September 29th, 2014

Dear Elaina,

You, my dear, are a hypocrite. You seethe and stew about your husband’s presumed ignorance of  knowing what it is you want out of life, when you have no clue yourself. You are dissatisfied with your life. Maybe shutting off the internet and discontinuing your work at 9:00 wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Now, instead of interacting with your writing groups, you have eliminated all of your distractions and must interact with yourself.

You’ve spent every night this past week thinking about what you want from life. You want more, but more of what? You don’t want material things. That’s never been your goal. You want to quench this internal thirst, this deep yearning that gnaws at you. You’ve tried for years to fill this gaping chasm, but you’ve only managed to sidetrack yourself. The empty feeling still prevails. It’s time to face it, end the distractions, and figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.

The problem is two-fold. The first is this need for more. You’re dissatisfied with where you’re at, what you’ve accomplished, and you want more. You don’t know what that looks like, but that sensation of wanting to reach up and stretch, arm extended, fingers reaching, is powerful. The second problem, which impacts everything, is this hole in your core. You need to address it once and for all because it’s holding you back. It’s hard to separate these two sensations. You feel unfulfilled and want more out of life, and you have this emptiness you keep trying to fill

You’ve been battling this black hole your entire life. It’s a dark energy force and you fear if you confront it or fight it, something else will crawl out of your memories’ archives and you’ll fall apart, again. What if you can’t accomplish your goals until you fill this emptiness? Worse, what if the answers are locked inside of you and until you’re strong enough to let them out, this ache, this emptiness, will always exist? The last two times your memory dumped, you had to crawl your way back to sanity, to functionality, to life. Could you survive another dump? Is it worth the risk? Is it even necessary?

Here’s another thought. What if you’re allowing these worries to hold you back? What if your fear of another PTSD episode limits your ability to see past the fear itself and you remain stuck in this void as a self-defense mechanism? What if this abyss holds the spot where your childhood feelings of safety, security and innocence lived. You can’t get those back. You can’t unsee. You can’t unknow, and you can’t be unraped. Maybe trying to fill the void is pointless. Maybe you have to accept the permanency of this rip and move on.

I can hear you castigating yourself for not thinking about this sooner. Remember, don’t judge. Don’t expect. Just be. Allow yourself sometime to sit in this thought. You might be wrong, but  you’ve worked so hard to fill this hole, you’ve never allowed yourself to imagine another possibility.Climb down into the void. Look around. What do you see? Sit in it. Maybe it will be like watching a scary movie. The first time you watch it, it scares the crud out of you. The second time, you know what to expect and the impact lessens. The third time, you brace yourself, but the shock never comes.

And finally, you’re not a hypocrite. Not really. You might not know what you want from life, but I bet if you ask your husband, he might have more of an idea than you’ve given him credit for.

As Buddha has said, “All that we are is the result of what we’ve thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.”

Well, Elaina. Maybe it’s time to start thinking new thoughts.