Then somebody loves you just enough

(Bernard Fanning, from Powderfinger)

Today was a tough day. I woke up from a dream about being molested (very vivid, extremely disturbing.) to groggily drive to school and sit through chem and bio, all while feeling nauseous and guilty about food and anxiety about the test I have to turn in by Thursday morning. Then I got a text from J (a million minutes late, because the Science Center apparently sucks whatever signal there is along with a few souls.) For the past three weeks I've been diddling along, trying to get on with whatever approximation of living I've been doing. Today, I realized to what extent my ways of coping with saying goodbye involve forgetting. Trying to forget the way it felt, so that I can't compare it to the present; trying to forget that I even met him, that we ever interacted... which is horrible, and really sad. It's not that I actually succeed in the attempts to forget, but after all the goodbyes I've said in my life, why am I unable to look back and reminisce without the poignancy, the nostalgia becoming overwhelming? Why can't I just enjoy the re-hashing of scenes and sensations (insofar as much as possible) without wishing to not be in this moment (which is definitely something I want to avoid)?
With this goodbye, in particular, I have run the gamut (so to speak) of reactions: I've been angry, sad, hurt, and even relieved to some extent (the latter mostly being because I was having trouble focusing on studying, when I need as close to a 4.0 I can get to apply to med school-- so far, I'm at a 3.89, or something.) But today, (and the other day), when I heard from him spontaneously, when I was alerted to the fact that I'm still on his mind despite everything that's going down in a new and exciting place, I was struck. Struck by how much I miss him, by the very fact that I'm important, by how much I was holding back, by the strangeness of my mode of coping, and by how it seems so callous. No wonder I'm afraid of being forgotten, when this is the way I deal with things. I braced myself for a big reaction at the beginning, when I thought I had time to deal with it a little more... but now is when it's hitting me, when it's been three weeks or so. So I try to deal with studying for my tests and struggling with myself for control of anything, when in actuality all I really want to do right now is write and cry and sleep and draw and dream, and then maybe go dancing when I wake up.

Some new-age wisdom

I got this off of Heather Corinna (http://femmerotic.com/journal/) and it touches on a lot of stuff I've been contemplating of late:

"There is a Tibetan teaching that is often translated as, “Self-cherishing is the root of all suffering.” It can be hard for a Western person to hear the term “self-cherishing” without misunderstanding what is being said. I would guess that 85% of us Westerners would interpret it as telling us that we shouldn’t care for ourselves—that there is something anti-wakeful about respecting ourselves. But that isn’t what it really means. What it is talking about is fixating. “Self-cherishing” refers to how we try to protect ourselves by fixating; how we put up walls so that we won’t have to feel discomfort or lack of resolution. That notion of self-cherishing refers to the erroneous belief that there could be only comfort and no discomfort, or the belief that there could be only happiness and no sadness, or the belief that there could be just good and no bad.

But what the Buddhist teachings point out is that we could take a much bigger perspective, one that is beyond good and evil. Classifications of good and bad come from lack of maitri. We say that something is good if it makes us feel secure and it’s bad if it makes us feel insecure. That way we get into hating people who make us feel insecure and hating all kinds of religions or nationalities that make us feel insecure. And we like those who give us ground under our feet.

When we are so involved with trying to protect ourselves, we are unable to see the pain in another person’s face. “Self-cherishing” is ego fixating and grasping: it ties our hearts, our shoulders, our head, our stomach, into knots. We can’t open. Everything is in a knot. When we begin to open we can see others and we can be there for them. But to the degree that we haven’t worked with our own fear, we are going to shut down when others trigger our fear.

So to know yourself is to forget yourself. This is to say that when we make friends with ourselves we no longer have to be so self-involved. It’s a curious twist: making friends with ourselves is a way of not being so self-involved anymore. Then Dogen Zen-ji goes on to say, “To forget yourself is to become enlightened by all things.” When we are not so self-involved, we begin to realize that the world is speaking to us all of the time. Every plant, every tree, every animal, every person, every car, every airplane is speaking to us, teaching us, awakening us. It’s a wonderful world, but we often miss it." --Pema Chodron

It's also closely related to the Osho I've been reading-- he's talking about something different (happiness vs. pleasure), but it boils down to the same essentials:

"If you are strong, then you are ready to fight. If you are weak, then you are ready to fly, to take flight. But in neither case are you becoming stronger. In both cases the other has become the center of your mind. These are the two attitudes, fight or flight, and both are wrong because through both the mind is strengthened.

Patanjali says there is a third possibility: Don't fight and don't escape, just be alert. Just be conscious. Whatsoever is the case, just be a witness. Conscious effort means, one, searching for the inner source of happiness and, two, witnessing the old pattern of habits. Not fighting it, just witnessing it."

It may seem like these really aren't all that related, but they both come down to what Osho calls cessation of mind, and Pema Chodron calls becoming friends with yourself. To giving up the fight in order to win it. This has a lot to do with many things in my life, from my tendency to want to run away from responsibility(moving from England to WA to Atlanta and possibly back again?), the ways I try to deal with my eating disorder (alternately fighting and fleeing), relationships, the way I communicate... the more I read things like this the more I get sucked in by this promise of calm, of balance.

I must admit when I first started reading things on the same sort of wavelength (the Alchemist, Siddhartha, Osho, the Tao te Ching, etc.) I was more than a little skeptical. But then, despite my doubts, something resonates with me and I feel like they're bringing me back to the resources of my own soul. Which is what I need, and what I want: it always has been my goal to be independent. (I don't mean fiscally.) Reading these has made me realize that I don't need to be isolated to be independent.

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Ok, "deep" stuff aside, I've been making some plans with some of my friends for my visit to England in May, and I am so excited. I get so hyper about it that I will literally scream and clap my hands. Yes, I am a big kid. Yes, I love it.