Caving in : today’s update

I feel like my life is completely devolving this afternoon. It was such a push to make it to therapy and I read the post that was most charged five minutes towards the end and when a torrent opened up I felt Kat saying time’s up as if that short brief window of time (1 hour) just is the absolute limit.. It felt so cutting today…

I pushed myself to the center afterwards for lunch as it has been super wet here, the roads near the lake are seeping with deep puddles of water on the parts of road lying under a lift of hill, everyone seemed to be having the same idea to escape the rain.. I felt a bit sick ordering a second cup of coffee I wanted but did not need.. I ate while reading more of my book and feeling so sad for little Hansi who had change his name to John in order to assimilate into English life and schooling after being ‘rescued’ by a Christian evangelist from war torn Czechoslovakia at the age of 8, ripped away from both parents. That these vulnerable Jewish children were ‘saved’ only to be forceablely converted to Christianity, made me a bit angry.

In later years Julie Rierden’s father never practiced any form of religion and he never even spoke of what happened to him. As I was reading this I thought of how dark much history is and of the painful losses, severings and separations war caused.. It is not lost on me approaching the anniversary of Dad’s illness being discovered in late 1984, if you look at photos of him you can see he is as thin as a rake and the cancer must have been eating away at him from the inside for some years. On the way to therapy today I thought that in only 6 years I will be the same age as he was when diagnosed with cancer, it took his stomach and I have constant stomach issues as I do not really know how to nurture myself with food, its something I notice lately…

Anyway I went to get groceries from Aldi supermarket before taking the lake drive home.. Jasper came out to greet me but on the day Simon walks him he doesn’t run down the steps to the car. He waits just inside the door to greet me as I unload my shopping and then looks upon me quizzically as I often burst into tears upon coming home. Today I just had the thought that I am dying.. I am seeing my own illusions and delusions. I gave away all of my savings to someone I don’t even know and have allowed him to pull me in again only to go AWOL when I am sick and he doesn’t get what he needs.. It was glaringly obvious in therapy how much I discount myself and my own value at times. I reached out to family to ask for a gift to give to my sister’s oldest son’s young boy and they have not even got back to me. I am so rarely acknowledged by them and a big theme in therapy today was the sense of a big hand coming out to push me away and tell me I am nothing may as well not exist and better not get ‘too big for my boots’. In the shower earlier I was crying as 10 years ago Phil and I broke up over his birthday and now I am in trouble for not helping another person with cake and wine for his.. Its almost as if I do not help I am nothing. Part of the ‘cryfest’ involved asking for Phil’s forgiveness when my angels said to me “Deborah, that was not your fault, don’t you know you are precious and beloved?” I told Kat this and she said the other voice blaming me and telling me I am at fault for things way outside the realm of necessary guilt is an ‘introject’. Perhaps my mother got subjected to this ‘you are nothing’ voice a long time ago, its one of the reasons she fought her own mother to get out of a domestic service live in position Nana set up for her at the age of 13 and defyed her by getting a job as a tailor’s apprentice, then throwing the first boss over for a second one who she thought was more qualified. That took bloody gumption for Mum. The same gumption she had when she went to Melbourne in the mid 70s to court Australian designers such as Prue Acton so they would let her take on their brand in a dress shop she started in Manuka that went bankrupt by the former owner.

So Mum must have thought more of herself and had more gumption than I have shown at times but more in the outer world, as her own feelings of shyness and insecurity on an emotional level were ones she once told me she saw me manifesting to a bigger degree than any of my other three sibling. Like a lot of my Mum’s generation (including young Hansi in the book I am reading right now – they were born 6 years apart, Mum in 1924 and Hansi in 1930) their emotional beings often got obliterated or were not able to express amidst the powerful collective adult forces shaping the world birthing out of the First World War dark ages and following depression years. Come to think of it Mars retrograde in Aries shortly passed back over the 21 degree point of my Mum’s natal Chiron in Aries. Dad had the same placement although he was born 4 years earlier and I believe both of them had it aspecting Neptune in Leo, another fire sign and Pluto passed over this placement for an entire generation when World War 2 broke out in 1939.

The annexing of part of Czechoslovakia was not something I was aware of until reading Julia Rierden’s book The Writing On The Wall. The Czech Jews were basically handed to the Nazi powers on a plate in the hopes such a ‘sacrifice’ would prevent a war that went on anyway.. And many children lost their lives in death camps as a result. Young Hansi was one of only around 60 or so ‘lucky’ young Jewish children ‘saved’ in 1939 by being flown out of Czechoslovakia on two KLM flights to England.

Its not only the impact of the political forces on those lives in terms of emotional themes that interests me.. What interests me more is the massive capitalist ethos built up on the broken back of so many devastated lives. A long time ago I read parts of a book written by Diane Armstrong that involved the voyage of a boat carrying hundreds of European refugees from war torn countries to Australia following the end of the War in 1947 Many of those coming to Australia lived on to become captains of industry..

At the moment there is a huge skirmish going on in Australia over the premier, Daniel Andrew’s handling of lock down in the state of Victoria and Melbourne in particular. Last night a former Liberal leader Jeff Kennett accused him of being a ‘communist dictator’… pretty over the top and there was a big stoush over the matter on our nightly current affairs program The Project last night. Yes livelihoods are being damaged by lockdown but in a difficult situation Daniel Andrews has been doing his best to manage things in the way he considers right for the safety of citizens and vulnerable elderly in particular. The point is industry can only go so far and although lives are being damaged there is a reason why which just goes to show life is often riven with conflict and economic concerns should not be the primary concern surely?

Writing this for me, for a time, takes me out of my disaster/breakdown mindset, at the same time I see how the force of capitalism sometimes leaves an aching void of loneliness at its heart, but of course my perception is tinged with the loss of my own father who left Holland in 1938 narrowly escaping the occupation and went on determined never to go back and build an empire so his children no longer needed to struggle..Of all four siblings my brother has fared best in terms of economic success and keeping his family close, but there is little reaching back to any of us girls.. My older sister died from working too hard and my other sister is in hospital again after years of battling that stoical work hard/live hard (while denying your softer more emotional feelings and needs for closeness) demon inside herself so valiantly over past years.. For me, I go on crying about it all in silence, apart from the channel I luckily (and by the grace of other wonderful humans) have been afforded here on WordPress. Just a few lovely comment exchanges with some of my most precious friends on here this morning made my day and I need to remember I do have a voice here.

Therapy today focused on what I lately have felt to be my purpose. It is no longer trying to finance someone else. Thinking it all through on the weekend after failing to help Scott I felt it was not wrong but all for the best.. In AA I learned that my primary purpose from the time of getting sober was TO CARRY THE MESSAGE AND BE AN EXAMPLE THAT I CAN LIVE A PEACEFUL SOBER LIFE.. and that the gift of serenity and sobriety is available to others.. at times I may not seem all that serene but I still hope by giving voice to a lot of this hidden emotion energy I help others in some way..

I do admire the work someone like Benny K is doing in New York with young ones in terms of helping them to find self acceptance and not succumb to self devaluation or burying of feelings through addictions. I would love to find that kind of pathway forward to help youngsters too who may question their worth and value or are being bullied or struggling with self esteem as I was but before I can I have to get to work on loving and accepting myself, fully and not blaming myself for things not my fault.

As a recovering person (recovering a sense of a self that has worth and value), helping others helps me. It may not be much of a favored ideal in a world run along individualistic standards but we all have to find what it is that most makes our human heart feel peace. Today for me that involves a form of compassion that helps others to know we all struggle in similar ways and at times get tormented by similar feeling, thoughts and issues.