Wine is my drink

The only time I do this on my own is when I’m travelling through airports: sit in a café drinking wine. But today, I’m not in an airport. I’m almost home. And I’ve just given into responsibility and decided to give myself some time. Oh I feel guilty, even with the knowledge that the grandparents are helping out at home today, I think. I feel like I have to get home when all I want is that there is no time, that everything happens when I want.

Turns out they are out of wine in this café. They have served me a beer that I need to pour myself. How I wish I was back in Europe. It wouldn’t necessarily change my state, but it would make one part of my life feel that it was in the right place. But it looks like I’ve chosen a difficult life. Let’s hope that I find a way to make it feel right before I die.

I’m so down. I don’t see how one finds meaning in life. Actuallly, forget about meaning, I don’t see how one finds a sense of security. I could die right now. I can I give myself the illusion that this is not true, even though it will be true one day.

Good wine is probably the only place that life seems worth it, where I actually accept that I can die now and that’s ok and I feel alive. If it wasn’t for wine, I don’t see what the point of anything is. I wish someone would enlighten me.

Burden

For my whole life, or at least the part that started with the move back to a big city at the age of 12, I have insisted that I am boring. And using the principle of reflection, it may also be true that I find people boring. I noticed that sometimes, but generally its when I’m angry about the world that I will think this. It’s truer to say that I have rarely entertained a regular friendship out of a strong belief that I will bore the other person and thus have to deal with the hurt of rejection. Every time. So I avoid it. And I especially avoid phone calls of a personal nature because there is always a point that I don’t know what else to say and the deadly silence frightens the hell out of me.

I learnt something in my last therapy session – that this feeling of being boring to someone is more deeply rooted in a feeling of being a burden. It might seem a bit theoretical, but something about it rings true. So I’m noting it for future reference. It definitely explains why I don’t want to reach out to someone when I’m going through stuff. And since I’m pretty much “going through stuff” all the time, that rules out any friendship that has a chance to go deeper.

I am in a deep hole of loneliness. I felt depressed most of the weekend with the only respite being after a nice walk in today’s afternoon sun. I have my prescription of anti-depressors sitting in my back, but I’m avoiding going there. I keep on hoping that this phase of panics will just end.

It feels like she hates me. Which may just be because I hate myself. Or maybe I also hate her – this new age stuff that she is so attached to is alien to me, and she’s right, there’s not much point of contact in that. Not that we have much point to find out if there is a future – we have virtually no time for each other.

I definitely hate the way she is so preaching about being a centered person without exaggerated emotions. I am the exact opposite so you’ll forgive me for getting the impression that she hates me. She definitely hasn’t hidden her belief that I’m just wallowing in anxieties and that I should be able to pull myself out of it, just like that. If you ask me, she’s in such denial of her own fear and lack of empathy. But there’s no point throwing that back at her – she’ll just accuse me of having too much of the traditional therapies. She actually got angry at our 5 year old daughter who spent the day crying because she missed her friend who stayed overnight for the first time – first time also that a friend stayed the night we her. I can understand getting a bit frustrated, but she actually gets angry because she’s expecting Z to be more centered and see that everything is ok. There’s nothing worst than new age idealism. It’s like a rejection of our human nature. At least in her case, it looks more and more like she uses it to justify her denial to feel all the “negative” emotions. I hate it when she talks this way, which is becoming more and more since she started with this group a year ago. I’m the opposite – I just want people to talk about the way they feel. I don’t want what she and her sister keep on doing – talking slogans in a language that is not even their own. They are completely infatuated with gurus, which if you ask me, doesn’t show a lot of centeredness.

To conclude, I wanted to jot down another reminder. Which is where she is right – I should grow a center. When anxiety comes, either in the car or in a queue, what I search for is a connection. Generally a connection can pull me back to reality. What I see is just how I’m not enough for me – I have no idea about how to be alone with myself. Self-love. My great short coming.

The holy grail of beliefs

If I had to use one word to describe my situation in life, it is this: lonely.

Don't get me wrong, I created this loneliness. I'm not asking anyone to shed a tear. At least, that's the lie I tell to myself. I probably want all the attention and affection in the world, but it all ends up making me feel the one in the wrong or the one with problems. So I keep the loneliness going just so I won't be reminded of how shitty I believe that I am. Not that I'm succeeding very well because I have a partner and two children and my inability to bring joy into our lives is enough to make me feel bad about myself. And even when I loved alone, I did a good job of being unhappy.

Everyone wants to be happy. But I resist it in ways that I haven't even fathomed. And believe me, I've done a lot of therapy. The anxieties continue, and I'm in a long horrible period of panic attacks.

I say that if I didn't have anxiety and panic attacks, I would be so much better. Which is a lie. I would still be just as undefined and unhappy as I am now. Or is it a lie? I don't know really.

The panics seems to have a root in traumatic ear operations that I had when I was young. At least there was this one when I was ten living in outback Australia and they took me and a bunch of Aboriginal children in an ambulance to a hospital some 250km away. They operated one after the other. I was the last. I remember my eyes rolling in their sockets before I passed out. I threw up all the way home lying on the floor. I entered into this in my last therapy session because the panics that stem from driving through bad traffic and feeling stuck seem to bring me back to this situation. I never had so much fear flood my body in a therapist's room. But the wave of panic came when I tried one of those therapy tricks - go there and be with your child. I couldn't do it. I was flooded with anxiety. My therapist asked me, who do you want there with you. "No-one". That was the answer. And yes, it brought tears, but it didn't bring relief. If I did something in my early childhood, it was to decide that no-one will be permitted to be here for me. I was so frightened and so lonely in that hospital surrounded by such impersonalism that I understood just how lonely I was in that place. In this place. In this world.

Was that the beginning of all this? Who knows. I remember loneliness even earlier. I remember Broome, another outback down on the Australian west coast. Every lunch I used to walk alone in one corner of the school where no-one congregated. There was a fence I used to tight-rope along it. Every lunch. It was a mostly Aboriginal school. I had one white friend Scott but he left town.

But to go from loneiness to anxiety is a step. I live with the belief that there is no protection in this world, that no-one will ever look after me if I am sick and that dying is absolute sheer suffering and fear. And I live with the knowledge that I am the one lying on the floor, I'm the one that is sick, I'm the one that is not strong, not brave. I don't look at the world, I just assume that it's perfect and that I am the one suffering. I don't think it's arogance or narcisism, I think that its the pure anger that I am the one who is not good enough, not brave enough, not strong enough. I am the one on the floor. Not them, only me. I am stuck on that belief and I am already a deadly 41.

Was it that hospital visit and the ambulance ride that planted the seed of anxiety? Is the reason important? Probably not. All I know is that I suffer from so much panic at the moment that I start to believe that I'll never get out of this and live a "normal" life like everyone else.

I get into the car to drive home from work and I'm already trembling inside with anticipation of being stuck on a freeway with traffic. I already have the belief that I will not make it. I have made it a thousand times, sometimes easily, sometimes with immense suffering sitting in the car in an off-road frightened that death is coming. Even then, I make it home. But the belief continues.

Anger sits there ready to pounce on who ever tries to belittle the beliefs. So I swear, I don't ever want to live in these stupid over-populated parts of the world. But I keep on doing it of course, probably because I don't want to end up in the isolated dumps of my childhood, probably because I'm afraid to be bored and most probably because my job is the only way I can make money to stay alive. That's the belief anyway. I found one thing I'm good at and I hold onto it with all the benefits and all the stress that it brings into my life. I actually like my job - or at least I think I do, even though it doesn't seem to bring joy to my life. But it sits on two conflicting beliefs. One that I won't make it - I'm actually not good enough. And the other that no-one is going to look after me, so I have to make this work no matter what, accept whatever conditions that come with the job. And maybe even one more, that I'm going to do this alone, I'm not going to let anyone help me because I don't want a reminder of just how inadequate I feel.

That's a lot of survival shit sitting there in my life. A lot of stressful beliefs. A lot of miserableness. And a huge amount of anger that the rest of world is able and well and doesn't care.