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.

Wear your truth

 I am feeling so low that I am not able to integrate my skills into my reality for reasons of procrastination, self doubt, and fear of being found that I was jobless for over 2 years now. It's what others perceive of me and that I am used to perceiving as my reality and my heightened anxiety and restraint that's blocking me from manifesting taking risks for the job path ahead whatever field that be.

It's like I am able to finally get the sense of disconnectedness that I have had with my relationships, my career path, my sense of creating a family and future with my child path which are all so empty, so nothing and that sense of vacancy I am able to connect to which was my life path in sum total sadly for a long time now.

It's like this deep seated depression has to show up to remind me of all this emptiness that I cannot undo, cannot fill with distractions, and cannot hold onto because that's what surrender to God would actually look like - just letting go without holding on to what can be fixed and what cannot be from my end and so on. 

Surrender to me all along was this grand sweeping gesture in my mind where realizations of past blocks and releasing them to His feet happened, had to happen simultaneously as if I want to be done with this and move on to something new, something fresh to learn and explore about. Being aware of how ill pervasive these blocks have been and have consumed my presence in my life as a participant, and by getting it thrust out my system through a bit of forceful intent is not how surrendering works.

Releasing and surrendering needs love, needs faith in love for my higher good that no matter how ruminative and stuck are the nature of blocks, but still with truth and perseverance, they can all be peacefully dealt with. Loving myself with this new found truth about my ignorance is hard but it's like I finally understand why I was hiding behind my numbness and choosing not to talk about it with anyone - the hurt is as deep-rooted as that. I can't make small of this wound that is reduced to a scar gradually now but wishing that it goes away and makes way for me to grow anew is again wanting to be unrealistic and impatient with healing the scars as well.

Life is short and I have minimized the magnitude of this by repressing it into my expectations and limitations oriented thinking. Living within fantasies and disconnecting with obsessive rumination while staying away from my present is time and life lost. I acknowledge that and just release peacefully without expecting it to be better, different, and analyzing on who is responsible for my state and again going down the trail of why I am the way I am and how to fix that. I can walk 1000 miles deep into fixing what is already broken but accepting that wholly without self criticizing, blame shifting, devaluing myself is to learn to be kind to this fragility within. I don't want to get overwhelmed with how much has been unhealed, not been aware of, not vocalized, but be there for me when truth trickles in unexpectedly and in situations that are least anticipated. 

Truth has a way of showing the mirror and making the subtleties come to conscious surface level that the amount of time spent in my hiding under the unconscious garb seems naked. Wearing that truth without fear of what others will think of me is truly being in my skin.

 

Awareness about ignorance

 When self avoidance becomes so true about you, then you tend to live an avoidant life where you need another to live your life so that the dependency can ensure that you stay avoiding your life and looking up at ways yourself to be open to your life and face life had on. This realization when it hit me as I have been avoidant of my life pretty much most parts of it as fantasies makes up for some parts of living in them while situation triggers makes up for the rest whereas there's no other go except respond to that situation, that piece of reality. Wanting to go back to withdrawing and meandering aimlessly in fantasies and half conscious realities makes up my life.

Withdrawing in a sense has been my fix -  my fix to coping up with all the outside noise - I never realized until recently that this process of shutting myself down in my 'personal' space is going to make me escape living life really and fully. And this is more painful than the pieces of reality that I need to  be painfully aware of and that no amount of procrastinating, numbing, avoiding and distracting is going to help. 

I let go and gave in a lot of myself away just to adapt to situations and so living in the present and with whatever situations came along was something that I did just to justify all this letting go. I didn't know where to pick myself up and had landed up losing so much of my time and opportunity to just be there with myself.

But life has given me many a second chance and this phase right now is quite special as it's a beautiful opening into all of the miseries that I had allowed myself to go through and is a way to reclaim maybe in parts, but substantial parts of awareness it is to make me realize that I don't have to avoid and just live in the moment at the same time -  distracting ourselves, meandering in fantasies many of us do, but to do this as the main context of your life is to not want to stay in alignment with your life as is and expecting things, people to change according to the context of your fantasies and wishful thinkings so that you don't have to be bothered to be a participant in your life fully or be that in others is restraining yourself, blocking yourself and wanting to stay in clouded consciousness.

My mother took charge or so she thought she needs to as she controlled my life so much so as I allowed her to do so while not knowing how far have I gone away from myself and how difficult I didn't realize then the path would be to come back to my self fully and unconditionally. I have stopped expecting and pushing myself to fulfill others idea of duties and responsibilities as I am responsible for my life no matter how anxious, how fearful that thought might seem to be present fully for myself. But this I got to do for myself. 

My body is not a safe place to be, my home is not a predictable place to be, my family is not who I can go to when I am in distress, and inspite of carrying all these heavy and dense and confusing thoughts day and night from childhood, yet I didn't develop enough resilience to back myself up as I just gave in to sponging these dense thoughts as if they need to become my life's essence.

These are truths to an extent and I did live all these truths embodying myself to withdraw as means to do so. All these thoughts felt safe in the deep recess of my withdrawing well as I got sucked into the darkness of such fake comfort and with material comfort provided by my mother outside, I just didn't feel like coming out too to really discover myself.

The view into the well as seen from a point of awareness is different from the view from within the well. One is ignorance and another is awareness about ignorance.

Coping up nevertheless as opposed to responding to life is what I had been doing all along. As if my life is an illness and I am here to suffer by living it. Even if it were an illness, the attitude that I learn and practice to motivate myself to get better is all that matters. To receive life as is without expectations that it 'should' make me feel well is another bitter pill that I understand and sometimes swallow. 

Whether my mom made me feel like a patient is another side of the story altogether but living life and participating in it and responding as best as possible is the optimal cure that I can understand from my life experiences.

Don't avoid your life

I have avoided living my life and taking control of it, and have been a silent witness and have lived outside of my life. Almost all my life I have followed this pattern and have been anxious to want to live life on my terms, and anxious and depressed for having subjected my life for being an outsider to it, and have developed self doubts to a great extent that again circulates the anxiety stream back in my body as if regurgitating on these ill beliefs and enabling it myself to stay stuck in this rumination which has become my routine for decades and decades. I have been completely ignorant of this self imposed limitation that has made me scared of living life and living outside of my fears of such non living.

Although the emotional abuse received from my mother and the combined environment at home in childhood have been the reasons for my stuck feelings, it's letting go these anxieties and fears about living life by myself, authentically and with secure sense of self dependence that seem daunting to me. But since I have stepped into feeling my feelings and realizing the painful lack of awareness of my life's truths which were wrapped in layers and layers of numbness and toxic attachments to the pattern mentioned above, it's this very same initiative to own my life and my truths that I had avoided for so long that's bringing back my long suppressed emotional pains into life and for my living and releasing them.

I was subjected to body shaming, guilt tripping for being too weak(I am sensitive, body and mind, that's all) and projected as a fellow victim by my mother in the name of securing her attachment with me in this toxic obsessive way which just broke my spirit for living my life which I had to scramble together, brokenness, pieces and all, but still it's a lot of time wasted in not living my life which is a missed opportunity. But here I am, still alive and still true to my feelings and life learnings that being real, being who I really am feels worth it. 

Sadly the anxiety that had kept me clouded, stressed, and hyper vigilant about my mother's regular criticisms on my body, my health, made me withdrawn and stay deeply hidden from her prying, critical eyes for any further criticisms in the form of repressing my boiling feelings like anger, irritation, and so on was just similar to placing the vessel(my mind) on simmered heat(repressed feelings) for too long and expecting the same mind to carry me through my future ahead with clear plans and concrete goals, which was a matter of idealistic imaginations and unrealistic fantasies which became an extension of me.

When this disordered mindset gets regulated, then we fall trap to our own thought process and limitations believing tendencies which become root causes to then avoid living our actual, real lives as my life is proof of it. Anyway, I am really thankful to the intuitions that didn't stop talking to me despite my shutting off and keeping my mind and life open to only very few relationships. It's the truth within these intuitions that made me realize that I am not true to myself and I had to get down to the root of this matter one day at a time.

It's an opening, a discovering journey of hidden wounds and scars which would be a lifelong process but not at the cost of forsaking my present, my reality in the moment by living in the hard to forget, hard to numb anymore hurts from my past. History need not repeat unless we tune into it as a routine everyday thing and feel sad and stuck for lack of better awareness as I had been doing over and over, repeating what could have gone right in order to have avoided whatever that had gone wrong -  this is no self responsibility taking but just creating reasons to be self critical and hyper analytical about my past. The wound stays opened and only half released as holding to the remaining parts in the hope that some day, somehow the past could all start to make better sense is just my rigid logical side of mind speaking loud and clear. I hear that too and I accept the feelings of betrayal, anger,  confusion towards my mother which are the side effects of the half released wound which hurts nevertheless.

But I need to move on too. As much as sitting with my hurts and feeling them and releasing them is important, it's equally so that I forgive myself fully for having allowed myself to get that hurt and broken in the first place. It's okay...shit happens. Centering on whatever life that's left in my quota I shall try living to the fullest.

Real courage=be real with self

 Anxiety has been such a big part of my life that I don't know how deep I had been consumed by it. The anxiety to be me was the most primary of all anxieties in me and the sadness for not getting to be me on the other side and thriving in both made me who I am in short. I have been so caught up in being in this loop and for the stark confusion for not reading my mother's emotional instability and her insecure attachment by making me an extension to her which led to my getting stuck between anxiety and depression as that's what I felt deep down and no matter how much I resisted them, they continued to prevail.

I kept wanting to stay away from my mother but I didn't know then the reason and now I know why. And for each and every health episode which is when I seemed to become evident to her in a more obvious kind of way and that's when she seemed to fine tune to notice me and crank up the volume of her frustration or her criticism towards me because she couldn't see me as a separate being and reacted the way she did as her all encompassing image of her and me together was supposed to be a comfortable and perfect one and she disliked if due to my feeling unwell that 'perfect' image got shaken up.

So, she took the efforts by taking me to the doctor, by promptly buying me medicines and other health boosting supplements so that I don't let her down in being a 'strong' team as she deemed us to be. My core strength, whatever that be, had gotten eroded so much as a result that I just lost sight of seeing me for who I am and so anxiety took over for lack of want of expressing myself in some shape or form.

The long duration of time that I have allowed myself to marinate in anxiety and depression which were my team so to speak, and they an extension to me, and have absorbed so much so these toxic trauma bonding tendencies that I ended up manifesting them in my life in the form of a neglectful relationship with myself. This avoidance of myself as a result and wanting to be unconscious of self has been so ill pervasive and has taken in its fold all the relationships that came in my life.

I feel sorry for myself and no amount of apologizing and asking forgiveness from myself for the pain I have inflicted on it (body, mind, and soul) would suffice. 

I want to experience life outside of all this pervasiveness and break free from the dull weight that I have felt pulled down by all my life. My identification with courage and perseverance was a weird way to justify that (dull weight) for the outside world as people thought I fought so brave and tall for whatever health issues that life threw at me, but little do they know that my state of health may not be entirely genetically inherited but environmentally acquired and unidentifying with false layers of my personality is the beginning of real courage.

Accept everything in your life

 I have been in hiding most of my life owing to not want to be anxious in coping up with my body as I had absorbed this wrong belief that the power lay in my mother's hands as she assumed I was an extension to her. And hence I too for having being told/criticized by my mother for so long repeatedly through every regular migraine attack that I am too sensitive and that I am like my father gave in to this belief that enabled my mother to want to be overshadowing me and I just let that happen as if no control over my life.

My mind had gotten weakened as I could not muster courage or resilience to stand up for my feelings and speak for them. I was supposed to be grateful to her for all that she did and all this make believe love for my parents (my uncles, aunts, grandparents included), fake loyalty, idealistic role playing of an obedient daughter placing her mother's emotional tantrums as priority and stifling my feelings in my chest and numbing them led to my mind weakening. This loop was all that I had as a routine and there was no escaping this except tolerating others temper tantrums (specially the oldies), their ego centric dysfunctional behaviours, the underlying cold wars between one uncle and another, the stretched silence between uncles as if it was how they were supposed to be, the unresolved anger in my aunts for getting treated like slaves by their husbands and their frustrations spilled over randomly was all a lot to take every day.

I just didn't know what I was truly like outside of all this as my personal space was heavily compromised due to living with so many others as mentioned above. People pleasing was the best way to cope up with the obvious imbalance in the family where love for love's sake was just a superficial layer of idealism and a hideout space so that people's true feelings and intentions can lay buried underneath the superficial projection of a big family where people come together as one unit -  one big broken unit where people stayed together for calculative reasons and this unity of purpose is the only thing that brought my family together. 

We offspring born in such a dysfunctional unit had each other as cousins, as friends, as family, and each went our ways owing to studies, jobs, and marriages. 

I have gotten this far in life owing to my self support despite my mental condition and have gotten exhausted many a time and have felt aimless and foggy on how to move forward with my life. Feeling stuck in such a family environment was what I had deeply repressed and this kept making me feel sick, fatigued, in pain and discomfort in one part of the body or another. 

I feel that my natural love and respect for my body has been so deeply bruised and hurt by my mother's constant and insensitive comments on my innately sensitive body and mind that at some point it broke my spirit as well. As if my life energy had gotten so contaminated and overshadowed by her trauma bonding with me and I in return had no choice but had to be in such toxic attachment just to want to justify my role as her daughter.

I don't know what hurts more - the fact that I have gotten so stuck in her hypercritical criticisms from way back or the fact that breaking me up in mind, body, and spirit was all the control that she needed so that I can remain under as an extension to her personality.

All I too have is this one life and all the perseverance that I innerly feel proud about got spent in putting up with her control attitudes and tantrums and all that I am left of this extending myself mindlessly, aimlessly, and with a broken spirit to want to  be attached to her even if insecurely to her overshadowing me aspect is just avoiding my life and living in a blur with no clear consciousness. Analyzing why she was the way she was is not worth it but reclaiming my life and restoring it with peace and love is all I can do to feel my way back into taking control of my life.

All is not lost until you give up on yourself. It felt like I had seemingly lost all - lost my joy, my freedom, my feeling secure in my body and mind, my ability to make choices for my higher good, my resilience, my self trust and a lot more, but I have still kept going because I have been assured, blessed, loved and guided by God in some way or another that I cannot miss the signs and the intuitions. And it's for my sake that I need to live life in acceptance of all that has happened and find the strength, the grace to let go which is work in progress, and keep centering my energies on what I truly feel, what are my silences whispering, what are my bodily pains indicating at times, and why is being present with my body while letting go toxic shame, sadness, anger, guilt, confusion and so on so vital for self growth.

A second chance at life

Avoidant Personality Disorder is an acute form of anxiety and hypersensitive fear of criticism and the onset of this disorder starts fairly early from childhood onwards owing to emotional neglect, repetitive emotional abuse from parent(s), and is an all pervasive personality disorder style that blocks the real self out and inhibits one to form close relationships.

I am a self confessed avoidant personality person and have tried to get help from psychologists to help me get a fair sense of the mind condition that I deep down knew was not right but didn't know what it was and neither did I go beyond one or two consultations to get a final diagnosis and that was owing to my fear and discomfort of seeing me inadequate. I did manage to learn courses online and got an understanding of CBT (Cognitive behavior therapy), REBT (Rational emotive behavior therapy), and dug deep into codependency, narcissistic personality disorder, and could instinctively relate my mother to being a vulnerable (a form of covert narcissism) narcissist. 

I understand that there are experts on the subject who can help navigate and get one on the recovery trail if one looks more on the outside for solution, but if a seeker of true self like me sticks through the inner journey and deepens spiritual connection with a trusted confidante and guide that I believed God was and has been to me, then doorways in the form of YouTube videos by experts in the field of psychology, psychologists cum authors whose books, articles and so on the above said topics was the much needed cohesive bridge to discover and contemplate more about my unspoken truths. In a sense the therapies mentioned above were just bookishly learnt and applied in my real life context and surprisingly the stifled feelings started to speak up as I sat and listened silently when meaningful questions from the courses and books that were collated had found answers in my writing journals. 

This start of sorts opened my repressed emotions which did not feel pleasant at all to begin with but the more I journaled and wrote what was true to my life experience, the more I could unravel the numb pain that kept me from participating in my reality. This phase during lockdown phase 1 was effectively made use in self exploration, feeling and healing through release of layers of emotions, and surrendering unconditionally to God. It was just the tip of the iceberg and it seemed as if I had still some tears left in me despite all the surface frozenness that penetrated my mind as well.

I kept going on as if I had to as the intuitive voice that silently whispered to me one night some 5 years ago that said I need to be true to myself kept coming back to remind me that there was still a long way to go. With the all consuming silence during the lockdown, it started to become more and more obvious that I needed to work on myself and stay true to accepting my life which I was just a witness to all along and just observed it from afar.

Staying connected to my findings and working through the emptiness felt the opposite to who I was from within, and the unhealthy attachment to fantasies started to loosen grip but not without making me feel like I had lost control of my life completely because I was so addicted to disconnecting from reality and living through fantasy. 

A major life threatening surgery happened during the second phase of lockdown and it made me realize the power of faith. It was like a victorious scene from my fantasy because I came out successfully alive and it was better than all the fiction fights that I had won (mostly verbal ones as if to prove something to someone). To come out alive through this aneurism removal surgery felt like a huge snowball of divine grace had been aimed at me and it smacked me out of my numbness and shock -  it was shock because I was not used to so much unconditional love showered on me as if I was so important for Him and that I was needed to participate in His divine will for my higher good. And here I was just being a mute witness to see my life flow under the bridge all along but this I could not let it pass by as if nothing had happened. In fact a lot had happened. And this is beyond my capacity to understand that how can there be so much kindness and love and no criticism, comparison with others, no body shaming, no guilt tripping, no suffering in suppressed silence, and just being gifted a unique opportunity, a second chance at my life. 

Avoidant Personality Disorder

 Secure attachment patterns with parents determines the pattern of love/hate or in between that we condition ourselves to attach to. If the attachment style is insecure as has been in my case with my mother, my only living parent, then what happens beneath the quiet, observant, and "she is weak" projected child is unimaginable anxiety. Hyper vigilant would be a better word instead of observant, and repressed, a better substitute for quiet as in my case.

My body has been on high alert for criticism from my mother which has been a play, rewind, repeat thing from childhood -  it was as if I could never be enough for her just as I am and she went back and forth between the past and the tragic incidents of losing my dad when she was pregnant with me and the challenges that she had faced to deliver me which became an extension into who she thought I was as I was to her not a separate life, an individual self, but a product of her efforts that she had to justify as a single parent.

She lived more like a victim and wanted me to follow suit and hence my attachment to her was conflicted, i,e, depended on her for my physical sustenance as I grew up feeling still the same as what I used to feel way back in childhood -  fearful, abandoned, and insecure. My craving for her unconditional acceptance just lay buried within the chest of my inner child as she felt stressed from time to time for not knowing how to regulate or express her feelings when she was around her mom for fear of being criticized again for all the sadness and confusion that the inner child absorbed and just didn't see any ways to outgrow this emotional state. The inner child remained locked, frozen, and stuck in all the layers of piled up feelings of inadequacies, suppressed anger, pain, and just numbness for want of freedom of expression and release. This anxiety for lack of clarity of becoming aware of her reality just kept the growing up me an emotional juvenile who stayed too quiet, too withdrawn, and just escaped further and further into reality like fantasies where she is the assertive, outspoken saviour, a justice providing knight, and sometimes a practically fun person who's having a good time with her friends, maybe some old and some made up within her fantasies.

I learnt to feed off my fantasies in order to cope up with my reality. I had this constantly disappointed feeling about my health, my body, which somehow could never be fixed even after numerous visits to doctors for migraines, heart problem that I developed due to an infection in the blood, gastrointestinal issues, severe menstrual cramps and so on -  my body seemed to squeeze in and out of pain while I seemed to cave in more and more into the colorful darkness of my fantasies in order to accept my mother's default criticisms and her comparing me to my dead father for his lack of good health as well. I felt like I was living a curse that seemed to cloud my mother and didn't give her the respite that she needed to want to move on peacefully with her life.

I believed in my weakness physically which came in some form or shape and never seemed to leave my side no matter what my age and how badly I wanted to feel "healthy and normal". I just settled with the feeling that I need to cope up with this perennial unsteadiness which made me depressed, self neglectful as I just seemed to look toward my mom to help find a way out of this, but again was met with her frustrations and just numbed my responses and bid the pain away with more and more doses of free flowing fantasies -  it felt addictive, real, liberating, and indulgent to make me feel important in that.

I didn't realize that it was insulating the crumbs of mindfulness that I had to force myself to be in only when I had to sit down to eat with the rest of the family (my uncles, aunts, few cousins who I lived with in addition to my mom), when I had to sit with them (which was only sparingly) to watch tv (I preferred to watch tv with one or two of my cousins) because my personal space was already overshadowed by my mother's excessive indulgent control and left me with no choice but to withdraw more and find my safe space which was in my fantasies, and it was simply overwhelming to spend longer time with the other members of the family at the risk of losing out "quality" isolation time with myself.

Just simply being me was an unthought of idea but I wanted my writing to do that for me -  just present me as clearly, as realistically, and with other characters if possible to be altogether my unspoken narrative in writing form which was not as free flowing as my fantasies were, but if I can be one kind or more in my fantasies, then why can't I display that flexibility I thought through my writing? I self criticized for lack of words flow sometimes and just kept journaling with circuitous expressions which never seemed to fully convey what my problem was and I used to resort to staying stuck with my fantasies where I had accomplished far more than what my reality managed to reflect. 

My broken feelings didn't make any sense to me any more than what they could convey through writing and it felt cold that I was not warming up to freestyle writing the way I expected myself to be and be an acclaimed author at that, which was a fantasy that didn't come true. Not yet. If there was an accurate expression for frozen living then I lived that. And my ice house can get broken in the face of everyday reality that I had to wake up to but I was only too happy that this ice house can get remade with my fantasies unlike the concept of my authentic self which lay anxious and in hiding in the frozenness as I was obliviously witnessing my selfhood melt away.

When did I die on me I cannot tell but I endured this suffering in silence way beyond than necessary while my mother, my uncles and their families just gave up on seeing me lock myself up in serious fantasy building and not career building as I was supposed to be into and did not have proper idea to help me out of this fractured mess of myself that I was too anxious not to talk about and could not bring myself together clearly to ask for support for lack of understanding of a condition called Avoidant Personality Disorder.