I was cleaning out my office and went through a pile of old notebooks. In one, I found this entry 👇🏽
I seem to have lost memory to an arguement I had. I recall the emotions, but I can’t recall the event. Feelings feel bundled up and put away. I shared something that was affecting me. She was not listening to me. I felt invisible and alone. I always feel alone, an alien to this world. I have to wear a mask to fit in. It feels empty inside, or almost numb. I’m not allowing myself to feel. What other memories are buried? What parts of me are lost?
It was eerie to read this entry I wrote on March of 2019, nearly a year before I started my deep inner work. In a way, my past self knew that something was wrong. What really hits me is that this me was crying out for help, and he didn’t know what it was. He wouldn’t know until almost six years later.
What was that feeling of being invisible?
I’ve been doing my work for almost five years. My past self went almost a year before he finally committed himself to finding the depths of what it is.
I told my therapist then that I’m committed to finding out what this is and that he could push me as hard as he could to push me through it.
It would take five years to get there, even with my relentless and obsessive drive.
Knowing what I know today, my past self wouldn’t been crushed with the truth, he wasn’t ready. He was crying out, lashing out, and running around the world angry, no knowing what he truly needed.
Just within the last few months, I started to graze at the edges of my grief. Each encounter, whether intentional or through emergence I felt the whiplash of the magnitude of the grief. It’s like being in a dark room, and trying to figure out what this object that stands before you is, where it starts and where it ends.
Sometimes it’s a soft and squishy, other times it’s sharp, pricking your fingers, and many times it hits back.
I didn’t know then, but I needed to build my capacity to be with this. Layers upon layers of armor was built up over the years.
The dance was getting close to it and starting to get an understanding, then being pricked and running back, raising up my shield again.
It wasn’t until I did an intense summer of assisting in psychodrama structures, witnessing the suffering of others, and decentering myself from myself that my armoring was able to slowly melt away.
Until I could be with my grief, and feel the sharp and blunt pain that came with it.
To be lonely in a world full of people is a deep wound
I found my capacity to be.
The present moment at one point in my generational family was not safe. The present moment was bombs.
In fact, there was 2X more incendiary bombs dropped onto Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) than all of World War II combined.
The present was burnt alive.
And so as I grew from this fire, I quickly learned to never be in the moment. My dad told me to never look back, always look to the future, and unknowingly, I did that. I ran. I never looked back. I kept running.
When a friend took me to Zen training, it was the most excruciating pain I experienced. What’s supposed to be mindful and calm was a warzone for me. The present moment was a warzone at one point, but it no longer was.
No one was there when I needed it
Summed up simply, that was it.
There was no one there.
It’s such an intellectually hard concept to grasp because yes there was. My parents were there, we had a community, and a school, and church. And therein lies the problem. We were surrounded by people but alone in the reality that our reality at one point was a war-torn home, poisoned with Agent Orange and burnt with napalm.
And when the womb that was suppose to be a place of safety became dangerous, the fetus froze in terror.
When the newborn cross the veil into a new world, his parents were traumatized from the journey to get to the refugee camp. He wasn’t greeted with love, but with frozen terror.
As I grew up, I instinctually knew that my parents weren’t able to help me, that to survive, I had to help myself.
Now as a grown adult with late diagnosis of ADHD, I’m starting to realize the depth of which I’m not able to perform basic functions. On the outside, I appear fine because it’s a life of learning adaptive strategies, but little me was a child.
He didn’t have the ability to care for himself, and his parents didn’t either. It’s the painful realization as a parent now that I may not be able to protect my child, and as a child myself back then, that my parents may not be able to protect me.
Knowing that would cause my world to collapse.
So I built an alternative reality, one in which I was Superman.
Now, today, I’m learning to let go of my hypervigilence gently. I used to think that I was seeing glitches in reality, but it wasn’t reality, it was the illusion that I created. It was my own prison that I created, my own Matrix.
And in some way, perhaps the world is just a collective projection of all our insecurities and wounds.
In being with my grief, I realize that what I was running away from, what I was always seeking for in things, relationships, and experiences was indeed the grief itself. It’s not something to be afraid of, but instead that friend that I always wanted, holding me tenderly.
The tears now flow, the weight of holding all that in became unbearable, and I gave up my humanity to do so.
Now I am human again.
I feel human.
And it’s okay to be sad, because it is sad.
Until again friends, we’ll find out what emerges from this ball of grief.