Live life for yourself

 Being a 'Mr.India' in your life where you feel invisible, where your opinions don't matter, where you struggle to fit in, where you are trying to be everything for everyone, but don't seem to have discovered a voice of your own and feel like you have the freedom to say and be so is what I have or had been all along.

But things shifted quite a bit from these past 5 years and it's largely because of a divine portal that had opened and made the truth of all the above known and come to my awareness and helped me feel my feelings as I believed that all the pain of remaining numb in order to go along with the flow of collective consciousness as I chose to remain invisible was all very real.

I have forgiven myself a bit and also my mother and my uncles and aunts for being so indifferent and stuck in their own ego consuming world where others personalities are nothing but just specks of dust in their spiral.

But there's a beautiful shift yet again which makes me realize that letting go my past and submitting all these pains, the pain of being numb and oblivious to my own pain, the pain of seeing others being stuck in their own worlds and not being sorry for their actions as much as expected, the pain of being subjected to others narratives and allowing them to define my life's storyline and not being present enough to my given life and just going along with the drifting for so many years.

In all this lifeless attachments has come the life saving anchor called truth which is helping me be aware and also detach gradually from the pull of the past currents one day at a time. It's really important however to have a sense of what my present is actually and that I am slowly roping into but somehow a good part of me feels undone and just learning to holding onto some remnants of what I am outside of people's projections was what I had been focusing on, but in doing so I am again giving more attention on people's projections and the ensuing feelings and not releasing them and staying stuck.

It's as if I am so used to feeling stuck and look up at others for helping me get unstuck and pull me out of my own mind made mess. This feeling of powerlessness is all pervasive in my life and I can't leave it to outside circumstances to pull me out of this void which I have created as if it's some sort of safe haven to go around and stay encircled in.

I have become so dormantly submissive to this feeling of powerlessness that the weight of awareness of this feeling and truth thereby is the develcro factor but I still feel myself stuck in this pattern of powerlessness. Perhaps the fear of unknown is what I am trying to control and what really happens when you let go not knowing how to reinvent yourself is all contained in this low lying fear I guess. It's not so much fear but anxiety in living an unaligned life which is not stirred up with liveliness and enthusiasm to live and is like the pattern that it was and has been for decades but now becoming aware of it is giving rise to an insecurity of how will I adjust or cope up with all the disintegrated parts coming together and where do I begin?

I lost my sense of centre and have been routed or wired through pain consciousness as my mother's pain and her fears for me were internalized as mine. For so long I have distanced myself, my true feeling, expanding self into staying limited to her fears and criticisms which became my inner voice. It made me hard on hearing my own true feelings and hurts and needs and desires and so much more. I just lost myself under the debris of all these layers. 

I believed her fears to be the lifeline that connects me to her as if I need to learn to limit my liabilities or problems in order for her to be a little relieved from her fears of losing me but in reality I lost myself over and over for decades together. And this is my sore core wound. Her pain narrative of losing my father while being pregnant with me and being afraid that she might lose me too and also her anger at having to 'put up' with my overall sensitivity have all thrown me off my core as I stayed oblivious in a blur and didn't take efforts to bridge this gap for a long time. I am just being now without having to 'try' to be myself and I need to keep asserting this mindfully as a part of me feels so broken and disintegrated and I don't know if I 'll be able to find a sense of closure for the brokenness but feeling weighed down by brokenness is a phase and moving past this heaviness because I have to and because I only live once this lifetime and so owe myself the remaining opportunities to self discover and learn and grow like it's a process and not so much an objective goal which I usually attribute life to.

Living life well and in wholesome awareness and self love is my goal and letting go my past because I need to be seen and heard and respected and loved in an all new sense will help live this goal.

 

New Beginnings and end of many sorts

I was a kid with a heart full of fears

I kept her locked in my frozen tears 

Filled they were to the brim

As the chances of letting them out were slim

Dirty and murky they became aging in dark shadows of the past

As drops of suppressed dew stayed trapped in the green moss of my heart

There seemed only unfiltered anger that grew alongside in this dried up well

Toxic and tired for staying shut for too long and not able to get past the fears in this swelled up hell

Age was just a number as I got stuck in the number of times I had become my mother's emotional punchbag

And got stuck in figuring out and internalized her anger at me as life seemed like a sad drag

I was never out of my head as my inner child was silenced but protested in my imaginations where I roleplayed my suppressed emotions

To hear her out, fear, rage, tears and all was the most human that I thought I was with myself and that soon dominated and catapulted into pain addictive ruminations

The sad kid wanted to be sad and was angry that she was not heard enough while stewing in her trauma And did not know how to reach out to get out of this numb pain with overwhelming layers of her mommy's emotionally dysfunctional drama

All this reenactment troubled this inner child who started out wanting to be a kid like any other 

But stifled her instincts, suppressed her voice, and numbed her feelings, as they became her controlling mother

I was as real as my mother in the outside world was but could not separate myself from the pain of my inner child as she held on to me tight

But stepping up and reaching out to embrace my truth was all that I had to embody to become a loving mother who does not abandon her inner child knotted up in fright

It's a journey to free my other inner children, hope, joy, laughter, as they wait on the other side of the tunnel, and want their equal attention, time, hugs and all

As the tracks change and squeal with new found freedom to just blend in the old with the new

The train of my timeline has made many strides and whistles its journey ahead going from frozen tears to hopes anew

This is a new beginning and an end of many sorts

As my life is inclusive to both fears and fun and not selectively lived in parts

 

Takeaway from my life

The inner child is the joyous, impulsive, curious, unfiltered versions of ourselves that we could learn to get comfortable with provided we learn to embrace our inner child. It's a unique flow of energy and channeling of its own unlike the flow of the collective conscious that we find ourselves mostly immersed in and try to navigate and find a way to feel our experiences.

I kept picking up and observing others thoughts and avoided confronting, challenging, or participating with my opinions in any way as if living in the invisible mode is all I am here for in this lifetime. I was the most apparently invisible person who cringed at any level of attention that came her way and used the guise of supporting others, comforting/counseling others as some of the means to stay away from facing my real inner world myself and hence kept reading others projections of me and the surrounding environment as means of looking out for myself from having to face who I want to be in the present. I was always part of the flow of whatever was around as if I am some sort of inanimate extension to the things around but who just moves around for keeping up with bodily functions.

The 'other' in my mind is more important than who I think I am. A needless sacrifice in retrospect that kept putting myself off the center of my life and kept being in the support others mode for 3 decades and more until I couldn't take being dishonest with myself anymore. This saturation was the overwhelming flow that I was slipping away into and it was my intuition, my soul calling, and a Higher, Divine energy above all else who guided me towards a script that's a beautiful self discovery of sorts in the making.

The letting myself go in this suppressed, suffering in silence inner world that I had locked myself in was something that I had to become aware to release all this unspoken, dysregulated feelings and sadness which again was a lot overwhelming even if there be release but not without triggering all the raw wounds that I had tied with my inner child.

We are not just flesh and blood and materially comforted with beings, but we are a form of energy as we learn to channel our given lives to our goals which bring us joy and connectivity starting from within. 

My inner child desperately wanted some form of support so that I can fearlessly bring out my creativity, fun, and thoughts on varied subjects which was absolutely lacking in the family environment where I grew up in. I soon realized back then that people didn't care whether I expressed myself or not and this I took upon myself as a personal limitation and maybe something I do or in some way I behave puts people off and hence it's better to be as rigidly stuck in playing the role of an outgrown child who silently observes all the drama around her but finds herself completely devoid of the stage within her to feel like she's centerstage atleast for my life if not for anyone else's. This feeling that I don't matter and that my opinions don't matter, and only my mother's vociferous projections about my health sensitivities matter and to which the rest of the family sympathized with was already a lost feeling and I was not resilient or strong willed enough to fight this as I assumed that this is how things are naturally and that I am just supposed to adjust with this kind of environment.

I took this self negation as a way of being and denied myself of real frustration, anger, irritation and so much more as if I can and am supposed be only ideal and not real. To fall out of genuine fostering of relationship with oneself is what I am trying to fall back in within myself. To start loving myself as how I need to be loved and not what I expect from others what love needs to be. 

It's the roots that matter finally not how tall the tree grows to be. Cherish your inner child and let it be, live it be, and just start falling in love with yourself truly for who you are is my takeaway from my life. What's yours?

Take control of your life

 Taking control of my life is the power that has been missing. Years and years of exhaustion, a feeling of having no choice, and simply giving in to avoid confrontation and being resilient in conflicting situations have been the reason why taking control of my own life felt so alien and like an outsider job. The commitment to be truthful to my life, to being supported, blessed, and protected have all been overlooked by me as if I am the dead end to my life and which in fact I was sadly until I went ahead and explored the truth about how I feel about my life.

Not taking control is not an option but expecting that life turn out this way and that is like wanting to stay stuck in imagination, illusion, and layers of falsehood that I assumed I have full access to as they in turn took control of my everyday reality. It was easy to snuggle in the backseat and want for others to drive me home to my purpose and expectations, and just quit taking control of life as if by habit and weakening my willpower muscle as a result -  I became too tired, too exhausted for no reason apparently as I didn't create reasons enough to stay in control and live within parameters of self regulation and balance and had just adapted to limitations and negativity. But all these had to change in the context of how true I was feeling to not taking control of my life and feeling powerless in being disconnected hence to my life source. I had but no choice but be true to all these and it was emotionally debilitating and I felt scattered and lost in an all new space which I could not control with old mindset and patterns but yet had to keep going by keeping faith in myself.

I tried to wriggle my way out of this as this felt like I was doing it all by myself and the moment of truth that faith is not external but how far will I go within to discover my faith in myself was the challenge. And this has been work in progress. 

Control is an authentic coming home to yourself and staying true to your essence and not using it to disempower others. 

Love thy self and love thy inner divinity

 Believing in myself is the real challenge that has endured the test of time. For it was not easy, not deep seeded, not self worthy enough to want to have faith in myself because of the outer environment that I was trying hard to adapt to. It was more easy hence to neglect myself and just believe in what others had to say and which got absorbed as hardened beliefs. 

To believe that I am capable of receiving God's love and to reciprocate a wholehearted heart filled with love has been an on and off broken phenomenon that is so ego protected that it has taken me lots of letting go and as a result feel more broken but yet whole for owning my grief of not entirely connecting with my self and for staying dissociated for so many years.

Now feeling all this repressed pain and feeling my feelings has been healing and triggering many emotions in turns but am happy that I got to address them as much as possible and also learning to let go and surrender broken parts, sometimes fully fleshed out ones to the feet of God.

And so loving Muruga Perumaan without fear, without doubt, without anxiety, without making myself feel low and trying to prove anything to anyone and just feeling good and having faith in my true feelings for Lord Murugan is the most organic that gets humbly put forth to His feet. 

For loving Muruga means being really true to oneself and trusting the process of growing awareness and intuitions, and deepening one's faith through love and not merely knowledge. Because love fills even those kinds of darkness that one would have been ashamed to have been part of at one time and is not a substitute for infatuation, or showoff, or anything that needs verbal or artistic or whatever material expression that we usually associate love to project - it's one's own insecurities that finds a unique expression and which is tried to discover outside of oneself and is a self fulfilling prophecy in its own way.

Moving beyond mind handicaps

 When the mind is paralyzed with fears of uncertainties, anxieties about how to face them, and worry if everything will turn out alright, then life seems to come to a regular standstill as if being stagnant is a way of life and adapting to it is the only response left to live life.

I have been witness to such a state and it feels sad that I have not participated in living life with the flow but have resisted it through the above response. So much of unlived experiences is also my life but to want to let go all this is my choice and it's a regular thing. There's no how much that lightens the burden but how effective is my surrender to a higher energy and replacing my thought habits with mindfulness, and replacing my activities with a purpose to connect with my core and not just to justify outside expectations.

I do feel guilty that for all the protection and blessings that came my way, I just couldn't channelize it to convert it to opportunities for growth and the result being numbness in every aspect of my life.

What is mind handicap I get it now and it's a very insidious form of pain which makes living look like a mindless exercise instead of being grateful for the life being given to me.

It was my choice again and it's my responsibility to center my thoughts on what I resonate with and be true to it and implement that in action to the best possible levels that I can.

Let the world outside have its own expectations and judgements, but I can do only what is feasible and with as much clarity possible.

As much as I put myself through this stuck pattern of thoughts and actions for quite a while, it's equally my duty to forgive myself for doing this to myself and just release this pain. It's work in progress but I am happy that this is the flow that is opening the thoughts and energies of life possibilities, one day at a time. This is better than not being aware of this handicap at all and blaming others for lack of movement and limitations in my mindset.

When projections die a slow death and life comes alive...

 The fear and angst for not being good enough for your parent is the most primal fear possible - it's the overwhelm of processing this fear that ruptures the self trust that is so essential to reorienting with one's own energies for sustenance and growth. 

I have been having excessive fear from childhood and my fight and flight have both been paralyzed by this fear and the over indulgent protection of my mother that made me feel like an object she likes to own and fix from time to time and keep it close to her. Her emotionally distant behaviour, criticisms, and ultra practical mindset which believes in doing than being made me feel like no matter what I do to be good enough for her will  not be enough and so limited myself to not being true to my being which I had only a vague idea of. 

How to immobilize my life is all self done and there's nothing more painful to realize that despite the environment that I grew up and its dysfunctionalities inclusive, it just felt trust betrayed as no one cares at the end of the day how you truly feel and it's upto us individuals to tap into our being and find out what it needs. I was loved but not shown how much. There had to be a why in the background I guess and I just answered it myself saying maybe I am not healthy enough, smart enough, confident enough, pretty enough and so on and came to believe all these things. 

What you believe regularly and deeply becomes your truth and conditions your behaviour accordingly. Fear became my open ground and on it festered all these negatives which sapped me off core energy and thereby left me numb and under focused most of the times. 

Learning to vocalize about my anxieties, to deviate with hobbies when anxiety becomes too real and life outside unreal are something that I am trying to work on. Life prepares us to face all these inner struggles as the outer world with its energies keep happening as there's no shortcut or wishful thinking to make it all go away. We can't harness our inner world with its fears, worries, and anxieties and keep obsessing whatever situations and thoughts associated with it to be overwhelmed with the above and expect life to come our way. It's how you take control of your thoughts and inner chatter and the negative egoic mind that matters and helps you balance yourself as life is not working against us, it's working for us as we allow ourselves to go through with our fears and whatever blocks and allow ourselves to release it from time to time.

I was projected my mother's fears and worries on me and her quick criticisms which made it hard for me to get her acknowledgement and acceptance for who I am as she obsessed on needing me in her life but didn't know how to value me and sadly used her fear and worry programming to keep me close to her as I gave in to her projections. Her projections became my reality as I got stuck and adapted to that and didn't know how to create and grow in a world of my own and draw in my strengths to make my life my very own reality and not someone else's expected projections that I need to keep working towards and thereby stay irritable, distant and confused at myself and also at others.

And so I project my fears, worries, expectations and stay in flights of wishful thinking and fantasies where I participant as the main protagonist and stay stuck in it until thee actual reality fits in with reality outside. The reality could be positive, healthy, or simply not what is in alignment with me and my inner world, but this block that's created blocks out life for what is and denies the open mind to accept life for what it is and it's similar to my mother's not accepting me for who I am. 

So, what my mother did to me is what I am doing to myself. I am denying the need to be loved and to love myself for who I am. Life will change, shift, grow in so many dimensions that we can't even imagine in our wildest fantasies and dreams -  we are just here for a while and it's almost like an open and close eye duration and it's just the projections that seem to be consuming my focus in this short span of our living. 

Is being consumed in projections worth it? Adapting to limitations might have worked for me back then as a coping mechanism but adapting to such extent to lose out on conscious and clear thinking and living is taking the adapting too far. I have given space for such unhealthy adapting as a way of my living but life still remains as the not so fully loved child that needs all the care and attention that can be possibly given to it. God has trusted in us that we will take care of the life He has created at large for us and so many other species and elements along with it to coexist and live in harmony possibly so that we love our lives as we would our kid but not get blindly obsessive to want to make it cope up to our will and wish because our lives won't do that for us. We need to be able to shuffle, balance, and undo, rethink and learn new tools possibly to reparent ourselves so that we can be the caretaker that we can be to our life given.

We are born into a family, live in the midst of relationships, communities, religions, cultures, natural forces, and so much more that might help teach us to arrive at how to caretake our life.

It's a garden, the whole life, and despite our efforts some patches of green fade, some flowers bloom only seasonally, and some weeds just never seem to die. But hope springs like the rainbow at the end of the curve and life seems to come alive. 

Disorganized style inner child's journey

 Ego defense has been my major anchoring ground in being who I am. I have guarded it with cae so that the wounded inner child remains alive through the span of my life so far through how I relate to myself and to others and to life and it's challenges as a whole. It's become my comfort zone that I have been believing that I need and just have been stuck living in it all this time, wanting to continue living in it through the imaginary egoistic role plays where I get to have the final word in my imaginations where it's much more vocal than my reality. 

I have allowed rather submitted myself so much to this limited and yet shape shifting version(s) of ego defenses that the real me if there is is like discovering the light behind the clouds and just remaining under the shadow of the clouds without claiming the real power of the light.

It's an overactive egoic other that wants to be my constant mind voice wanting me to constantly engage and interact with it and to make it more colorful, indulge in the imaginative projections of it. It's tiring to be so unreal with life and when there's no other choice but to be real and accept life for what is - it's tiring to keep playing in and playing out as if it's the wounded inner child's preoccupied time that it doesn't want to share with anyone but just is a means to cope with all the uncertainties, expectations from her environment, and to continue to believe that she is in control of her life. Whereas it's the simple truth that the egoic mind is something I am not willing to let go of and when the essence of a higher energy is something that I am also humbly in tune with from time to time, it feels like I am at the same time nurturing both the evil and the good in me and want best results for me no matter what life challenges come my way. 

It's like I expect life to act a certain way while I carry within these divides and want life to be coherent and uniform with me. It's maybe the other way round that life will remain as unpredictable as it has always been and no matter how much controlling my egoic voices can take control of my life and priorities, but it can never limited the world outside to its shape shiftings no matter how diverse they may seem. I have allowed sadly these egoic defenses to run amok like kids playing in an open ground and not wanting to come back home. 

To come home to my heart and soul is my true homecoming and this restlessness until then which doesn't prepare me for anything basically but just splits my calm how much ever that be into pieces. I am broken no doubt but to stick to which piece which fits my groove is out of question now because i am so widespread in my disconnectedness and disorganized sort of self that I can only pick up from where I had left it behind and maybe only fall back into the same pattern over and over and just give in to the ego defense which thinks it knows better obviously than any other higher energy. Its level of ignorance is so high and equally transparent that despite its mirroring to me through the egoic role plays in my mind, I just have no sense of will power or strong sense of self to fall back on and just give in to the projections of this mirroring over and over.

Undoing and doing myself is what I have been doing but this strong attachment to my ego defense is something that I thought I needed to preserve somewhat my sense of self and authenticity, but it's just a shallow assumption. 

I have grown fighting through many an inner and outer physiological battles but nothing hurts deep and doesn't even allow us to feel its hurting than what the inner wounds can possibly do to us. My poor inner child had only this means to believe in some source of "assured" egoic projections to help fit in into her emotionally neglectful family and it's sad to see her get limited to being a wounded inner child and to continue to adapt to these limitations as a way to survive with all the dysfunctionalities outside. 

Assured as in no matter who stays with me or wins my trust and helps allay my fears to trust in them in return and to open up truthfully to talk what's hurting or who and just vocalize stuff whatever that be is something that I had to trade with the ego as if that's going to be my support no matter what. It does come back over and over even if the clouds are getting lifted off the light like an uninvited guest and I succumb to its entry as my sense of space and boundaries are so undefined that it takes full advantage of my generally open disposition to empathy. 

So, in essence, ego has been my mind double and also my body double in terms of taking over my physical mind and just blurring me out of my self actualizations for a long time until now. No wonder I felt so weak, fatigued, clueless about my life and what it truly needs in order to grow with it. 

Thank you divine guiding energies for helping me come out of this blur from time to time and to make me realize my inner child's journey alongside mine. 

Truthful realization of wounds

 My grief is so deep and invisible that it has taken me decades to fully realize its presence and grieve it. My father's absence in my life since he has passed was a given since he passed away before my being born while my mother was pregnant with me, but the fact that my mother chose to become a weak link between me and my father can't be denied and it's also equally true that how my mother made me feel by being the weak link and justified her insecurity for not being integrated enough despite her understandable brokenness is entirely her doing. But the way she chose to stay connected to self pity and seeking sympathy from her brothers and their families and isolating me in the process whenever I went through a health issue and which if was reminiscent to her about my father's health and issues, she would resort to addressing her triggers and helplessness by making me feel guilty about it. She in short made me feel like a victim and since I was so stewing in my fears and anxieties and trying to avoid feeling abandoned while she body shamed and grief shamed me into making her feel sad while I was ridden with regular migraines and nausea and vomiting due to this overwhelming pressure to process all her scattered and unresolved feelings and still be good enough for her.

I used to assume it's my high sensitivity and the heat and cold temperatures outside in nature which was repeatedly in turns making me sick, but it was in fact my mother's hot and cold mood swings that made me more body volatile and withdrawn and depressed. Since I was guilt tripped and shamed enough by using my dad's absence against me and that I was a sad reminder to her specially when I got sick, I really lost sense of trusting her and since as a child I didn't know if there were other options, I just learnt to cope up with her emotional neglect which she tried to cleverly disguise by justifying that she provided everything materially for me and despite doing so that I am being ungrateful or disrespectful or repeatedly falling sick and so on.

Her gaslighting me using my dad in context hardened my grief around his absence but since I didn't vocalize my feelings with anyone whom I could trust at home and since my mom I perceived to be my closest family of all, it just broke my self trust and kept me staying stuck in a loop of validation seeking from her and self doubting myself. 

She broke me up as I allowed her to break me and never got myself together to consolidate myself -  I keep picking myself up only to realize that I have become more disorganized in regulating my moods and behavior towards myself first and can easily choose to abandon myself just for the sake of placing precedence on her emotional needs and security issues. 

My father has been unconditional being in his spirit form and I share a special bond with him. He guides and protects me in his own unique ways which I am beginning to trust as my relationship with the spirit and the Holy energies is one of a kind and it's a beautiful feeling that the deeper repressed truths that when I bring to the forefront is energetically supported as I feel the vibes of the truths expressed and owned for in my body and is also equally therapeutic as I let go and release them to surrender to Muruga's feet.

To experience this truthful realization of wounds is a beautiful undoing and gift for being highly sensitive and spiritual and self aware and sometimes intuitive.

Deaddiction from anxiety...

 I think getting addicted to anxiety became my primary means of self expression and it curtailed expanding my personality and growth. Anxiety is not entirely bad in itself because it's a defense mechanism for alerting one to understand that a healthy way to interact and survive in an environment is turned off as per one's nervous system's triggers and warnings as it senses stressors in the environment and is hence anxious. But anxiety might help wake us up from what we might be missing out on also as anxiety is a major feeler to help us stay as perfect as possible. The minimizing of errors on our part can also come to the forefront owing to our anxious alert stage but if one starts to believe that one is always at fault, then staying anxious for want of coping up with this acquired label from the environment becomes a daily habit. Even if that seeming fault seems to be having health issues now and then, but the way one is made to feel and the way one responds as if always at fault becomes a pattern that unfolds and sticks to one's mind as some kind of conditioning.

This has been my conditioning as I have mostly believed that I am at fault for causing the stress that I have caused to my mother and for triggering her past memories owing to that and that my illness, whatever that be, or however short-lived that be, is like the trauma that I have habitually bonded with in some form or the other. I have fed off this sick thought that I can survive only if I continue to cope up with pain, mostly physical, and just withdrawing further down into dull numbness and fantasizing my proactive other in my imaginations. While my mother continues to thrive on controlling off of my life and materially keeping me "safe" and "secure", but what she has made me into is a mess. 

To let go this addictive habit of staying anxious or drawing in anxiety from my mother in order to stay anxious is something that I have become aware of and try to let go. Because the more I stay anxious and get restless if I am not so, then that much numbing, sad, impulsive, reactive and so on I get. I feel sad for myself for allowing myself to become this but with mindfulness, slowing down, and journaling, feeling my feelings and letting go, I have become better at identifying how much to interact with anxiety and how unnecessary it is to prove myself over and over as it's by being oneself that one becomes who one wants to be and not by doing. 

I had and still do focus a lot on doing to be someone but the ease to slip into in order for being whatever that is is enough for me and that's not a stagnant destination -  it's a constant flow of self discovery and it's okay to feel, to make mistakes, to have mood swings, and so on.

Let it go

 I am feeling trapped in my house here with my mother. It's like I have chosen to stay enmeshed with her and don't know how to see a way out of this. And the apartment that's my mother's that needs to be sold off is also not sold off yet and I am here out of duty to facilitate selling it off and not out of love for her. I still have not released a whole lot of suppressed anger, unresolved sadness, and just simply letting it all go..Because I was so tuned into through anxiety and fear as part of conditioning by my mother that I never got to experience what being genuinely loved by her feels like. The nurturing that I got from her was seeped in her anxiety to overprotect me and fear that something might happen to me. Since appa's passing and my being born after that I guess I can understand her fears to an extent, but making someone a victim and enabling this victimhood by her anxiety and fears is really painful to let go -  it's like she has taken control of my life and just pushed about it unmindful about my boundaries and just lived on my behalf and just made me feel so helpless, lifeless, and so out of sync with my life that I do not fully know what living my life and taking control of it actually means. 

Life is uncertain, I understand, but the opportunity to have lived better doesn't repeat or come back as time lost is lost and I am deeply sorry and take responsibility for doing so. 

Having walked on egg shells all along, I don't know what it takes to freely and not looking back walk ahead looking forward to life. 

All this realization, one after the other is saddening but I am happy too to know my suppressed pains and what it feels like instead of staying numb and blindly staying attached to my mother as she had programmed me to do so, and now coming to terms with what it means to let go even if fears and anxieties crop up, but to let go the unlived times, opportunities, learnings, freedom and all, is my point of self acceptance and when done with love and kindness, it makes all the difference.

I do not wish to live the lack, loss, repression, anxiety, sadness alone as they have been part of my life and not the entirety. And they belong to the past, most of it, but I can now take the right, the power to fully look forward to being open to life and not limit it to painful portions of it and keep coping up with it and withdraw inwards and keep repressing my life. Because coping up with painful portions of my life is what felt like living my life back then, but I realize that the more I hold on to this, the more it hardens, this pain..just continuing to cope up and not releasing it is like reliving my past habit and this has to go...for my higher good, for my peace, for my mukti.

Making space for myself

 I have almost always made space for the other at the cost of staying minimally visible and repressed in my space - that's been my pattern which has made me so ill at ease in my house whether be it in Chennai or Hyderabad. And even if I found my centered space within myself without having to compromise by staying repressed, but the fact that it was owing to my other that I primarily adapted to being repressed as she took control of my life and had wanted to fix it with her overprotectiveness. 

I assumed the comfort zone provided by her materially was something I need to be grateful in turn for her emotional neglect, guilt tripping me, and expecting me to enable her emotionally even as I was a child back then. My uncle, amma' s 3rd elder brother kept me feeling intimidated and controlled and nothing that I did was good enough for him. He was a terror wherever he went and treated people like his slaves. And avoiding him, having minimal conversations with him, and remaining invisible as much as possible were ways that I used to cope up with him. 

Both my mother and her brother were controlling, each in their own way. My uncle is not alive anymore but it took a lot of grieving to let go my buried memories which was ridden with fear, anxiety, and sadness. But with my mother still being with me and having grieved for the trauma bonding that she has gotten me tuned into since appa had passed during her being pregnant with me and her projections on me by making me feel guilty for stressing her with my ill health back then and instead of nurturing me and accepting me as is has been another overbearing factor that I have had to cope up with -  what I can rightfully expect back then was upstaged and in its place just a giving in to the controllers like my uncle and my mother who got what they wanted by way of entitlement, invoking fear, and abusing others. But this block that was a huge pain in my chest has lightened up a bit as I have grieved for what I was then when coping up with such a negative environment and dysfunctional people. Because I wish to remember my journey by making way for all the cleared up space now. And no one can take away what is rightfully mine -  my growth, my learnings, my life.

To take responsibility for my life 

Outgrowing your family...

 I guess my parents (My mother is a single parent and we lived with her brothers and their families together in a joint family) agreed to disagree on more situations and were bound by their meanness, ego, control freakiness, bitterness, anger and so on than being kind and forgiving to each other -  they lived ousting love and understanding out the window as if love was just a namesake emotion that they had to put up with in order to continue to remain disagreeing with each other and that too staying together in a joint family...talk about being so disconnected with family values and just being hypocrites and leading us into believing as children that we are safe and secure in such an environment?! 

We kids (now we are in our prime forties and mid fifties, myself and my cousins included in this age group) have moved away from each other and are not as dishonest as our parents and more no-nonsensical in processing how much we can give and maybe expect from one another in whatever stuff that matters and are better self equipped to hand ourselves than living off each other and staying toxically enmeshed and blaming and manipulating each other while staying together under one roof however long that was.

I think the purpose of evolving here is to outgrow such a family and learn to move away from such toxicity in order to embrace the real deal in us -  I guess families do teach a thing or two and that for us is to be better people than what they were. In all honesty they did what they could for our good but what's really for our betterment lies in our awareness and the choices we make in moving on and how we choose to do so while keeping the gratitude for doing what they could for us. I mean it's like a rite of passage going from one messy, confused, dark, twisted spot and coming out the other end kind of self forgiving for staying angry at them for so long, staying so stuck to all the compulsive mind programming that we thought was so right but then learning to unlearn them one day at a time. It's where we come from and also what we do with it that matters. Because we are in fact as individuals responsible for our respective behaviours and though the reason behind being who we are the way we are comes from our past, but how open and less closed we have become to welcome knowing ourselves as individuals and being less burdened by emotional and mental dysfunctionalities from the past at home is a start.

I can't speak for my cousins in saying what I said above but I feel that this is the purpose of a family -  to be oneself despite whatever the family might have been -  it's not that the family was right or wrong but how good and meaningful a relationship I have with myself is all the truth that I can express without justifying anything from the past for who I am or how I am today.

Living in reality

 I made a lot of space for my imaginary conversations with people with whom I have the last say and shut them up and prove them wrong -  these conversations, although they look so real and so much a pseudo release for all the anticipated situations that could come my way and hence this buildup of assertive, sometimes defensive, and proving I am right as against their imaginary verbal attacks, but all these hold me captive in this self talk where I talk, they seem to listen, and yet again I talk and seem to shut them off. 

It's like resurrecting an enemy within me so that I can cope up to live with this imaginary, all consuming distraction of a fantasy which makes me become a participant in it. It's sad that I relate myself or reduce myself to being a participant through my fantasies but do not trust myself enough to respond adequately if things don't turn out as expected. I have desperately wanted my wishful thinking to work for me so much so that I could be more stronger and healthier for my mom but the reality of migraines was way too much unpredictable and uncontrollable that I could bring myself together to accept my reality for what is and just minimizing my pain and the aftermath weakness and exhaustion of pulling myself together mentally and just giving into feeling scattered and floating in some vacuum in my head was simply disorienting to say the least. It's like these fantasies from back then was a way of making me feel secure, undoubtedly strong and assertive as if I am just having the last word and living every bit confidently.

Fantasies even today keep me company and make me self isolate more as if mimicking the concept of comfort zone and self soothing -  because this isn't anything close to that. It's in fact more self agitating and steers me away from staying grounded to my present. 

I have been under so much mental distress all these years and my brain has been trying to help me cope up and I just feel sad at one level but also doubly sad for the awareness of such sadness that had never come up to be expressed before.

People sometimes talk themselves out of their self doubts and negative thinking, but I talk myself through the veil of imaginary deception which I so intensely make believe that I talk my head off being the lead/hero of the show going on in my head -  thinking and talking at the same time makes it preoccupying and not at all being aware of how unmindful this is all becoming towards staying with my present right now is like a version of me that's a self automated popup blocker to my reality -  even my reality can't come in the way of this active imagination and participating in it.

Being in it or being out of it is a matter of choice...being with my present and staying with my reality as is is the baby step that I can take to not go deeper to live in it in my imagination.

Being true to my life one day at a time

 I feel like this month has been a roller coaster. Lots of adapting, lots of patience wrecking procedures to facilitate selling my mother's apartment and a lot of letting go expectations and just going with the flow - it's like the universe wants me to be better connected within myself and with my strengths' which are not dependent on anyone's approval and participate in a world with my mother rather than being away from her and yet staying in hurt for all the things that could have gone well had she been emotionally better aware of my feelings rather than being terrified of her traumas and possible pains. She got used to her brothers apathy and huge egos, control and so on from her childhood until she got married to my father that she assumed that after my father's sudden passing and being placed in a job on compassionate grounds in the government organization that he used to work for would help her feel secure in some way. She just grew up insecure and neglected and intimidated as that was the best way for a family dominated by an angry father and bullying brothers and with hardly any female support as her mother had passed away when my mother was quite young was just her history repeated after coming back home after losing my father but with me born just then and with a job that could give her possibly a lifetime of support and sustenance but not just enough stability personally as she had hoped she had wanted from me and that was a lot to ask for from a kid back then who was in fact dependent on her mother's calm and stable emotional nurturing. 

Try as I might but I could never have been the stable ground even if I had better health and just optimum sensitivity and not high sensitivity because it's not my responsibility to make her feel stable but her wanting to grow up that would have helped her accept me for who I am and the condition that she has always put herself through in as a survivor of an emotionally abusive family and having to live in constant fear and people pleasing -  this truth could have set her free rather than wanting to stay with her brothers in a toxic relationship and trying hard to make her life work alongside me which used to be highly stressful on me. And so her complaining that she has to all of her life without her husband and again getting reactive at me at how my health is so much like my dad's was both confusing and disorienting. My migraines, cardiac issues, and so on were just premises that exacerbated her already existing emotional/mental stability issues. She used to make it all about me but in truth it was she who had unresolved trauma, a lot of grief work that she had to do and not just for who she could have been but not when living with her brothers but also the tragedy of losing her husband quite young and just when they were about to welcome their baby to life.

She is a survivor and like her I too learnt to be one. That was the best way and no other choice if we were to live in this family along with my mother's brothers and their families. And I grieved this choice by my mother, hated her almost for it, if not then but decades later because the amount of mental health damage that it had done on me was something that only I could fully understand. To enable her to carry on with her life normally was supposed to be my only goal but not living with joy and gratitude for just simply having a life and enjoying my space and time in it and discovering my personality, likes, dislikes, and growing which became just tweaked to being good enough for her expectations as if by doing that that would help me move towards participating in my life to the fullest. 

I became a victim for my mother in order to enable her to stay as one and had no clue that my life was at stake and any semblance of owning my life and living it well was out the window. I had locked myself up from inside and kept looking out at others for help, including my mom. Nothing feels more tragic than having a life and not having the power, the will, the awareness of choice and exercising it to build my life muscle so that I cherish and feel happy for my life and walk the miles to make my journey happen no matter how long, how far that could be, but taking the steps, baby steps is what I am doing now. I trust myself but it comes after giving in to lot of doubts, anxiety, and a trauma bonded sense of self. 

I guess trusting myself has been the most vulnerable and yet the most powerful step that I have been taking consistently. Although soaking in my mother's trauma, her emotional instability has been my conditioning and whatever I do feels like I am placating this need of hers to stabilize her, but there's only so much that I can do other than living my life -  this is not my entirety no matter how much trauma baggage and unresolved grief she may be carrying, it's on her finally. I cannot stay off centered from my life at the cost of making her feel stabilized. She needs to help herself no matter how old she thinks she has gotten, it's an opportunity to truly grow that she has missed on and compensating that with money is selling herself short.

My duty is towards my life and live grounded, calm, and at peace with myself more than anything else in the world. That seems doable but would require daily practice and I am trying to keep at it being true to it one day at a time.

Undoing beliefs

 I suffered mentally without there being a need to suffer. It's all owing to feeling like I am the bad one, the one at fault, the one who disappoints people, the one who causes people to be triggered negatively as believed by me since it was projected that way by my mother. And why? Because my body, my physical sensitivity and susceptibility to health issues made her project so and made me feel like it's all my fault. And I seemed so similar in physical and health constitution like my deceased father who had passed when she was pregnant with me and that again somehow is my fault (?) as I unconsciously picked it up as she didn't even come back to apologize for losing her mind and saying such stuff in her anger and helplessness. She just let me believe that she was right all along as I just suffered her mental dysregulation in silence.

Suffering meaninglessly because of this and self avoiding myself into numbness and depression added more share of actual suffering to all this. I didn't know what was real, what was my suffering in all this, and what is just an enmeshed knot of maladaptive beliefs which just kept me away from addressing my real issues deep within. My heart goes out to my inner child and to myself as a whole for having to endure all this in order to survive in a emotionally dysfunctional family. 

To think small, to feel small, to live through the mind of the mob, and to stay fuzzy and emotionally disconnected was who I identified myself to be. This was never for my higher good and only truth as is and the courage to look the truth in the eye has helped me set free many of the knots that had kept me bound to feeling small and insignificant. Feeling alone in all this is an understatement but I have had to deal with being tossed aside in emotional neglect by my family and for being constantly criticized by my mother for the health I had and endured all this for so long that I didn't have anything remaining of my own to go home to because I just went with mob mentality to fit in in the family somewhere that I lost out on discovering myself for who I am truly. 

I believed that I was worthy of all the neglect and criticism I got and had to adapt to being relevant to that at the cost of avoiding my reality and putting that aside as irrelevant. I was not empathetic or selfless hence but had to think more of others and be hypervigilant of their moods and cope up by being pleasing to them so that I could make this belief work on a daily basis. 

It's funny how people just don't own their suffering as their own and expect the world to make sacrifices and suffer in silence so that their voice(the sufferer) can be heard by the world. If one has suffered, the others too shall suffer goes the logic eh?

Did this kind of suffering make me stronger, wiser, or resilient? No, but it just made me more defensive about who I thought I was and that was not even true to who I am in fact as I realize now!

I was simply egoistically defending my image which had endured so much and any sense of changing this pattern (to think I am worthy of all the neglect and criticism) just became a self fulfilling prophecy and a reality by and large as people judged first and then cared to understand my truth later, all thanks to this belief.

Empathy is not one-sided

 Self care is the best medicine for me specially since I was raised by a self serving mother. Expecting that others care for me is a continued sense of betrayal and pain that I was putting myself through and sponged in more and more of my family's emotional neglect as a whole. I'll admit that they suck in that big time and could not be grown up enough for us kids, like, for my cousins besides me.

Besides emotional neglect I had to live back then which I didn't realize was to live in survival mode - live on high alert to make sure that my body, my health does not come in the way of making my mother feel better for that day. My health was in fact perceived as something bad as it let her down, as it made her ruminate on her past tragedy of losing my father, and made her feel frustrated and tired for coping up all alone by herself. She completely overlooked my feelings and that how these statements from her would make me feel. 

Hence, emotional neglect coupled with living on egg shells was the crossroads where trauma meets and kept walking to that and just as quickly as I reached that spot, I withdrew in my shell until I get up to meet myself there. I avoided seeing myself truthfully so much in this process that I preferred living in the dark of my shell rather than coming out and talking about how I truly felt back then. It became more and more disconnecting and a sort of numb spiral that kept regurgitating pain and avoidance without letting them out. I suffered due to my empathy towards my mother and went nowhere close to knowing how to be kind, reach out to myself and care for myself which is the best way out as it seems now.

Empathy comes at a price if you don't know the real value of it yourself - it's like a bite you backwards thing and my patient waiting that I am going to get what I put out just made me feel worse, betrayed, and disillusioned.

And then empathy seemed like a strained cord that you cannot stretch beyond a point no matter how soft and sensitive the giver's feelings maybe inherently. If empathy seems like the coping up that is best done for a self serving parent, then it's better to channelize for self care, clarity of consciousness, and just being present mindfully to oneself one day at a time.

And empathy cannot be one sided; it needs to flow from both ends and meet together at some crossroads sometime for reaping the harvest of the flow. 

What's close to your heart?

 Trauma has been my middle name and so much a part of my unconscious that I am recovering and it's not a treasure trove of a recovery but still all the dust that I need to get myself off so that the real gold in me shines:) 

To think about it, I have attracted relationships to make a point somewhere deep down within me that it's others who need my help but not me! How self contradicting can I be?!

I have been so tuned to self abandonment and obligatory guilt as programmed by my mother and applied on me while she wallowed in her self pity, widowhood, and victimhood, which she made the most of, but just had to feel securely attached to something and which was not her family. I now get it after almost decades that why does she brag so much about her material acquisitions, her intelligence to work with and maintain them, and her wisdom(?) to tolerate the fools in her family just so that she can stick on with being painfully patient with them and make the most of those applicable who can help facilitate for her in support of her achievements (which happens to be me more or less). Any which ways, she gets to be as self serving as possible and just stubborn to make it through what she wants. Overindulging in those who help support her, physically, throwing in ideas wherever possible (which would be me again) to support through her tasks whatever that be, as she keeps her pride and image intact is how I had gotten so enmeshed in toxic attachment with her. 

She is my only parent and I have not seen or spoken or heard how my dad communicates, but shaming, guilt trips, undoing my boundaries, and projecting her passive aggressive anger etcetera are what I have heard from her and no wonder have been in the self fulfilling trauma bond(s) that I had brought upon myself  - minimizing my feelings, my need for her unconditional love, and empathy for the physical ills whenever they happen, nurturing for my high sensitivity, and being held without pestering me with her literally nagging concerns over my health are the real limitations that I had been adapting to. They snowballed into trauma and replaced true expression of  these maladaptive limitations with hardened icicles of inner criticism, numbness, and just swaying from wanting to be intimate, vulnerable, but pulling myself back for lack of trust in others, including my mom.

My mother in essence is trauma in a complicated form. She just needs sustainable means to remain being one. She is fraught with trauma from her childhood maybe for no fault of hers but hasn't gotten off riding the 'high horse' of being a successful survivor and wearing me out for the worse as she had been doing all along. 

I didn't realize all this and thought I was supposed to be her enabler of her emotions, no matter how confusing and beyond my age it had seemed then. In return I had to learn to trust no one but be left with myself to lick myself off all the hurt of my feelings and also silently persevere through migraines, nausea, heart disease and so on. She made me a victim for no fault of mine and I just grew up well into my late 20's feeling stuck depending on her for her broken emotional support and her ever persistent criticisms on my health fluctuations, and didn't realize that it was my depression and her emotional neglect for crying out loud that tried to get my attention to do something about it, but I was too busy avoiding myself.

I had wanted to deny this truth about her given to how much I had unconsciously believed her to be better, stronger, more organized, and perfect in all that she does. But it was self serving at best and I just came in the way of her staying consistent with that since my physical ills from time to time meant that she had to also trauma bond with me and hence her shaming me in the disguise of ruminating over my father's untimely demise from ages ago, and how all that's getting replayed when looking at me so weak and ill, was just a cover for strengthening her sympathy skin and protecting herself as she's comfortable in her core that way. I am not empathizing any of her hiding and throwing wool on others eyes including mine, but seeing her for who she is truly is both a relief and also liberating for undoing all these crap conditionings that just screwed with my mental health.

Not being aware of my real feelings, and not going out there to open up and trust someone that I could talk to and get clear about my emotions, meant that all the explosions happened in the form of fantasies where I could assume the self confident, assertive, no nonsensical person tone in all the role plays that I indulged myself in.

I am responsible for my own mental health and feelings and emotions no matter how free flowing or snowballed they maybe. I am happy that they are free flowing now. 

I am surprised and shocked that how neglectful can a parent be and yet claim that they have made a world of difference in their child's life. Birthing me, my mother did, but growing up, it was all me. She materially provided for me to grow up and instilled certain habits that have got to do with eating food on time, having medicines on time, and when feeling unwell, reach out to the doctors on time - the first two seem to stick with me, but discovering more of my hidden grief, repressions, anger, feelings of betrayal for trust being broken so many times and so on have been really healing. Not that I don't need a doctor, but I am happy to acknowledge that the physical ills that used to disorient me, scare me, and make me feel as if my body is intimidating me have been a part of my life from my past, but I don't feel the need to depend on an emotionally neglectful person to further the persistent state of trauma that I was always living in - there's a way out by simply being true to my emotions and feelings, and by stepping into my reality and accepting myself for who I am, physically or otherwise, and just keep moving on.

I don't need the approval of others to make me feel accepted and normal. It's in fact a painful disrespect to myself that I had put myself into over and over for lack of self actualization and appreciation.

Trauma is who I became in a way I guess and do not wish to leave this planet feeling all traumatized and stuck on unresolved feelings.

I have been emotionally neglected by the other members of my family as a pattern as they assumed that my mother's overindulging and infanticizing me and my needs are enough, and could never sense the growing disconnect within me for my own feelings and deep seated depression as a result. It didn't even appear as emotional neglect to them let alone stepping in to support me way back when I was a child or be a voice to my feelings. All the material comfort that they saw is all that I got and I too assumed that that's enough and never opened up to talk about any lack and felt that I couldn't breach any form of disloyalty to my mother as she had wrapped me up in her finger and had so deftly controlled me in keeping me all ignorant and ill supported for self growth. 

Her support can only be so much and only for so long but living under this impression that everything lasts forever was my biggest ignorance and something that I was painfully unaware until my marriage.

After my marriage and that too an arranged one and a lifetime partnership that got settled in a span of 2 months tops was the major spin off for making me come face to face with the fact that material pampering does not last forever. What was assumingly love for me in my head from my mother was not what I got from my husband and my in-laws. I downsized love to just that unfortunately.

In fact I had attracted a companion who was so loyal to his trauma bond with his parents as his parents made him to believe that that's the kind of loyalty he was supposed to have in order to serve them as they had worked their asses off trying to win their approval and respect from their family which they never received, and also financial support from their fellow siblings which they only sparingly, and all of 'the unconditional support from family for all the sacrifices done earlier' just remained expectations and nothing more. And so I was expected to partner with him in infanticizing his parents needs foremost and making them all inclusive of my life even if my husband and I lived separate from them and yet in close proximity to them so that they could continue to give the impression that they are the most forthcoming parents for all the trauma and troubles that they have themselves gone through and yet want only the best for their only son and his wife and that includes giving us our space. They gave us our 'freedom' and if not for them, we wouldn't have a life together!

Entitled for respect, for food and care as and when they feel like they need which I need to tune into(even if they were and still are in good enough health to take responsibility for themselves) as I am obligated as their daughter-in-law to do so, which is as per their expectations, and allow them to live off our combined generosity, my husband and mine.

My father-in-law had thrown away prioritizing his life and making the most of his work opportunities and just struck losses in whichever job venture he set his mind on, and just tried to live off the generosity of his siblings as he stayed bitter and broken and irresponsible for not just his life but also his wife and the 3 children that he let down. Absent of money and material comforts, food, and a secure sense of living, my mother-in-law has been a broken mess in progress and even if all these be their past, they do not want to let this go and keep guilt tripping, gaslighting others (me in this context) and do so with expectation that they will be taken care of. They do not wish to outgrow their insecurities, even if they have the needed material comforts and health to an extent by their side, but expect that their son and daughter-in-law bend over backwards to fix all their brokenness and assure them from time to time and make things alright. In other words being empathetic to their entitled feelings that they want others to read, reach out, and fulfill is an utterly tiresome job. They brought upon themselves their material poverty and expected bad choices to work for them and just felt betrayed and ridiculed and also robbed off some jewels, which my mother-in-law had lost in the process of being married to my father-in-law, thanks to his not too trustworthy relatives, but  staying angry, bitter, sad, vindictive, covertly narcissistic, emotionally manipulative as a result despite decades of coming out of all these struggles is also her/their choice.  Just ruminating and keeping them alive so that she can get all the sympathy from me, get all the freebies like food and care for them on time whenever they ask for it (since we lived close to them in the neighborhood) and disguise their motives under all the suffering that they had gone through in the past and so have earned the right and the obligation to expect all these and more from her 'daughter' like daughter-in-law for their  own calculated benefits.

I saw through all these layers and was not as stuck and avoidant like my husband who could see his parents intentions from me but was too weak back then mentally to fully support me and my boundary setting and had wanted to avoid conflict of any kind at all costs. So, appeasing his parents while enjoying his new found intimacies with me back then worked out fine for him. But their constant cribbing on why I reduced my visits to their house, why was I not forthcoming to ask if I could be of some help to them, why was I not accompanying them whenever they visited other elderly family members' houses, family gatherings and so on was something he couldn't control for long.

He had minimized his real suffering and trauma of being given food only once a day in his childhood by his parents, of separating him from his 2 younger sisters by placing them each in a family member's house who could take them so that they could have some sense of material security as his parents didn't provide anything close to that to all 3 of them and just broke their childhood, are some of his sad but true horrid tales of utter parental dysfunction, be it emotionally, financially and any other thing possible.

They are too proud to take responsibility for their irresponsibility and want their children to step up and save their face which they have tiringly and thanklessly done so, but are too tired themselves to want to continue to champion their parents as a cause and avoid living their lives as a result which they had been doing all along, and are getting to live whatever bit and however fragmented it seems for them by being away from them -  my husband in his own way with me and his 2 sisters in their own way with their families.

Screwed up people screw up people, that's all. They won't take the deep dive, ask for support for getting better for their own good, and will act all high and mighty and noble, and just continue living their dysfunctional conditionings as their pattern and blame everyone and anyone for who they are today and expect people to feel sorry for them but not ridicule or put them down. My in-laws have not earned respect for themselves the right way and their fragile egos to which they are too strongly bound as if it's their secure attachment and all that they have, while people around them are too busy living their lives and working on building their health, career, material stuff and so on.

They would risk breaking their relations off with people but not allow for their egos to break as it's their nucleus and their home. I didn't belong there, didn't want to, and am alright being a namesake member of their family.

My husband and I are finally able to see the truths about our parents and about ourselves too and so continue to live together to explore more about ourselves now and interesting stuff that we could talk about, watch stuff on tv or the net , and just like being a team and work together through each day as it comes. That's another side of my trauma recovery in progress.

Traumatized people need not traumatize others just to give another a taste of their suffering but find some amount of humanity in themselves still so that they can see the trauma of others as is and be sensitive to them. Entitlement, victimhood, and tall expectations will not take people anywhere, and close to others hearts, never.

 

Trauma release mode on!

 I have lived for most part of my childhood until late 20's in a constant state of worry about migraine attacks and how anxiously did I try to ward off that but in vain. Temperature fluctuations, specially heat rising would spike my migraines as well as gastrointestinal infections sometimes aggravates one, and also stress for not being able to detach myself from this trauma bond with migraine which culminated in irritable bowels syndrome and acidity and a circuitous loop of sorts where getting adapted to trauma of some form or the other, but trauma, was so in manifestation that when there were days when I didn't have any health issues, I would get stressed out.

I lost my self confidence as a result of my mother's criticisms and frustrations and her ill comparisons with my deceased father who might have had similar health patterns but that did not mean that I should feel guilty, but it became an obligatory guilt of sorts for all my material dependency on her - medicines, money, clothes, academic fees and all that I sold myself short over and over and got enmeshed with her trauma and tragic ruminations over losing my father and having to be by herself to face my highly sensitive body which was termed as "too sensitive" and her repeatedly getting irritated and calling in the other family members and gaining sympathy from them but body shaming me in the process just broke my confidence in myself.

And so, trauma became a constant in my life and living outside of that was abnormal for me. All these realizations are the new normal for me and it feels new but I am able to see patches of trauma free reality which I could navigate the clearing through and it feels like I am able to discern the difference between the forest from the trees. The forest was in slow burning fire that I didn't see the smoke for the clear clouds above. It feels freeing as if there could be a reality beyond all this trauma that I believed I needed to live through to sustain, to survive all this. 

Now it feels like sacrificing my time and energy(if needed) for priorities other than mine is not my acquired obligation but a choice that I can work through to facilitate for the benefit of the other but within my set boundaries. My boundaries are my rights and not weaknesses or triggers for guilt tripping. 

Coming home to myself feels so authentic as if this space allows for a beautiful connection to life in totality itself -  I am connected to life and living and hence have discovered this blessing to continue to explore my connect with life from within and reaching all the way out. This is a stark contrast to the earlier pattern where life from outside with all its reactions, judgments, uncertainties, comfortable/uncomfortable physical/geographical environment/temperature and so on was all that I would draw in, and repress my inner world accordingly and suppress any sense of intuitions, instincts, feelings, desires and so on just so that I adapt to the outer world being in a hyper vigilant mode. 

This hyper vigilance mode just stressed me out so much and kept me confused in other people's versions of what they think, believe and so on and could not trust myself enough to put myself out there for fear of being ridiculed, criticized, and devalued. It's how others reacted to my health trauma which didn't just get limited to migraines but spilled over into heart valve issues, one bout of epilepsy, and other issues that seemed like a never ending stretch of my sick personality which didn't feel  healed no matter how many medicines I took or how many doctors I went to. It just broke my spirit and made things worse and I just continued to pretend as if it's something that I can easily just get past with perseverance no matter how many issues that may bombard me. 

Perseverance kept my self avoidance and self trust issues intact as I worked towards enabling the false beliefs that I had gotten tuned to and which was to look towards the outside world for my worth and validation and not trust to look inward.

I have come so far in being open and vulnerable with my feelings and my life experiences with courage, determination, and a growing faith in Lord Muruga. A bit of self compassion and cutting down the voice of the inner critic seems like music to my ears! All this tuning is new to get used to but  going deep within and discovering my true feelings, grieving for some, feeling hurt by some, angry at some more, tearing up bellowing my chest out while feelings of betrayal come out, just being in the moment for some mindful truths and downloads to land, quietly contemplate and journal at times, go on walks, listening to soothing music, release and surrender to God, and so on have been my healing work put together in progress. It's not in a linear order but since I was all by myself whenever I was shamed, guilted, criticized, devalued and so on, this undoing of sorts is also all by myself with a bit of support via listening from my husband sometimes and sometimes sharing with a friend or two at the most, but mostly this inner work has been solitary, sad, deep, crumbling, disorienting, and also worth the time by means of all the validity that it gives to my repressed feelings and also help in my detaching with them from time to time. I cannot forget in other words but neither is there a compulsion to want to get stuck on a loop to relive past wounds so that I continue to live in trauma, even if there be any physical issues or emotional neglect or otherwise.

Karma

My take on karmic lessons is that or karma basically is that they are packaged to make you aware of the things you need to be mindful about for that particular situation and respond dutifully while being detached about the results no matter what they be.

I don't mean to intellectualize this truth but this is a revelation after my inner layers of wounds, false beliefs, assumptions, judgements, limitations, ignorance and so on came up maybe not in a linear order but the revelation is not an isolated moment in time but part of the flow. It's as if karma is what you feel you don't need for your ego to handle as your ego becomes your inner compass and makes your mind seemingly powerful and interprets what it thinks is right and how things need to happen for you to be alright with it, but karma serves up as the antithesis and hence serves you what you need for being in alignment with your soul.

The wheels of karma are well oiled and will give you results whether you planned for it or not - if your intention and your desire to work towards your self growth is worked for, then you live a karmic life truthfully since you will see the role of people in your life who may or may not be toxic but come into your life for offsetting the blocks that keep you from realizing your mistakes, who may help you discover your core strength through their deeds, good or bad, but it's the responsibility for owning your actions that's your karma and not to get stuck with 'my life, my wish, my this, my that..' and so on. Once you own your responsibility, then you let your feelings behind holding onto negative emotions underlying that responsibility go. You will feel it to heal it and live secure with the principles of uncertainty that life presents in itself and it's your karma to live through it as if slicing through the whole of the fruit and just remembering its essence and not get stuck on the taste of it and craving more of it.

Slice we must and slice we will since it's what we got to do. We will bear fruit of this slicing no matter how thick or thin the yield but just reaping what we sow in other words is the true take home, our actual home, back from where we came from cosmically. We become how we behave and how we act and not how we project to the rest of the world for who we supposedly think we are because all those ain't going to matter in our destination getting back home. If we have not truly worked for our higher good with our inner compass, our mind, body, and spirit, then we just will keep devouring life as if it's a never ending eating experience and will be served even karmically even if we feel full. So, releasing the layers that don't serve the appetite for soul food, or karmic food that nourishes the soul is in fact the necessary thing to do. So, karma is needed for your soul to stay aligned with its journey to get home to where it came from and not get derailed by the load of karma in your life - it gets heavy only if you wish to hang on to it and gets lighter if you release stuff that you don't need anymore and continue to stay true to it. 

Don't resist your karma - live it to leave it. It would leave you rather if you choose to not get stuck on what benefits it brings to you. The more lighter you get after living and letting go, the more space you create for God within you. 

Navigating with mindfulness

 I have identified myself as being a victim for a long time now and the sad part is I was made to believe that by my mother and her brothers and their family. So, how does one feel entitled to people's attention, their sympathies, and playing along for their support in some form or the other, my mother grew to be an expert at as she trauma bonded with her widowhood and took me in as a fellow victim to project all her frustrations and criticisms as if my job was to be the receiving end of it while I had no clue that this is code for quick sand and absorbing her victimhood and being party to it unconsciously will just make me one -  a victim.

It's as if my basis of self hood rests in being a victim and whatever relationships that I have had was to hide behind the layers of victimhood in order to escape or protect myself from volatile behaviors of people and their frustrations, criticisms etc. I used being a victim as a shield.

A victim to not being present to her life and witnessing her life go by as a third person and depending on my mother (during the teenage-early adult phase specially) to help me by making me feel better about my body. But that feel good never happened and neither did my mother's victimized projections that she loved soaking up owing to her past and projecting on me as if I am not someone separate from her and I just ended up absorbing it all in, criticisms, anger, body shaming, and so on. She never helped me regulate my feelings and I got stuck feeling all her feelings and tried to be good enough for her which I wasn't no matter how hard I tried or how much I tried to suppress my core feelings in order to hold space for hers.

I just became a dependent and just was intellectually separate from her as I believed myself to be but needed her support so that I can get on with my life and live on my choices and terms. But that never happened and I felt like a mere instrument to channelize my empathy for her and hold frozen her frustrations and anger on my too sensitive body and on my father for leaving her widowed and pregnant with me. This emotional turmoil didn't just hit my mother but it also deeply distressed me somewhere right before my being born. I was a born victim and no matter how much I resisted wanting to identify that way, but my highly sensitive body and emotionally dysregulated mind kept me conflicted from within as I sought to seek refuge in my mother's rigid and organized style of living her life. In fact I used to feel safe for not having to deal with my vulnerabilities and true feelings which I perceived were blocking me from staying enmeshed with her which I had gotten tuned to for long and just numbed the need to be true to myself.

I became a victim to ill adapted choices and emotional dysregulations and thrived on a sickly environment overall which I kept mirroring and absorbing and silently regurgitating them all without proactively releasing excessive thoughts which kept me from seeing my present for what it is. Being mindful to my present was something only bookish and ideal but never a healthy choice that I could put my mind to access. It's as if a deep part of me resists feeling well, resists being aligned with my core emotions, and wants me to stay wounded, hurt, confused and distressed about my past and just stressing on trying to get a job so that I can look forward to working on something which again consumes my attention fully in it as some kind of replacement to the old pattern of staying enmeshed with something other than my personal priorities, self growth, and free expression of my emotions, feelings, and vulnerabilities for what it is. 

My self esteem has been so badly hit as a result that just thinking my way through wellness and confidence is not going to earn me any. But I have earned my way into all the caves and the darkness where I used to feel safe in order to hide myself and my true wounds and not feeling like a victim while doing so but someone who's curious and caring to unearth my truths but still has to learn more on tuning down my inner critic which makes me feel terribly irresponsible for whatever I could do with my given life.

I will sometime soon voice out in the written way the voice of the critic as is so that I don't confuse responsibility with discernment of situations as is and learn to work on to separate them and go with the flow. It's awareness finally and acknowledging that fully from within and accepting life for what it is, however resolved, broken, damage controlled and so on that this is my lifetime opportunity no matter how long I live to just stay present to my life and participate in it without rushing it or expecting life to work out in some idealistic way for my benefit. 

Being enmeshed with life is how I had chosen to live my life but being present to it as is as my choice now and going forward. Being connected to my emotions and feelings by being present to it is a beautiful shift for me -  it's taking time but I don't need to make this come into being as life, our present reality happens on its own and we just need to be mindful of it and keep navigating with.

 

Discover your inner strength

 I am feeling so out of sorts as if the truth about myself and who I live with just gets more and more complicated and frustrating to handle. It's my husband who I live with of course and he too took the attachment style quiz and found out that he is an avoidant attachment style person. I wish I had been aware of the characteristics and the unhealthy habits of this type so that I could have saved myself years and years of confusion, self doubts over my self worth, and could have focused more on my self regulation rather than getting caught up in trying to understand his attitudes, likes and so on, only to feel pushed out on and off from this partnership, and getting lost, feeling left out in this partnership as if I have to be all by myself and all these just triggered my trust issues more and much to the damage of my emotional and mental health equilibrium. 

As it is I have been struggling with issues of self avoidance and self trust, thanks to being disorganized attached as per the test results and it is a seamless combination of the anxious and the avoidant mixed to add to my inner conflicts, it just doesn't seem to get any easier, all these truths. It's how we behave and the why we behave the way we behave that makes us relate to the attachment styles that we maladapt to and are not born with it obviously. 

I now get it that why was I feeling so lonely as my expressing my emotions was also so repressed and conditioned to suit maladaptively to the emotionally dysfunctional family that I was part of prior to my marriage, and to make matters worse, I attracted an avoidant into my life who needs to feel like he is in control and only his work allows him the independence and the space to do so and so wants to stay with this unhealthy habit of being consumed by work despite his getting married and we just relied on physical intimacy to bridge all our emotional gaps and strains which was further opened by my mother in law through her obsessive control disorder.

My husband couldn't control her any more than he could not control the weather and so just committed for marriage with the hopes of keeping his freedom on his control alive at the cost of exposing me to frequent periods of time by myself or just wished that I could keep his mother company and do so amicably, dumbing down if possible, and allow her the same control for namesake the same way he does just so that he can keep away from the conflict all his seeming submissive attitude seems to give her an impression that she can further intrude and try to control our lives as well other than controlling her husband, my father in law who has given into becoming a husband who is again namesake alive by his power as the eldest in the house is severely undermined.

Wow! I am amazed at my ability to stay so enmeshed and numb in all this partnership crap that circles in my in laws as if we cannot (my husband does not have a sense of his personal boundary and that much is obvious to me now) have a space of our own much less emotional intimacy and freedom to be vulnerable and openly expressive about our feelings mutually with each other. While my mother who's extremely possessive and insecure and God knows what mental conditional label she maybe carrying inside of her that she tries to live off my generosity, naivety, and lack of prioritization of my personal growth. 

Yep, she just assumed trauma bonding with me over my father's sudden passing when she was pregnant with me is the means to hold the victim card on herself that she felt would be an extension to her as she projected victimhood on me just because I was highly sensitive and assumed that that would be a protective shield of some sorts in her absence as mother and I came back to live with her brothers and their wives after my father's passing. She just planned it all in her head and wanted me to get myself together as much possible so that I could as well continue to enable her as much as she expected her sister in laws to enable her which was not possible beyond a point. Her tantrums, throwing her weight around as she became this single mother, widow, and central government employee who has to brave the odds further by making her daughter strong and in this process disabled me into a project which is too sensitive and so a receiving end to her frustrations as she relived my father's demise over and over as and when I had gotten sick. I was not physically disabled, but emotionally, yes. She made me one, thanks to her dysregulated emotions, insecurities over losing me, and just confusing and shaming me into being her dependent shadow without a sense of self, or a sense of my very own willpower that had gotten lost, thanks to wanting to be loyal and grateful to my mother and to her brothers and their wives and so on, as I just completely moved away from feeling myself, being myself, and knowing how to be myself, which was all close to nothing.

I had attracted this suffering in silence as a result as I did not know how to trust anyone in my family owing to their hot and cold emotionally dysfunctional behaviors as I just felt like I needed to thrive on all this dysfunctionality rather than make space for myself and have a trusted source that I can rely on within my family which just remained as one of my fantasies and nothing more.

And after being in this self fluffing prophecy to my self doom which is all about when will I be rejected by the other and to hope secretly that I won't, and to end the anxiety, just go ahead and screw that possibility and precipitate through situations in my own avoidant and anxious way put together, and being a hard inner critic on top of that, and just subject myself to rejection as soon as possible and just get it done with when the other too starts being dismissive, judgmental, or being just angry with me, as all these are signs of rejection ringing oud and clear in my head. So, self rejection became more and more my second nature and one that I didn't openly talk about for obvious reasons.

I guess my pride didn't allow me to identify with self avoidance, trust issues, self rejection, and just plain lack of self love and expressing my need for getting support while going through all these.

All these truths exhaust me but it's good in a way that I don't need to stomach them and feel uncomfortable about blocking my gut instincts, negative feelings, emotional vulnerabilities and so on. I am dealing with making way for releasing them all out as I am now coming in the way to do so and that's quite an achievement if you will.

Self realization in progress

 My body has been a carrier of guilt, shame, and pain for a long time. I have obsessed about my body with such carriers spinning a loop and embodying me in it. And it was owing to the environment I lived in which became strong adhesives to stay stuck in such a style of attachment as sickness, both physical and mental, prevailed in the air. I was oblivious to how destabilizing this can get as I assumed that I can intellectualize it away or just idealize my expectations from others who were too busy living their loops.

I realize that it had destabilized me enough to make me want to relate to my past as a frozen reality and not processing my present enough while worrying how will I manage to live without living off this person or that in future.

I have felt my feelings, the hidden icicles under the placid lake just unfreezing and forming a fluid mess that I have become, and the good news is I can't undo this peeling. It's too real and truthful and just bears my skin and inner wounds for what it is. Maybe I didn't get to become the strong, thick skinned, all achieving multifaceted personality that I had wanted to be but has revealed the real softness and vulnerability that I hid underneath all the surface strength that I had wanted to project. And I am not ashamed of it. 

I had internalized my caretakers emotional neglect in my childhood so much that I resorted to rejecting myself and avoided my true feelings and take a stand for them for a long time after that. From abysmal suffering to real feeling, this journey of self discovery is actually beautiful. 

Having been invalidated, believing that I need to be that way in order to thrive, I continued to being devalued from other relationships even as I tried to move away geographically from my parents. 

Holding on to the past and going places in the present is like reliving the past in different settings. The past will always be part of me, pain, suffering, neglect and all, but I do not wish to logicalize them into tolerable boxes and keep working on memories which indicate repression all around it. I cannot undo repression by going back to the repressed feelings and trying to feel them one by one - that's just triggering myself beyond healthy levels of mental health preservation. One way or the other, either completely numbing or wanting to undo the numbness by feeling them all is just wanting to relive my past in the present and the more I keep doing this, the more I will fall apart with my present realities.

Truth is not to make forced realizations happen and create narratives that justify them. I have given space for a lot of brokenness of my rigidity towards emotional vulnerability to happen and am proud of that but it can't happen at the cost of my self preservation at present and going forward. 

Truth is allowing for awareness to happen on its own and take one by surprise, and for that to happen all the toxically attached layers of skins needs to go which in itself is self realization in progress. 

A journey of many miles

 I grew up in an environment where I became more and more aware that my mother's emotional vulnerability had more voice since she was pregnant with me when my father passed away and so her coming back to live with her brothers as their gesture to readapt her back into the family and the house where she had grew up in where I was born was all put together I assumed in her favor for want of understanding of negative emotions whatever they be.

I made way unknowingly for her vent, her frustrations, her ruminating on being all alone to handle me specially when I got sick and kept trying to get attention from her brothers and their wives for the victimhood she embodied and lived.

I assumed that her feelings had more validity than my own even if she neglected to check on how I was doing or feeling mentally which became my pattern of getting stuck with her trauma bonding with her since I didn't have clarity in expressing my discomfort for this forced sense of conditioning which broke my authenticity in whatever shape or form.

I was a child then and didn't realize the morphing of my real self identity that this fog would consume me into and the more that I numbed feeling any feelings about my neglecting my feelings and abandoning them which was just mirroring of what I thought best was what I could do to thrive in a volatile environment with her and her brothers and their families.

So, neglecting my feelings for giving importance to hers was a way of my being and it included not grieving for my dad and just feeling guilty whenever my health situations reminded my mother of my father's health and his demise. I was so shadowed by my very own empathy for my mother that I didn't know how far I had gotten away from myself. I thought that was supposed to be the way that things worked at my place and learnt from then on to see myself second to the others. I got too comfortable to the point of seeking approval from others for any choice that I would like to make by myself and reassurance if the choice didn't go well and criticized myself endlessly holding myself to blame for making this 'mistake'. 

A mistake is who I felt I was in her life as I was never enough for her as she never accepted me for who I am and just made me feel like a victim for being health sensitive. And I assumed that by becoming emotionally numb and denying my feelings or to express them is how I can take care of it myself and be hypervigilant in the process not to show any signs of 'weakness' of my emotions - it was always black and white - strong, weak, and my life revolved around proving that I am strong enough even if I maybe weak physically which is not again always.

It was all about her and her dysfunctional mental framework which I could not understand back then since I was so enmeshed in her way of seeing me as an extension to herself.

The reason why this inner wounding hurts me so much I get it now is avoiding to face my hurts, my feelings, and my wounds, and just giving in to her over indulgence in me materially is another coping up thing which just kept the wound in me deeper and more covered in all these layers. I never honored my true feelings and neither did I honor my negative emotions, and my inner wounds, and just repressing them as I did earlier is something that makes me feel sad and angry at me in turns but that doesn't help in recovery now. It was all about her and nothing about me but her insecurity that my health made it all about me and nothing about her and hence she made me feel guilty for making her feel so helpless, so frustrated ranting about being a single parent and that she is having to face my health ups and downs all by herself just adds more hurt to my existing wounds, and not to forget confusion and a sense of shame for myself for being who I am.

I became who I thought I was based on the above factors and became very insecurely attached to my negative image of my body while also giving in to whatever material comforts she provided, be it money, medicines, clothes, food, jewelry and so on - it's like  I sold myself off to all these in a bid to earn my worth in her eyes. 

She has a sick mental health which I was not aware of then and being so grappled by anxiety, loneliness, depression, and avoidance of my evolving realities, I became so infested by this disease which I am not sure what it's called but it chewed me out of my consciousness and just made a spillover of who she thought I was as I was fighting within me and so conflicted to want to prove it wrong by trying to be judgmental, critical, minimizing my feelings, expecting that things/people get me while I tried to hide behind them or situations so that the real me remains as oblivious and unconscious as it has been always. So, proving her wrong on the one side but not having enough self esteem and confidence in myself to prove myself right but yet egoistically doing so was how I thought I won. There was never a self let alone a self esteem.

And all these discoveries made over few years now being true to myself, my feelings, my feelings of betrayal of my mother and her family as they played on my innocence, empathy, generosity by being emotionally manipulative as is the case with my mother, and being emotionally distant as is the case of my uncles and aunts, are all true. No amount of numbing is going to make it all go away. And I need to accept it whether I like it or not. 

The point is not to settle scores with them or allow their voices to play in my head, in my consciousness and just pluck them like weeds and oust them but just do so patiently and kindly. Some are alive and some are not, but bitter memories live longer than the expiry of people and I do not wish to spend the rest of my life reliving them as it's not worth it. 

Even if by being patronizing as is the case of my aunts on me and my mom, or sadly my mom being patronizing towards me as if she did what she did and still seeks a sense of achievement and validation the way she has brought me up and the things she had to do in order to raise me are so convoluted and tailormade according to her narrative that not many in my family would buy my narrative much despite having moved on from her overbearing protection. Just moving on in whatever shape or form that's feasible for me will not do but rewiring myself with new thought processes slowly and gradually will be a journey of many miles.