Icing

Things are coming together for me. I live with a mind that is constantly looking backwards with doubt. It realizes, but unconsciously. Today I experienced some realization, perhaps aided by the daily transits, and I was gripped by the emotion that came out of my body.

I am in the process of writing my inventory, part of the process of 12 Step recovery. Being invited to do the 12 Steps was not the invitation I had been waiting for, but it felt right and it has proven to be exceptionally helpful.

Writing inventory is like writing your life story, but not the part you'd like everyone to see. It's everything you hate about your life, and about other people. It begins with every resentment you have, how everyone has hurt you, and then moves onto how you hurt them, how you are being dishonest, what you want to get out of the situation, and what you are afraid of. No one walks away from the experience of writing inventory and says, eh, no big deal. No one says, wow, that made my  life worse, I wish I had never done that, it its not pretty and it's not easy.

What I have started to see is how much my open solar plexus has run my life. I'm not just talking about avoiding an argument. When Ra talked about the open solar plexus he said, "these people have a secret life." I knew what he meant, but I had never realized how fiercely I defended my secret life, the lengths to which I was willing to go to avoid emotion.

It started with realizing that every single person in my life is non-emotional. Literally everyone I've ever felt "close" to, anyone I've ever trusted, everyone I've ever felt "understood" me is non-emotional. Not only are they all non-emotional, almost every single one of them is splenic. Wow. That terrified me.

But today what I saw was the root of my secret life. It started before I was seven, when people would ask me "what is wrong?" and I didn't have an answer, I didn't know. This seemed to concern them, so I started to hide my crying. I'm seeing clearly that I only ever cried when my father was in the house, (he's the only emotional being in our family) and, interestingly, that I often cried about him, and that he was the one I was hiding my emotion from. I knew he would get so upset if he knew how upset I was and I wanted to protect him, er myself, from feeling all that pain.

There is a new girl living in my house. She's an emotional generator, and I seem to be sleeping in her aura, even though there is plenty of room between us. I wake up in the morning feeling frustrated and emotional. These emotional people are like whales, you can't budge them. I respect her because she seems to respect her own pace, but I was also enraged for the last week about having to deal with this emotion. What I realized today is that it's not the emotion I don't like, it's the lack of control. Since she came I have started crying quite regularly. I cry sometimes continuously throughout the day. This is terrible, I have been thinking, this is not fair! But after today I realized that it's not the crying I mind, it's the fear that someone will see me, and ask me, "what's wrong" and I won't have anything to tell them. That fear is so old and so engrained in me. It is the foundation of my secret life.

So today I cried, hard, in the kitchen. It gripped me and brought me to my knees at one moment. And then it passed, rather suddenly. It's not me, all this emotion, but that doesn't mean I have to avoid it. I don't have to avoid anything. I can just trust that I'm going to be where I need to be and I'm going to be who I need to be when I'm there. Everything else is just icing on the cake of life.