Note to Self: It's Okay to Be Loved
Be where you are. Pay attention the space around you, and then to your physical self. Take a second for each sensation, what can you hear? What is the lighting in your environment like? Where are you? Can you smell anything? What was the last thing you ate, or have you brushed your teeth today? What do your clothes feel like on your skin? What position are you sitting in, if you're sitting?
Now take it a little bit deeper: What do your muscles feel like? Are you hungry, or will you need a bathroom sometime soon? Are you tense anywhere? Any aches or pains? Are you relaxed, or trembling? Think about your bones, and the way they rest against each other at the joints. Can you feel what your hair is doing? Is there an emotion or any kind of feeling in an expression on your face?
If you're having a feeling, what is it telling you? Does it beg a question? Is it making a demand, or a proclamation? Does it beg for action? Expression? Does it mean to be heard?
The answer to that last question is almost certainly "Yes." The fundamental emotions we experience come from a place in us that processes things in means beyond words, beyond images or concepts we can grasp. Your subconscious is a place sort of like a black hole, where so much exists in such a small place with such immense gravity that it's influence is apparent in everything that we are.
The other day I spent some time with a friend who mentioned that her subconscious was her entire body, and when I considered the idea of all the autonomous functions your body performs without your conscious effort, it clicked and made perfect sense that your physical body outside your mind, where all your unconscious movements happen, is part of your subconscious. It's a manifestation we use as a tool to interact with and to manipulate the physical world around us.
The lymphatic system is of the physical body, and it's the system that controls and produces all of our hormones, and if you've been through puberty--or especially if you experience a menstrual cycle--you know that your hormones are essentially interchangeable with your emotions. Some hormones generate feelings that are less like emotions and more like physical sensations, but our emotions can sometimes cause us to have physical sensations as well. Some emotions are strong enough to compel us to take action.
For those other feeling that we have but choose to neglect, our subconscious keeps track of those for us. I've learned from many sources, but only heard it phrased by my father, that the body keeps score. Stress is one of the primary killers of humans, and this is one feeling which scores highest when the body takes it's tally at the end and beginning of each day.
I've suffered a great deal of anxiety in my life, and even read results from one personality profiling system that told me that my anxiety is core deep, which unfortunately rings true to me. From what I understand, having an anxiety disorder means having an especially sensitive fight or flight response, it can be triggered by projections of thoughts and ideas into the future which do not exist. We conceive the very things that cause us stress, which ultimately kills us. It seems as though everyone fears death, and is obsessed with youth and living longer, and yet the one observation I've made that has been the most effectively comforting to myself has been that the inevitability of death is meaningless and not at all worth giving any thought or feeling to. I do still think about death from time to time, but I rarely consider my own death, and when I think of the deaths of others, I only ever think of how sad it will be to have lost someone. I've had anxiety over this before, but the thing that gets me worst....
Life. Living my life terrifies me. Especially living my life in a way that forces me to expand the boundaries of what I'm capable of, feeling or doing. Taking risks that would affect my physical well being is definitely scary, and I do enjoy a thrill now and again, but the thing I have in mind that gives me the worst anxiety is something that has such a tight grip on me that until yet in this very post I've barely been able to bring myself to type out in plain words what I'm scared of: Love and intimacy.
I know my mother loves me, as well as my whole immediate family. I'm really lucky to have the family I have, as we're all pretty tight with each other and like to hang out together. We get distracted and some of us are further than others, but we talk and we all always know that we're on the same team. When I was little, the state my family was in was a bit more scattered. My parents' marriage got pretty rocky around the time I was conceived, and because a grumpy mom is a grumpy house, all my siblings found ways to preoccupy themselves, and I ended up a little alone despite everyone who was around all the time. I know now that my family has lots of love in it, and that we all definitely care, but when you're little and you're only beginning to understand things, you tend to kind of fill in your own answers. I did my best to get whatever positive attention I could, but it's quite possible that I came back to the same conclusion more than once, that even though people cared about me, deep down they didn't seem to really care. I have a pretty fundamental fear of apathy, especially in the face of my caring so much. It's been a bit of a problem for me in life, caring too much, and it's taken me a lot of practice to just calm down and accept things as they are.
One of the ways that things are is loving. In Buddhism, there's a concept called interdependence. Your existence inevitably depends on the state of the world enabling you to survive. The air you breathe is available to you at all times, the light the sun shines allows you to see and navigate, the earth grows food for you to eat--and all of this is inevitably influenced by your existence, as you consume and produce everything that you are. Every aspect of your life is influenced by your existence.
I live my life with the belief that everything is only a unique manifestation of the same essence, which is vibration, light, consciousness, and most truly, love. As a living creature, especially one capable of empathy, you are a source of love. Ego is the separation of self and other, and this separation is a kind of apathy. When you determine that something is "other" than yourself, it also becomes objectified to a degree, as "other" tends most often to be either feared or used by ego. You can even separate your essence from your concept of self, and this creates a chasm inside you into which things can fall, especially your self-love.
The love others offer you can fall into this space as well, and I've been struggling with this lately. I've had bouts and episodes of manic depression, and in the process of detoxing from being high all the time, I'm expelling a number of emotions and sensations which I've suppressed over the years with the help of weed. I've grown a lot of depressed feelings in my life, and I've always rejected those feelings. I've always wanted to feel differently when I get depressed or anxious, and this sort of self-denial is something that can build up a lot if you leave it unchecked. Now that I'm sober more often than not, I'm forcibly experiencing everything I never let myself before, and it's downright miserable. I woke up today in a funk, feeling disconnected from myself, in a foggy headspace where nothing matters, and if it does matter, it hurts. It takes a conscious decision for me to allow myself to feel the things I'm experiencing.
There's someone who matters a great deal to me who I haven't talked about yet because I want to protect her privacy, and because for a very long time, I was just really insecure about whether or not her being in my life was as significant in the shared human reality as it was in my own personal reality. Turns out, we actually have a substantial relationship in which we both matter to each other, and I was shocked to learn that she actually shares my feelings for her. I've known her since early in high school, and she was there for me when I wasn't even awake enough to know that I needed someone. She sat in that Dark Room of depression with me through my entire sophomore year, and although we drifted away from each other after some time, we've more recently grown much closer, and I'm now thrilled to be able to call her my partner.
After I woke up from my deepest depression in high school, I knew I loved her, and I did try to be with her then, but we grew up in a predominantly religious, small town, and she had the same boyfriend mostly on, sometimes off again for seven years. After high school, I always knew where she worked simply because we were friends--and even lived together with one other friend for a while, before she moved in with her boyfriend--and I used to visit her there occasionally. It was a simple pleasure to see her at all, even though through the years I taught myself that she wasn't available for me to be too close to. I'd grown to accept my supposed fate of living without her, and I pretty much got over my feelings for her. However, in the past several months, she's reached out to me, and asked to hang out with me, and speaks lovingly to me. I was shocked initially, and I plainly didn't understand her behavior towards me. I tried to explain that I had feelings for her, and I kept expecting her to disappear, as I was totally convinced that she was completely straight, and many of the girls I'd expressed my affections for had previously been overwhelmed by me. But she and I tripped together, and even briefly held hands, and I told her that I was scared of letting her see me. She replied that I had nothing to be afraid of, but I was still so scared.
It's hard to feel love when you're scared. Less than a week ago, I had my first sober nightmare. It was set in a house I'd never been in, as though my primary and I had moved, and there was this kid from the neighborhood who I was afraid of. I remember seeing the neighbor hang himself on the front porch, screaming as he fell into a badly tied noose, and I could only imagine he hung himself from no longer being able to live under the threat of this kid antagonizing him. This teen terrorist looked like people I've known, white, scrawny, shaggy dirty blonde hair, deadpan expression, and my dream reached a point where all the doors and windows in the house were locked, but I was still certain that he would find a way into the house to terrorize us. It might seem counter-intuitive, but after having this dream, it occurred to me that this character is a small part of myself, and that despite how apathetic he truly was, love is the only thing that can be applied that will help. I know that I need to learn to love even the worst and the scariest parts of myself, and then maybe it will be easier to accept love from others.
It's taken me weeks to fully accept that my friend, my love from high school actually loves me. She's said it countless times, and I always assumed it was platonic, but we stopped saying it for a short while, and I found this frightening. Now when we say it, it's a confirmation of things we already know, and it comes naturally, because I've chosen to allow myself to be loved. It isn't always an easy thing to do, especially when you see yourself as a void of darkness with nothing but gore to show for yourself.
My primary has seen some of the worst parts of myself personally as well. There was a long time when I sincerely felt as though he would be unaffected if I disappeared from his life, and he felt the same of me, despite all the time we spent having hard conversations about the ways we felt about each other.
One of the hardest things you can tell yourself is that it's okay to be loved. What's scary about this is that once you have something, it can be taken away from you. It keeps people from going after the things they want all the time, it gets the better of us when opportunities are presented. This life is strange and complicated, and it's all we have, and in my experience, the only thing that makes life really worthwhile is love. As it's said in one of my favorite movies, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return."
When you take a second to calm down, to forget about everything outside yourself, forget about everything you're projecting into your future, the one thing you ought to be feeling, the feeling that demands to be heard, is love.
Now take it a little bit deeper: What do your muscles feel like? Are you hungry, or will you need a bathroom sometime soon? Are you tense anywhere? Any aches or pains? Are you relaxed, or trembling? Think about your bones, and the way they rest against each other at the joints. Can you feel what your hair is doing? Is there an emotion or any kind of feeling in an expression on your face?
If you're having a feeling, what is it telling you? Does it beg a question? Is it making a demand, or a proclamation? Does it beg for action? Expression? Does it mean to be heard?
The answer to that last question is almost certainly "Yes." The fundamental emotions we experience come from a place in us that processes things in means beyond words, beyond images or concepts we can grasp. Your subconscious is a place sort of like a black hole, where so much exists in such a small place with such immense gravity that it's influence is apparent in everything that we are.
The other day I spent some time with a friend who mentioned that her subconscious was her entire body, and when I considered the idea of all the autonomous functions your body performs without your conscious effort, it clicked and made perfect sense that your physical body outside your mind, where all your unconscious movements happen, is part of your subconscious. It's a manifestation we use as a tool to interact with and to manipulate the physical world around us.
The lymphatic system is of the physical body, and it's the system that controls and produces all of our hormones, and if you've been through puberty--or especially if you experience a menstrual cycle--you know that your hormones are essentially interchangeable with your emotions. Some hormones generate feelings that are less like emotions and more like physical sensations, but our emotions can sometimes cause us to have physical sensations as well. Some emotions are strong enough to compel us to take action.
For those other feeling that we have but choose to neglect, our subconscious keeps track of those for us. I've learned from many sources, but only heard it phrased by my father, that the body keeps score. Stress is one of the primary killers of humans, and this is one feeling which scores highest when the body takes it's tally at the end and beginning of each day.
I've suffered a great deal of anxiety in my life, and even read results from one personality profiling system that told me that my anxiety is core deep, which unfortunately rings true to me. From what I understand, having an anxiety disorder means having an especially sensitive fight or flight response, it can be triggered by projections of thoughts and ideas into the future which do not exist. We conceive the very things that cause us stress, which ultimately kills us. It seems as though everyone fears death, and is obsessed with youth and living longer, and yet the one observation I've made that has been the most effectively comforting to myself has been that the inevitability of death is meaningless and not at all worth giving any thought or feeling to. I do still think about death from time to time, but I rarely consider my own death, and when I think of the deaths of others, I only ever think of how sad it will be to have lost someone. I've had anxiety over this before, but the thing that gets me worst....
Life. Living my life terrifies me. Especially living my life in a way that forces me to expand the boundaries of what I'm capable of, feeling or doing. Taking risks that would affect my physical well being is definitely scary, and I do enjoy a thrill now and again, but the thing I have in mind that gives me the worst anxiety is something that has such a tight grip on me that until yet in this very post I've barely been able to bring myself to type out in plain words what I'm scared of: Love and intimacy.
I know my mother loves me, as well as my whole immediate family. I'm really lucky to have the family I have, as we're all pretty tight with each other and like to hang out together. We get distracted and some of us are further than others, but we talk and we all always know that we're on the same team. When I was little, the state my family was in was a bit more scattered. My parents' marriage got pretty rocky around the time I was conceived, and because a grumpy mom is a grumpy house, all my siblings found ways to preoccupy themselves, and I ended up a little alone despite everyone who was around all the time. I know now that my family has lots of love in it, and that we all definitely care, but when you're little and you're only beginning to understand things, you tend to kind of fill in your own answers. I did my best to get whatever positive attention I could, but it's quite possible that I came back to the same conclusion more than once, that even though people cared about me, deep down they didn't seem to really care. I have a pretty fundamental fear of apathy, especially in the face of my caring so much. It's been a bit of a problem for me in life, caring too much, and it's taken me a lot of practice to just calm down and accept things as they are.
One of the ways that things are is loving. In Buddhism, there's a concept called interdependence. Your existence inevitably depends on the state of the world enabling you to survive. The air you breathe is available to you at all times, the light the sun shines allows you to see and navigate, the earth grows food for you to eat--and all of this is inevitably influenced by your existence, as you consume and produce everything that you are. Every aspect of your life is influenced by your existence.
I live my life with the belief that everything is only a unique manifestation of the same essence, which is vibration, light, consciousness, and most truly, love. As a living creature, especially one capable of empathy, you are a source of love. Ego is the separation of self and other, and this separation is a kind of apathy. When you determine that something is "other" than yourself, it also becomes objectified to a degree, as "other" tends most often to be either feared or used by ego. You can even separate your essence from your concept of self, and this creates a chasm inside you into which things can fall, especially your self-love.
The love others offer you can fall into this space as well, and I've been struggling with this lately. I've had bouts and episodes of manic depression, and in the process of detoxing from being high all the time, I'm expelling a number of emotions and sensations which I've suppressed over the years with the help of weed. I've grown a lot of depressed feelings in my life, and I've always rejected those feelings. I've always wanted to feel differently when I get depressed or anxious, and this sort of self-denial is something that can build up a lot if you leave it unchecked. Now that I'm sober more often than not, I'm forcibly experiencing everything I never let myself before, and it's downright miserable. I woke up today in a funk, feeling disconnected from myself, in a foggy headspace where nothing matters, and if it does matter, it hurts. It takes a conscious decision for me to allow myself to feel the things I'm experiencing.
There's someone who matters a great deal to me who I haven't talked about yet because I want to protect her privacy, and because for a very long time, I was just really insecure about whether or not her being in my life was as significant in the shared human reality as it was in my own personal reality. Turns out, we actually have a substantial relationship in which we both matter to each other, and I was shocked to learn that she actually shares my feelings for her. I've known her since early in high school, and she was there for me when I wasn't even awake enough to know that I needed someone. She sat in that Dark Room of depression with me through my entire sophomore year, and although we drifted away from each other after some time, we've more recently grown much closer, and I'm now thrilled to be able to call her my partner.
After I woke up from my deepest depression in high school, I knew I loved her, and I did try to be with her then, but we grew up in a predominantly religious, small town, and she had the same boyfriend mostly on, sometimes off again for seven years. After high school, I always knew where she worked simply because we were friends--and even lived together with one other friend for a while, before she moved in with her boyfriend--and I used to visit her there occasionally. It was a simple pleasure to see her at all, even though through the years I taught myself that she wasn't available for me to be too close to. I'd grown to accept my supposed fate of living without her, and I pretty much got over my feelings for her. However, in the past several months, she's reached out to me, and asked to hang out with me, and speaks lovingly to me. I was shocked initially, and I plainly didn't understand her behavior towards me. I tried to explain that I had feelings for her, and I kept expecting her to disappear, as I was totally convinced that she was completely straight, and many of the girls I'd expressed my affections for had previously been overwhelmed by me. But she and I tripped together, and even briefly held hands, and I told her that I was scared of letting her see me. She replied that I had nothing to be afraid of, but I was still so scared.
It's hard to feel love when you're scared. Less than a week ago, I had my first sober nightmare. It was set in a house I'd never been in, as though my primary and I had moved, and there was this kid from the neighborhood who I was afraid of. I remember seeing the neighbor hang himself on the front porch, screaming as he fell into a badly tied noose, and I could only imagine he hung himself from no longer being able to live under the threat of this kid antagonizing him. This teen terrorist looked like people I've known, white, scrawny, shaggy dirty blonde hair, deadpan expression, and my dream reached a point where all the doors and windows in the house were locked, but I was still certain that he would find a way into the house to terrorize us. It might seem counter-intuitive, but after having this dream, it occurred to me that this character is a small part of myself, and that despite how apathetic he truly was, love is the only thing that can be applied that will help. I know that I need to learn to love even the worst and the scariest parts of myself, and then maybe it will be easier to accept love from others.
It's taken me weeks to fully accept that my friend, my love from high school actually loves me. She's said it countless times, and I always assumed it was platonic, but we stopped saying it for a short while, and I found this frightening. Now when we say it, it's a confirmation of things we already know, and it comes naturally, because I've chosen to allow myself to be loved. It isn't always an easy thing to do, especially when you see yourself as a void of darkness with nothing but gore to show for yourself.
My primary has seen some of the worst parts of myself personally as well. There was a long time when I sincerely felt as though he would be unaffected if I disappeared from his life, and he felt the same of me, despite all the time we spent having hard conversations about the ways we felt about each other.
One of the hardest things you can tell yourself is that it's okay to be loved. What's scary about this is that once you have something, it can be taken away from you. It keeps people from going after the things they want all the time, it gets the better of us when opportunities are presented. This life is strange and complicated, and it's all we have, and in my experience, the only thing that makes life really worthwhile is love. As it's said in one of my favorite movies, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return."
When you take a second to calm down, to forget about everything outside yourself, forget about everything you're projecting into your future, the one thing you ought to be feeling, the feeling that demands to be heard, is love.
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