Dear Beloved…

I now have a flight to Guatemala which leaves the weekend of Thanksgiving (US) and returns a couple days before my birthday. I will come back for the 9 days between my birthday and Christmas and then maybe hang around a few more days after that. So it will be my shortest ever trip to Latin America and I’ll have to figure out what to do with so little time. I could write up an actual itinerary, something I never do; I tend to just make it up as I go along.

The reason for hanging around in the US a few days after Christmas is that I think I want to go to a silent Quaker retreat to celebrate the New Year. They play games in silence and have a big bonfire. After that I will fly to Colombia and plan on staying for three months. At the end of thise three months, I don’t know where I will be, but now I have made plans, and I honestly feel so nervous about my life. I can continue to connect to this and other Quaker meetings online but it isn’t the same.

I do not know what it is going to take to make me unnervous. I feel like everybody’s got somebody, that helps them feel less nervous about the world, that mirrors them and helps them see that the way they are living life is not so bad after all, that they are indeed lovable, that they won’t fall through the cracks, but I really have no one and I don’t know what it takes or what I need to transform psychologically to feel secure in my existence right now. What I have never been able to explain now becomes a lot explainable, in a lot of ways, ambut I am the furthest thing from being able to write a memoir. I had an idea though and it might be a therapeutic way to figure out what I need so that I no longer feel that my life is so precarious and unstable. The idea was to write Letters to My Once and Future Beloved and to write them as letters to my beloved as in one who might beyond hope or expectation choose to love me, if I ever find such a one as that, but also letters to the Beloved as in the divine. I would be writing to the divine in my love and the love in the divine. I would say all the things that are hard to say, express my insecurities and fears, and my ridiculous hopes as far as what I think my beloved might be like (because they will likely be absolutely nothing like my imaginings and that is okay); and all my fears of things that I think would get in the way of anyone loving me.

Last night I did a cool thing with my mother and when she is in a good and supportive mood it is good. We thought about going to corn mazes and haunted hay rides but we ended up doing this Mesmerica exhibit by James Hood and it was really cool. The toys you get to buy afterwards are awesome as well!

So I started thinking, what is it going to take for me to feel less afraid of life, and I really have no idea. I have to take this like a project, coach myself to do the things or create the conditions in my life that will make me less afraid of the future. Whatever I am feeling now is impermanent. I am sad because I can’t imagine feeling the way I felt at any previous point in my life ever again, and maybe it is always thus, but I feel it particularly now. For one I have to change what I can change, knowing it may not be very much: clear out my life of those who are not friends and companions on the journey, those who were but may never be again, and have the courage to start anew. Then when I choose to give folks anchance I want to ask them to be reallly honest with me about how they see me. In a year I want to have forgotten so much of the sadness and be in a better place. I want to find friends to write with and write to and friends who get something valuable out of tslking to me on the phone. In order to feel myself and understand what my needs are it is so helpful to see myself in the eyes of others.

What is the source of my fear and what can be done about it? Will it ever be possible to feel safe and secure and loved within a community of people again? I mean, to deep down trust that there are or can be people who care about me enough that they like spending time with me and won’t let anything bad happen to me. I need to keep my expectations reasonable, but I have felt that before, that I at least had a degree of support such that I wasn’t likely to spiral downwards into hell. Finding people who get me would be really nice. Figuring out what I had before that I don’t have now that made me so much afraid than than I am now that my life and the world could go to hell in a handbasket… what is it that needs to chance for me to feel the safety I need to actualize on higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. I have to find out what I might still be fooling and deceiving myself about and see things clearly. I don’t even know if it is more of an inner transformation that needs to happen or an outer change in conditions that needs to occur.

I am tired of the way things have been and I hope someone can still see the good in me. I hope past behaviours have not set my reputation in stone across the whole world and the universe. I have met wonderful people who see good in me, yes, but something is missing: my own sense of being a good person worthy of forgiveness is wounded and tattered, and I do not really believe I have lived in a way that makes me worth knowing, but this kind of just jumped up on me out of nowhere. Of course being seen through the eyes of others who love you is transformative and I can quickly realize through such connections that maybe ai am as worthy as everyone else. It feels hard to think about connecting intimately because my depths suddenly feel so shallow and I am not ready to feel like I deserve a happy, intimate, wholesome connection with others. So if something like that feels like it has anchance of happening, my issues will come up, my insecurities, and I will push it away. It is hard to imagine that anyone I like might deserve me. I mean, I am not good enough for them, they deserve better. I don’t want to play games if as a result of my playing everyone ends up losing. I want to learn how to have hope for the future again. I don’t want to waste any more of my life. I want support in feeling like I am the least bit worthy of the blessings of love. Whether such a beloved exists or not, writing letters to this mysterious unknown quantity feels comforting. I think?