myself on a job well done, drown in despair that I’ve lost my 4.0.

But no more.  If a friend wants to be in touch with me, I am easy-peasy to find online.  If I did something as a ten-year-old that I wouldn’t do today, twenty-two years later, I don’t have to scorn my childhood self.  I can give her the sympathy and love that she couldn’t give herself, because I have two decades’ worth of life experience, and three years’ worth of learning how to be a loving parent, to rely on.  She didn’t have those things.  If I got an A- this semester instead of an A, I can remind myself gently that I am a full-time worker outside the home, a wife, and the mother of a three-year-old.  I can remind myself that nobody, but nobody ever has cared about my GPA for my MA (4.00, incidentally, when I worked half as much time, was not married, and did not have a small child).

I don’t have to carry the guilt.  I don’t have to fix it.  As my therapist says, in any moment I can ask myself the question:  In this moment, just as I am, am I enough?

And the answer, always, is:  Yes.

All the things I could be and perhaps should be are irrelevant in this moment.  All the failures and successes are irrelevant in this moment.  In this moment I am myself, in the moment, without past or future.

And just as I am, I am enough.