Otis…

I tried to do something productive tonight. I just couldn’t. Except the one thing I made a commitment to doing which is spending a little time sitting to meditate instead of lying down. When I lie down to meditate I sort if do it and I can spend a long time sort of meditating but I know I probably don’t go as deep and it is easier to trick myself and tune out when I feel something uncomfortable when I lie down. I meditated lying down earlier to a guided meditation by the teacher of this four week course and ended up falling asleep. I woke up feeling really sad and I wake up feeling sad a lot but I just wished I hadn’t fallen asleep. So I did the kaizen thing and chose the shortest, 15 minute meditation, to sit for… the feelings that came up at the end were so intense and I felt like I can’t handle the emotions. I can’t handle the pain. I don’t know what to do with it. I feel powerless. When it started I kept being distracted myself by thinking about things like, I want to go eat oatmeal or trying to calculate how much Medium pays for views. I just wanted to think myself elsewhere.

I came back to my breath and recognised that coming back as a moment of mindfulness and was gentle with myself about it but my mind clearly wanted to be elsewhere, anywhere but here. Even when I was following my breath the desire to escape them and think about things kept asserting itself. Up to that point it was good, it was centering and helpful. Then the instruction switched from awareness of breath to awareness of sound. At first that was really relaxing and enjoyable and I do not know why I don’t meditate with sound more often because it is quite relaxing, just noticing all the sounds even in the quiet night, the humming of something electrical, the drip from the shower that will not completely shut off, faraway sounds from outside. Even when you think it is quiet there is still so much sound.

The centeredness led to my feeling my heart and the sadness in it and I didn’t want to feel it. I don’t think I can handle it. Earlier I was having thoughts and I often have this fear lately that I will not be able to handle what comes my way. It feels like it is happening now even though it is a fear of the future. I just had a conversation with my mother where she asked me if I wanted to go to a restaurant that used to be my favourite and I told her, okay, I will go and just eat the pasta and fries, since I don’t eat chicken anymore. She warned me that I might get upset by her question and asked me to promise not to… but how can I control that? It is so emotional to me, a restaurant that used to be such comfort food and that made me feel grounded somehow. I didn’t feel bad about the question and I was looking forward to their pasta and fries so I said okay but then she said the pasta isn’t that great and you can get better fries elsewhere. But I wanted to eat that pasta and those fries. If she wanted to go there I was okay with it because I want to go for the pasta and fries why would she then inject her own preferences and say let’s not go because *she* doesn’t think it’s worth it just for the pasta and fries? It’s like she was making the decision for me based on her own tastes rather than accepting that for me it would be worth it to go just for that? It wasn’t a huge deal, she texted me and said I misunderstood, she was just saying other places have good fries too. But in our conversation she actually asked because she assumed that if we went I would eat the chicken? It was frustrating: she said, I thought maybe you eat meat sometimes. Has she ever in two years seen me eat meat or does she think I just don’t when she’s not around? It was strange, but I guess I get that she just doesn’t understand…

In this meditation so much stuff was coming up and… it was good to do because I needed some time where I could just be and not worry about all the things I want to do that I’ll never have time for. It is so good for me to have some time where I am not trying to do aaanything except just be aware. But then I was meditating on sound and as my body relaxed I felt the pain in my heart and I started feeling, oh, I can’t handle what is coming up. It’s impossible and I will never feel happy again. I started feeling such resentment and anger that I stuff down so much of the time about how I got anseevice dog because I was really, really sad, and how he made everything better, but my mother apparently thinks this is just inconsequential. There were times when she would criticise me just for trying to pet him let alone spending one night in a month with him. Why is my nervous system so messed up? Nowadays largely because I got a service dog when I was sad and he was wrenched away from me and my own mother does not have rhe slightest clue that my having access to my own service dog might be kind of important. She has no clue that the way things have been breaks my heart over and over and over again, that one of my biggest fears is losing him and then feeling the pain and grief not only of that but of the heart connection with him that was severed by my own mother’s… who knows what her motivation is, but with him I’m happy, without him I am inwardly miserable and I can’t connect with any other dog and feel happy because this is so unfinished, what was supposed to make me happy only ended up making me so sad, and the only thing I can imagine that will heal this pain so it doesn’t stay forever in my heart is having access to my own dog or at least my mother caring the least bit about how soooo much of the pain
and suffering in my life had its roots in the so not okay way she has handled this. I wanted to yell at her. I felt so much resentment. If anything happened to him that will be a stain on my heart forever. It hurts so much that my mother doesn’t know the first thing about me, if she did she would know so mich more than that this affects me but she doesn’t even seem to recognise that. Nothing I say gets through to her.

Maybe that’s part of why i am so anxious about time. While he is still here there is still a chance, at least in theory, for me to heal some of these wounds, but things have to be made right to some extent, and it doesn’t make sense that I’m not with him. It is like being torn apart from the one you love most and never getting a chance to resolve that in any way at all and knowing someone else you love who could have made sure this permanent stain in your heart didn’t happen actually is responsible for so much of the pain. I can’t handle all of my emotions about this but it makes me so… I do not even know what… when I think about how all the ways I feel heartbroken and alienated would immediately get better if only I could be with him and there wasn’t such constant drama and hurt around it.

So I texted her, I tried to tell her how much I hurt and how huge of an effect this has on me in a way that Inwish she would take seriously… without actually telling her what this ‘thing that hurts the most’ actually is. I feel powerless because there is no way to express or get her to care how much it hurts. She wasn’t mean, because I did not mention the topic directly. She had no idea what I was talking about, though by now she should know this is the most painful thing for me. She just doesn’t hear it because she doesn’t want to and has her own issues which to me come across as appalling selfish. She said ‘what exactly do I need to do to make you happier’? I told her, if she doesn’t know by now, how will she ever know, and I said I can’t being up the topic directly because the past is the best prediction of the future and in the past every time the topic of my dog even came up she was so mean to me. It hurts enough as it is without having her behaviour towards me piled up on top of that. If I had even told her what I was talking about, she would close down to me, start huffing and puffing about how unreasonable I am for even having feelings, and it would spiral into even more hurt.

Maybe if I keep trying to tell her how I feel without actually bringing up the direct issue, she will hear that I am in pain and maybe sort of care, and then when she finds out it is because my heart has been torn from what I love and what brings meaning to my life and what relaxes my nervous system and… well, does everything for me, or did, until she basically decided he was hers… I don’t know, maybe she will at least not hurt me with it? Maybe she will actually try to help me be happier around what feels hopeless rather than hurting me more? If she wanted to make sure I had more frequent *access* to my dog, or access at all, certainly she could figure out some way if taking some small step to do that. She does not get that I am numb, I hurt and feel the most intense horrible feelings, cannot connect with any other animals let alone people and the world, and just getting to sleep next to my own dog, having my own mother care about me having that chance, would change everything. That she won’t do that, just tortures me more. This feels like so much totally unnecessary pain, and not because I can’t let go — he is my dog, I shouldn’t have to let go and resign myself to never being comforted by him like that again… but it feels so unnecessary and how do I not resent that everything that would make my life so much happier was just… argh, how, how, how, nobody understands what andog means to me, how it tears apart my heart, not only to be severed from that connection to what helped me melt and feel my heart, but to be treated this way by her.

If I take even a second to try to understand it, I just get, argh, it is such horrible feelings. All I want for Christmas is knowing my mother cares about me having access to my dog (no, zi want my dog, but I’d settle for the lesser of the impossible wishes) and knowing that’s not going to happen, I just can’t move on and everything everything everything is so much harder because of something that could be so simple to start to make better. I don’t think ai’ll ever be able to stop processing this and if I lose him it will never get fixed, it eill be the biggest regret of my life, and the fact that I can’t explain that to her in any way at all… there are no words for these feelings. It even hurts too much to write his name…