Today I saw 999 and 6666. 999 Means one chapter is ending and another is beginning. I find this to be true. I find myself to have more exuberance, natural vibrance, and distress tolerance than I used to. I find myself needing less of my anxiety medication. I find myself in birds. I find myself in fields. I find myself within others and outside of others. Everything I relate to is completely different.
Yet, I am still a young grasshopper. Dr. M will teach me what I need to know to get to where I want to go. Ultimately I want to be married and be able to explore kids and have a wonderful career as a healer in my safe place. The world is a very safe place when you think in terms of its positivity. We are lucky to be able to inhabit such a place of wonder but the real wonder is in what we cannot look at, but what we truly see. That is where the magic lies, in between the real and unreal. Religion creates boundaries, it creates divides and not only divides but wars. Spirituality unites. That is the difference. The difference between liturgical commitments and commitments of the heart.
I saw a crow today watching the world. It flew onto a branch as I was taking my beloved dog outside and sat on it almost the entire time. The crow then, after five minutes or so, flew away to join his flock. Again the things we interpret are in our minds, in our body, in our spirit. To me, the spirit is the most important part. I identify with Christianity but carry many principles of Buddhist philosophy with me. The source of all suffering is the attachment to desire.
The attachment to desire is a strange thing. I was raped almost twice in Texas because of it. The first time was so bad I had to shout “no, no, get off of me” and sprinted for the door. I ran home to my apartment so fast and again because I had no boundaries, I believed a friend of Lauralee’s brother at SMU would do nothing of the sort. I can’t believe the same guy had the nerve to ask me later to watch his dog on a trip, like nothing had happened between us. If I hadn’t gotten out of that apartment, just down the hall from mine, I would have been raped.
We talk a lot about the victim-perpetrator-rescuer identity in therapy. In these situations, as my staff of therapists would agree, I am the victim. There is nothing I did except for walk down the hall into a friend’s apartment for the second time to think that I would be raped. Unfortunately letting that identity take on a life of its own because I fear success and thus losing it once attained is not an identity I seek.
Yet, where I am at fault, is both times I was almost raped both men expected sex in return for weed, unbeknownst to me. Seeking weed during a time in my life when my icloud was hacked and had to reimage my computer almost six times until ultimately I was told to delete my social media, is an excuse to smoke weed but at the time seemed much better than smoking cigarettes or drinking. That is my fault. Not that the men expected and tried to engage in sex with me because of it. Did I put myself into a situation? Yes. Did I ask to be treated like that? No. Did I even conceive these two friends of very close friends would try this? No.
For a large part of my life, I have been the victim. That is why I identify with that card so much. But now I have learned that there are times when I become too victimized by myself.
Do I like being sick? No. Have I been a victim. Yes. Does this mean it is my identity? No. Has it become my identity in the past? Yes. Have I allowed it to become my destiny? No.
to look is not to see 