Impending Changes

It's almost 2026.  I'm preparing for some self-imposed, necessary, and impending life changes by bingeing (sp?) on Instagram, knowing I won't see it for the foreseeable future.  My feed is full of advice for how to spot a narcissist, get over a narcissist, leave a narcissist, heal.  None of this is healing.  I must say though, it did give me the courage to say out loud, to my therapist, that I thought I may have suffered narcissistic abuse.  Turns out she was waiting for me to tell her before she told me.  Apparently that doesn't always go over well with survivors of that type of abuse.  Who knew?

The impending changes are, of course, in an effort to finally come home to myself.  Engage with life authentically.  I have spent over four decades dedicated to the achievement of things, the pleasing of other people, the meeting of expectations.  I have compared myself incessantly to others, denied myself my own unique beauty, and in turn denied others theirs.  I have sought standards to exceed and worry about, goals to crush and all the while, ignored my only obligation- to be.

So, this year I will be.  I will be alone, and with friends, and with people, and with people I don't like.  But I will be, with myself, the entire time.  Because never again will I abandon myself while trying to earn the love and approval of people who cannot love and approve of me, being me.  

Tonight I began Jack Kornfield's No Time Like the Present.   He quotes Neruda at the beginning of the third chapter;  "you can pick all the flowers but you can't stop the Spring".  A wonderful reminder that we can grip our suffering until our fingers bleed, but healing is always on its way, almost an inevitability.  Thank God, because my suffering, wounds new and old, is cutting off my circulation.  It's why I'm beginning this very ordinary, analog walk through life, as unaided as possible by modern traps of distraction and disconnection.

I expect to feel like an addict strapped to a bed in some cheap Arizona rehab for awhile.  That'll be fun.  But, i'll record it all here; every doubt, every feeling, tantrum and epiphany.  Thanks for coming for the ride, wherever you get on or get off.

OHO